Lawrence O’Donnell delivered a blistering critique of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday, branding the multimillionaire a “sleazy punk” and a “buffoon” over his outlandish defenses of President Donald Trump.
“That is a Trump Cabinet invention,” O’Donnell said. “They invented it this time around. That’s not what they were doing last time. We’ve never had a more ridiculous secretary of the Treasury than that clown who you just saw.”
O’Donnell said he once believed Trump’s first-term Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, represented the low point for the role.
“But he now looks like a statesman compared to the buffoon Donald Trump has put in that job to lie for him every day,” O’Donnell said, arguing that Bessent — a married gay man — was humiliating himself by serving Trump and the GOP.
O’Donnell suggested Bessent’s behavior changed once he came into Trump’s orbit. “There was no evidence of Scott Bessent being a pathological liar before working for Donald Trump,” he said. “But he is Donald Trump’s best student in the art form of Trump-speak, which is deranged, irrational, irrelevant lying.”
Bessent is now Trump’s “most tortured accomplice,” per the title of O’Donnell’s analysis. Watch the clip here: