‘Inept, incompetent, craven’: Scott Bessent struggles to clean up the president’s mess

There’s little optimism about treasury secretary’s ability to handle Trump’s tariffs, Iran sanctions and colossal US debt History remembers Gen Dwight Eisenhower , the supreme commander of the allied forces in Europe during the second world war, for his role in the D-day invasion of Normandy. Whether Scott Bessent will achieve similar posterity as the face of the “economic D-day” in Iran remains to be seen. The US treasury secretary, already trying to manage a $40tn national debt pile, this week took charge of Donald Trump ’s effort to reverse-engineer his war of choice.