Scott Bessent traveled to the Reagan National Economic Forum last week and delivered a message that would have been almost unthinkable from a Republican treasury secretary a decade ago: America got globalization wrong.Speaking before an audience of Reagan Republicans, Bessent argued that both parties spent decades sacrificing industrial capacity, supply-chain resilience, and national security in pursuit of cheaper goods.“One thing that has made our Republic great,” he said, quoting Reagan, “is that we don’t hide from our mistakes. We learn from them; then we go on and do things better than we did before.”
Bessent then laid out what he described as decades of economic mistakes from both parties.
“We told ourselves that so long as goods were cheaper overseas, it did not matter whether factories went dark in Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania,” he said. “We assumed that supply chains would always function smoothly, adversaries would always behave responsibly, and the invisible hand would correct vulnerabilities that too few in public life had the courage to confront. And while we reassured ourselves with those assumptions, risks accumulated all around us.”
The speech underscored Bessent’s increasingly important role inside the Trump administration. While Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio often dominate headlines, Bessent has emerged as the official tasked with explaining Trump’s economic agenda to skeptical investors, business leaders, and conservatives raised on free-market orthodoxy.
