Republicans don’t want to talk about Donald Trump’s treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent’s long professional work with Democratic megadonor billionaire George Soros.
Republican senators’ strategy for Thursday’s Senate Finance Committee hearing is instead to keep the conversation future-facing, admitting they’d rather trust Trump than look too closely into Bessent’s past.
“Somebody may explore that; I’m more interested in what we’re doing going forward,” finance committee member Sen. Bill Cassidy told NOTUS. “President Trump has all the confidence in the world in him, so that’s a pretty good endorsement.”
Republicans have turned Soros, who has donated millions to Democrats and progressive causes, into an almost cartoonish boogeyman.
Bessent joined Soros Fund Management in the 1990s and maintained a decades-long relationship with Soros, briefly leaving the firm and coming back as chief investment officer in 2011. Bessent spun off with his own hedge fund in 2015 — with a $2 billion investment from Soros.
But the Republicans who’ll be questioning him Thursday didn’t want to talk about that in the days leading up to the confirmation hearing.
“That’s not a concern for me at this point,” Sen. James Lankford, on the finance committee, told NOTUS. “How many former Democrats are currently in the nomination process? Several. It’s the policy issues, we’ve had a long conversation about where his policy is.”
House Republicans, too, while they have no say in the confirmation process, think it’s best for senators to leave the past in the past.
“Saddling up to Soros is certainly not a good thing, but you know, onward and forward, right? He’s the president’s Treasury nominee, so we gotta go work together,” Rep. Chip Roy told NOTUS.
Republicans told NOTUS they plan to ask Bessent all kinds of niche policy questions that have little to do with his past instead. Cassidy wants to ask about his own niche interest, a foreign pollution fee. Lankford wants to talk about the cost of energy production. Sen. Ted Cruz, though not on the finance committee, told NOTUS he’s most interested in Bessent’s plans for regulatory reform.
Meanwhile, Democratic senators are gearing up an argument highlighting how Bessent’s past exemplifies only one thing: helping rich people get richer.
“It’s not about politics,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told NOTUS about Bessent’s history working with Soros. “It’s about who you think government is supposed to work for.”
Warren also issued a 31-page letter to Bessent, posing more than 180 questions about his positions on a range of issues from banking to tariffs to home loans. “You have no government experience. At the same time, you are poised to inherit some of the most far-reaching governmental powers in the world’s largest economy. There is no comprehensive record of your positions,” Warren wrote.
She told NOTUS she plans to bring up “all of his work to squeeze extra money out of every rule or trick or path in order to help rich people and leave everyone else behind.”
About a dozen Democrats who weren’t in confirmation hearings took to the Senate floor Wednesday with a similar message: slamming Trump’s tax plans.
Senate Finance Committee ranking member Sen. Ron Wyden tied Bessent to no one but Trump.
“If I were to distill the Trump economic program,” Wyden told reporters about Bessent’s upcoming hearing, “I would say it’s basically about giving tax breaks to people at the very top.”
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.