Trump Treasury Chief Prompts Fox Host Off-camera To Tee Him Up For Nasty Shot At Kristen Welker

Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took a nasty shot at Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker during an interview with Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday.

The stock market continued to slide all last week as Trump’s trade policies and repeated refusal to rule out the possibility of an impending recession contributed to market unease. Bessent took Trump’s lead when he appeared on MTP this past weekend and Welker asked him “Mr. Secretary, can you guarantee the American people here and now that there will be no recession on President Trump’s watch?”

“Well, Kristen, you know that there are no guarantees,” Bessent said to begin his reply.

On Tuesday morning’s edition of Fox Business Network’s Mornings With Maria, Bessent prompted Bartiromo off-camera to ask him about the exchange so he could get off a rejoinder that eluded him when he was face-to-face with Welker:

BARTIROMO: The other day, you were asked a question by another outlet. Can you guarantee that we’re not going to have a recession? And you wanted to address that this morning.

BESSENT: Yeah. Well, look, it was a silly question. Can you guarantee there is not going to be a recession? I can’t guarantee anything.

I can’t guarantee that the journalist who asked me the question that her news program is going to be on in a year.

But, what I can guarantee you is that there is no reason we need to have a recession. I think that there is — the economy in the first quarter is doing better than the media is reporting.

I think we’re seeing some very good underlying data from credit card companies, from banks. I think that the airlines, which reported some bad passenger numbers, a big amount of that is from federal employees who are not flying right now.

So, the underlying economy is healthy. There is no reason we have to have a recession. Could we have a pause as we go from this incredible level of government spending, which is just unsustainable?

I said on the show, what I could guarantee was, if we kept going the way we were, we would have been in a financial crisis, and President Trump has put the brakes on this. We are going to get this spending under control. We are going to bring manufacturing back home, and we are going to make the country more affordable for working Americans.

Bessent’s exchange with Bartiromo came hours after Trump attacked NBC News and refused to take a question from one of their reporters.

Watch above via Fox Business Network’s Mornings With Maria.