Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Sunday dismissed concerns Americans might be having about a potential impending recession and the status of their retirement plans, saying President Donald Trump and his administration are “building the long-term economic fundamentals for prosperity.”
In an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” Bessent called it a “false narrative” that people who are close to retiring may be reluctant after their retirement savings may have dropped last week because of the stock market downturn.
“I think that’s a false narrative,” he told moderator Kristen Welker. “Americans who want to retire right now, the Americans who put away for years in their savings accounts, I think they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations.
“In fact, most Americans don’t have everything in the market,” he added. “People have a long-term view. … The reason the stock market is considered a good investment is because it’s a long-term investment. If you look day to day, week to week, it’s very risky. Over the long term, it’s a good investment.”
Later in the program, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., blasted Trump for setting “retirement savings on fire” and then leaving the White House to golf at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
“He’s wrecking our economy. I think people have seen their retirement savings on fire, and there he is out on the golf course. That may end up the most enduring image of the Trump presidency. That is the president out of the golf cart while people’s retirement is in flames,” he said.
Schiff also directly criticized Bessent’s remarks, pointing to his and Trump’s wealth.
“The treasury secretary saying that people aren’t looking at where the retirement savings are — maybe he doesn’t have to. He’s got the wealth; he doesn’t have to. Maybe the president, with his wealth, doesn’t have to. But what I’m hearing from Californians is those who have just retired, those who are on the eve of retiring, they’re terrified of this,” Schiff said.
Bessent said he wasn’t concerned about the stock market’s negative reaction last week to Trump’s announcement that he was imposing tariffs as high as 54% on the U.S.’ largest trading partners
“The market consistently underestimates Donald Trump,” Bessent told Welker.
He added later in the interview, “Who knows how the market is going to react in a day, in a week? What we are looking at is building the long-term economic fundamentals for prosperity, and I think the previous administration had put us on the course toward financial calamity.”
The U.S. stock market plunged after Trump announced the tariffs, with the Nasdaq, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 posting losses that hadn’t been seen since the start of the Covid pandemic.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins also downplayed the market’s reaction in an interview Sunday on CNN, saying, “We knew there would be uncertainty.”
“But to take Thursday or Friday … and to say, ‘Oh, the world is ending. The markets are crashing’ — the markets are adjusting,” Rollins said.
On Saturday, in the wake of the market downturn, Trump defended his tariff plan, urging consumers and investors to “hang tough.”
“We are bringing back jobs and businesses like never before. Already, more than FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS OF INVESTMENT, and rising fast! THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic,” he wrote on Truth Social.
Asked how long Americans will have to live with the economic uncertainty and “hang tough,” Bessent said the administration is “going to hold the course” to impose the tariffs and bring down inflation but didn’t say how long that would take.
“This is an adjustment process,” he said. “What we saw with President [Ronald] Reagan when he brought down the great inflation, and we got past the [President Jimmy] Carter malaise, there was some choppiness at that time, but he held the course, and we’re going to hold the course.”
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., emphasized Bessent’s point, telling Welker: “Re-shifting the economy back to getting more manufacturing back to the United States — That’s good for us long term. There’s no question short-term tariffs do cause an increase in price. As Secretary Bessent just said, it’s a one-time increase. It happens. I want to get that down.”
Bessent said the previous “unsustainable system” of trade was also to blame for today’s economic uncertainties, telling Welker that “this has been years in the building, years in the making, this unsustainable system.”
“Our trading partners have taken advantage of us. We can see that through the large surpluses. We can see this through the large budget deficits,” he said.
In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, also downplayed concerns about the impact of the tariffs on consumers, saying other countries are bearing the brunt of the impact.
“If U.S. consumers are bearing the costs, there’s no reason for the countries to be angry. So the fact is the countries are angry and retaliating,” Hassett said.
He added that several countries are approaching the United States to negotiate a way out of high tariffs.
“They’re doing that because they understand that they bear a lot of the tariff. And so I don’t think that you’re going to see a big effect on the consumer in the U.S.,” he said.
Later in the interview, he acknowledged that “well, there might be some increase in prices,” but he argued the previous tariff status quo led to a decline in Americans’ real wages.
“If cheap goods were the answer, if cheap goods were going to make America’s real wages, real welfare better off, then real incomes would have gone up,” Hassett told ABC News. “Instead, they went down because wages went down more than prices went down. So we got the cheap goods at the grocery store, but then we had fewer jobs.”
