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U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in the in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. on September 25, 2025.
“I’ve eaten edamame, I’m pretty sure that also makes me a soybean farmer,” one person said.
When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told ABC News’s This Week that he “felt the pain” of America’s soybean farmers on Sunday, the claim landed with a thud heard far beyond the Beltway.
“Well, Martha, in case you don’t know it, I’m actually a soybean farmer. So, I have — I have felt this pain too,” Bessent said, responding to anchor Martha Raddatz’s question about growers hurt by tariffs and stalled exports to China.
It was an improbable statement from one of the wealthiest members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet and one of its few out gay officials. According to Forbes, Bessent’s net worth hovers around $600 million, built over decades as a hedge fund manager and global currency trader. He has invested about $25 million in Midwestern farmland, but those acres are leased to working farmers. He is not the one operating the machinery at dawn.
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The secretary made the remark while promoting what he described as a “substantial framework” for a new U.S.–China trade agreement. He said the deal would include renewed Chinese purchases of soybeans and a delay in Beijing’s rare earth export restrictions. “I believe when the announcement of the deal with China is made public, our soybean farmers will feel very good about what’s going on both for this season and the coming seasons,” he said on This Week. Bessent also credited Trump’s 100 percent tariff threat with forcing China to the table.
Online, however, the reaction was swift and unforgiving. “Bessent’s a soybean farmer the same way Elon Musk is a coal miner; spiritually, from a distance,” one post on X, formerly Twitter, read.
Others juxtaposed his quote with images of his former Charleston, South Carolina, home — the pink-stucco John Ravenel House —and asked, “Any other soybean farmers live like this?”
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Bessent and his husband listed the mansion for sale late last year. The Post and Courier confirmed the March sale for $18.25 million, a record for Charleston. The couple had bought the property for $6.5 million in 2016 and renovated it in what agents called a “museum-quality restoration.”
“I’ve eaten edamame, I’m pretty sure that also makes me a soybean farmer,” another person on X wrote.
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