I keep seeing this quote from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and I can’t get it out of my head. “I’m actually a soybean farmer,” he told an interviewer, his face presumably arranged into a mask of solemn empathy. “I have felt this pain, too.”
Let’s just pause there for a second.
Scott Bessent, the man Forbes estimates is worth around $600 million, is telling us he feels the "pain" of a trade war that is actively bankrupting multi-generational family farms. This is a man whose financial disclosures list his soybean and corn farmland as being worth somewhere between $5 and $25 million. That chunk of land, a rounding error in his portfolio, kicks off somewhere between $100,000 and a million bucks a year for him.
This is not a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of political theater. It’s an insult of such staggering arrogance that it almost achieves a kind of purity.
The Million-Dollar Tear
Bessent’s claim to feel the pain is like a guy who owns a decorative yacht complaining about rising tide levels to a fisherman whose entire village just got washed away. The scale is so grotesquely mismatched it stops being relatable and becomes a dark joke. A Treasury spokesperson, trying to buff this turd to a shine, actually told the press that the Secretary has "experienced opportunity losses of nearly $100 million since assuming office."
Opportunity losses.
Let that sink in. He didn't lose $100 million. He just didn't make an additional $100 million that he might have otherwise. Meanwhile, a guy like Jake Benike, a sixth-generation farmer in Minnesota, is looking at the very real possibility of telling his kids that growing soybeans is something their family used to do. He’s not weeping over opportunity costs; he’s staring into the abyss of his family’s legacy turning to dust.
Bessent’s “pain” is a balance sheet problem, a minor inconvenience he has to get his accountants to solve before the Office of Government Ethics deadline on December 15th. Benike’s pain is existential. It’s the knot in your stomach when you’re deciding if you can afford to plant next year’s crop. Offcourse, Bessent wouldn't know the first thing about that.
So what are we supposed to make of this? Is this just the garden-variety disconnect of a ridiculously wealthy politician, or is it something more cynical? Is he so insulated by his fortune that he genuinely believes his situation is comparable, or does he just think the rest of us are dumb enough to buy it?
Welcome to the Glitch Economy
Lately, half the websites I visit serve me an error message: Are you a robot? or "A required part of this site couldn’t load." It feels like a perfect metaphor for our current reality. The system is broken, glitching out, and its first instinct is to question if we, the users, are even real.
That’s exactly what this whole performance feels like. We’re being told a story that doesn’t compute. Bessent promises that after some vague announcement about a China deal, soybean farmers will "feel very good." It’s the political equivalent of "Please check your connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser." It’s meaningless jargon meant to shift the blame when the page won't load.
This is the same government whose Treasury Secretary is talking about a TikTok transfer deal getting approved by China while farmers are going under. It’s a masterclass in distraction. Look over here at the shiny social media app! Don't pay attention to the guy whose family has worked the same land since before the Civil War and is now facing ruin. They dangle these vague trade deals and tech buyouts in front of us, as if that solves anything, and honestly...
It reminds me of trying to cancel a gym membership. They send you through a maze of phone menus and online forms designed to make you give up. The system isn't broken; it's working exactly as intended to wear you down. Does anyone in Washington actually care if the Benike family makes it to a seventh generation of farming? Or is their struggle just a useful prop for a press conference?
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe we're supposed to applaud a $600 million man for having the courage to write off a few million in "opportunity losses" for the honor of public service.
It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature
Let's be brutally honest. This isn't about a politician being "out of touch." That lets them off too easy. This is the system functioning perfectly. The powerful don't need to understand the pain of the people they govern; they just need to perform a convincing pantomime of it. Bessent’s "I’m a farmer, too" routine is the whole game in a nutshell. It’s a carefully constructed peice of theater designed to create a false sense of shared struggle, to make you think the guy in the castle is worrying about the same leaky roof as the guy in the village. He's not. He's just worried you'll eventually show up with torches.
