Treasury secretary’s tone-deaf take on LA protests will make your blood boil

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is more concerned about the state of self-driving cars than he is the wellbeing of protesters and journalists getting shot by police with rubber bullets and pepper spray in Los Angeles.

Scott Bessent is either heartless or the United States’ most committed treasury secretary to date. 

As Los Angeles residents and on-the-ground reporters are being pelted with rubber bullets and maced in response to an organized protest against ICE raids, Bessent’s biggest qualm seems to be over the destruction of some Waymo self-driving vehicles. 

“The cost of hardware alone on these autonomous vehicles is estimated to be ~$97,000,” he wrote on X Monday. “Multiple have been set ablaze. All to the jeers of masked men waving foreign flags.”

Multiple Waymo cars burn near Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Detention Center on June 8.

Surely, Bessent didn’t intend to sound like he values vehicles more than humans, right? It’s hard to tell these days. 

After all, it’s Bessent’s own boss, President Donald Trump, who ordered the National Guard to infiltrate Los Angeles, where protesters were exercising their right to dissent from the Trump administration. He’s has even flirted with the idea of sending 500 Marines to Los Angeles.

This is the first time that a president has federalized the National Guard without consent of a governor since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed members to Alabama to protect protesters at a civil rights march.

While the National Guard cannot carry out law enforcement in Los Angeles without Trump enacting martial law, he hasn’t ruled it out. Though declaring martial law would require approval from Congress, when has that stopped Trump before?