Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered the commencement address at the Brunswick School on Wednesday, and his remarks were exclusively obtained by Breitbart News.
Bessent delivered the remarks at the Greenwich, Connecticut, preparatory school, noting that his son attended Brunswick.
He said:
Reflecting on the responsibility to form young men of resilience and character, Tom wondered if, quote, “the very absence of experience with obstacles may just prove to be the greatest obstacle our boys will ever face.” He asked, amid the bounty of places like Brunswick and Greenwich, “how we [can] instill the strength of character that often only comes as a result of experience with great struggle.”
Now, this is not to suggest that the Class of 2026 has been spared from struggle. After all, you were born at the height of the global financial crisis and then came of age during Covid. And that is to say nothing of the personal challenges that each of you have surely faced, in your own way, to today’s ceremony.
“History attributes a similar adage to Teddy Roosevelt, a man who understood the hazard of vessels left to rust in their idleness from his service as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. To paraphrase him, warships are not built to rot in harbor,” the Treasury secretary said.
He added, “But President Roosevelt’s commentary found its fullest expression in April of 1899, when he stood before Chicago’s Hamilton Club—named, I might add, after Treasury’s first and most iconic secretary—to extol the virtues of what he called “the strenuous life.”
Bessent noted that Brunswick has “never wavered from the merits of ‘wrest[ing] triumph from toil and risk.’”
Bessent said that felt compelled to get involved in President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, citing concern for the direction of the country.
He said:
But then I became concerned about the future of our Republic and got involved in candidate Trump’s campaign. In November 2024, the call for public service came from the President-elect to serve as the seventy-ninth U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. In the past ten days, I’ve met with the Prime Minister of Japan, the President of Korea, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and President Macron of France—all in their home countries.
Nothing else in my life has ever matched this whirlwind, but the privilege of shaping the trajectory of the United States for my children and you all the next 250 years is purposeful, consequential, and all-consuming.
Now, as you leave this place, you will be tested to take the easy or the most convenient way. As you do so, I hope you will remember that the world does not need more men of “timid peace.” I trust, instead, you will recognize that it requires men of consequence; that it requires men of Brunswick. Men who believe, as Washington did on the coldest night of that darkest winter, that something worthy awaits beyond the comfort of the shore—if only we have the courage, honor, and truth to go out and seize it.
He concluded, “Congratulations, Class of 2026, and fair winds on the voyage ahead. Thank you.”
Read the full article here
