The Close Relationship Between Donald Trump’s Nominee for Treasury Secretary and the Royal Family

When Camilla Parker Bowles was an outcast, Scott Bessent befriended her

I first heard of Scott Bessent, President Donald Trump’s choice for Treasury Secretary, in 2013 when I was researching my biography, Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life. My late friend Robert Higdon, the executive director of the Washington, D.C. based Prince of Wales Foundation from 1997 to 2011, told me he was “one of our early donors.”

Scott Bessent today

Bessent’s background as a successful and exceedingly wealthy financial strategist for billionaire investor George Soros has dominated the headlines since his appointment on November 22^nd. What is less well-known is the close connection that sixty-two-year-old Bessent forged nearly thirty years ago with Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles when he kept a much lower profile while working in London. In a Royals Extra on November 19, 2023, An important moment for Charles and Camilla that The Crown may overlook, I described how Bessent, then only thirty-seven, had a crucial role in hosting and orchestrating Camilla’s breakthrough trip to the United States in 1999. The visit helped bring her out of the shadows at age fifty-two following the death of Diana Princess of Wales.

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For the previous two years, Bessent and his domestic partner, Will Trinkle, had been among an elite group of benefactors contributing $20,000 a year to the Prince of Wales Foundation. By way of thanks, Charles treated his donors to opulent black-tie events at royal palaces as well as Charles’s Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire. Robert Higdon invited me to “make up numbers” (fill a seat without donating money) at seven of these dinners from 2008 through 2010. On June 25, 2023, I wrote about them in a Royals Extra called Remembering lavish Prince of Wales Foundation dinners.

A hand-painted menu in the shape of Prince of Wales feathers for a June 2010 Prince of Wales Foundation dinner

“Anything they did, we went to”

There was more to the friendship between Scott Bessent and the royal couple who would become King and Queen, as I learned when I had an extended conversation with Will Trinkle in 2014. Trinkle is the fourth-generation scion of a prosperous Virginia family of real estate investors and developers. Bessent is also a Southerner, four years younger than Trinkle, born in Charleston, South Carolina. Trinkle and Bessent would eventually part company—Bessent is now married to former New York City prosecutor John Freeman—but back then Trinkle spoke to me fondly about Bessent and their glamorous life together in London. When it came to the Prince of Wales Foundation, Trinkle recalled. “Anything they did, we went to.”

“I made some notes yesterday,” he said as we began talking. “I have a yellow pad with about twenty pages. I wanted to get the timeline right.” Bessent came to know Charles through the well-connected Higdon, who had previously worked for Ronald Reagan during his presidency and for the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Higdon also introduced Bessent to Mark Bolland, Charles’s powerful assistant private secretary since 1996 and chief adviser to Camilla as well. Bolland served as the prince’s “spin doctor” with a mission to improve Camilla’s public image after Diana had denigrated her as the “other woman” during the Waleses’ turbulent marriage.

“Mark Bolland was a friend of Scott, who got involved in the Prince of Wales Foundation just before we started going out,” Trinkle told me. Like Bessent, Bolland was openly gay, and Guy Black, his partner (and later husband) ran the Press Complaints Commission that dealt with grievances from the public about the media. When some Buckingham Palace courtiers objected to Charles hiring an overtly homosexual adviser, he rebuffed their concerns. He only cared about Bolland’s ability to do the job and regarded his sexual orientation as irrelevant.

“Scott and I were the first same-sex couple presented to the Prince of Wales together”

“We were told at the time that Scott and I were the first same-sex couple presented to the Prince of Wales together,” Trinkle recalled. It was a Prince of Wales Foundation dinner at Kensington Palace on June 18, 1998, and they were going through the receiving line.