Hi everyone, I think you’re going to love the new episode of my Receipts podcast. Sam Stein and I decided to dissect Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s very odd interview with Axios. Among other things, Bessent declared he was totes in the right for declaring “I am the house now” in his failed bond-market interventions, before determining that, eh, sometimes the house loses. (Former failed-casino owner Donald Trump can relate.)

We also talked about Bessent’s record with the ladies (according to Bessent, Trump’s female friends are disappointed to learn that the secretary is into men), and whether a comparison to the nation’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, proves entirely favorable.

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I also spoke with Mateo Kehler, the CEO and cofounder of Jasper Hill Farm in northern Vermont. Kehler is a dairy farmer who makes delicious, rich, award-winning cheeses, and is supposed to be exactly the kind of person Trump’s trade war with Canada is helping. Instead, the president has obliterated Kehler’s export business. We spoke about why Trump’s trade wars and hot war are hurting dairy farmers on both sides of the border, despite Trump’s specific callouts promising to rescue U.S. dairy farmers. Trump’s cheese wreckage was the subject of my recent Receipts newsletter, as well:

IN HIS OTHERWISE INEXPLICABLE trade war with Canada, U.S. dairy was supposed to be the one industry President Donald Trump was actually helping.

He frequently namechecks the sector in his social media posts and interviews about Canada, citing it as evidence that our polite northern neighbors are really a bunch of dirty cheats. Sometimes, Trump complains that Canadian dairy tariffs on the United States are 250 percent; sometimes, according to Trump, they’re 400 percent.

And look, it’s true that dairy trade has been a source of friction between the two countries over the years. Trump’s response to that friction, however, has been to tariff, bully, and ban his way to prosperity. To which American dairy farmers are now saying: Please, stop helping.

Read: Who Cut the Cheese

Thanks for all your terrifically cheesy cheese puns, by the way! Very hallouminating. I’ll see you back here Thursday for the next edition of Receipts.

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