Cancer can be a wake-up call — often to the things we haven’t fully appreciated in life.
For Jason Trennert, one of those things was compliance meetings.
Like many on Wall Street, the 57-year-old head of Strategas Research Partners — known for his prophetic, contrarian bets on the success of President Trump and many of his controversial policies — had always dreaded long, tedious sessions with lawyers combing through regulatory paperwork.
These days, Trennert says the prospect of those mind-numbing obligations is one of the best things about getting up in the morning.
“I hated certain things like those compliance meetings, and would do anything to avoid them,” Trennert told me last week in his first interview about the illness.
“Now I can’t wait to go to one because it’s just a privilege to be alive.”
For the past year, Trennert has been sidelined undergoing various grueling treatments to eradicate cancer from his blood system.
Rounds of chemo and stem cell therapies left him 45 points lighter and bald.
He missed work regularly because he simply couldn’t walk.
Among the side effects is kidney failure; he is seeking a donor and does dialysis three times a week.
Now Trennert’s back — maybe not 100% — but good enough to both work and return to his usual spots on financial TV, including an appearance last week on Fox Business (where I am employed).
The doctors say his cancer is in remission.
He’s optimistic about getting a kidney transplant.
As for his story, it’s one I can appreciate as a cancer survivor myself: You wish it on no one, but it is the ultimate humbling experience, the great equalizer that doesn’t discriminate, and makes you cherish just living.
Force on Wall Street
Full disclosure: I consider Trennert a friend.
We met on the set of CNBC some two decades ago where we immediately bonded over our obsession with markets and boxing.
He started Strategas around that time and quickly built it into a force on Wall Street, an international business advising hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.
A guy named Scott Bessent was a client.
In 2024 Trennert was in the mix for a big job inside the Trump White House — a “life goal,” he tells me.
His long relationship with Bessent certainly helped, and he was offered the post of assistant Treasury secretary for financial markets, essentially the country’s top bond salesman.
But just as the press release on the appointment went out, Trennert began experiencing severe migraines.
At first he didn’t think anything of it; he had those in the past and they subsided with some simple meds.
This time they didn’t.
Further tests revealed a diagnosis no one wants to hear: a form of blood cancer that responds only to the most aggressive treatments.
Trennert checked himself into Memorial Sloan Kettering — and a career that showed no limits suddenly hit a big one.
The stem cell and chemo treatments he received made him sicker than he ever felt in his life.
He credits his partners Nicholas Bohnsack and Dom Rissmiller for keeping the business running.
There were other setbacks.
The type of cancer Trennert has damages the kidneys; they often repair on their own.
In Trennert’s case, they didn’t.
He is seeking a donor.
His wife, Bevin Trennert, plans to donate one of hers — which doesn’t match her husband’s — to Weill Cornell’s so-called lottery system, where Jason will get a voucher for one when a match is found.
Man of faith
“I’ve always been a faithful guy, going to church every week. I love my wife and my kids,” Trennert said.
“My wife has been amazing,” he says, as have friends including Bessent.
Nevertheless, Trennert also admits the emotional damage has been intense: “I was in shock for months. My personality vanished. I was so depressed.”
Slowly but surely, Trennert has recovered, mentally and physically.
That’s especially great news as Wall Street gears up this week to attend the globalist World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
For years Trennert has been a rare mainstream economist who has viewed the confab as a waste of time, far removed from the economic concerns of average Americans as attendees offer a preachy blend of globalism and progressive dogma.
Trennert’s contrarianism on Davos is now more widely accepted.
No surprise that he was maybe the only economic guru who saw the populist Trump phenomenon coming, predicting back in 2015 that the New York real estate baron and reality TV star had a chance to become president because he spoke to the concerns of middle America.
Since then, Trennert has been prescient on the success of Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation.
He also predicted the failure of Joe Biden’s leftist expansion of government and obscene spending, warning that it would spark inflation that we haven’t seen in decades.
His level of insight is rare, and we’re all better off having his voice back in the mix.
“Things are really looking up,” he told me.
“Like I said, I’m happy to be alive.”
