“Opportunity is Omnipresent”
Good morning. President Amiridis and Provost Fitzpatrick; members of the faculty and Board of Trustees; distinguished guests and graduates of the Class of 2026: thank you for the privilege of joining you on this wonderful occasion and for the honor that you have bestowed upon me today.
Graduates, like so many of you, I hail from South Carolina. So I know that for centuries, USC has been the place where this state sends its most promising young people—and receives in return its most dedicated leaders. As I look out on the class before me, I have every confidence that USC’s newest alumni will fulfill its abiding commitment to “the good order” of the great state of South Carolina.
Now, Provost Fitzpatrick, I am grateful for the generous citation you shared. But for those less familiar with the earlier chapters of my story, I was born in Conway and raised in Little River. It is fair to say that lifeguarding and bartending in Myrtle Beach scarcely seemed like it would give way to a career on Wall Street or in Washington. And yet it is the honor of a lifetime to stand before you as the seventy-ninth Secretary of the Treasury—and the first from the Palmetto State.
Graduates, I can imagine that the immense pride you are feeling today is mingled with a sense of uncertainty. I remember my own commencement festivities, set against the anxieties of the Cold War and the advent of the technological age. The celebratory nature of these occasions can sometimes belie the unnerving specter of what comes next.
This group has come of age alongside a different set of disruptions. Your grade school years coincided with the global financial crisis. Your high school years, likewise, with the global pandemic. Yet today here you sit as a college graduate.
Economists tend to describe those with a capacity to absorb shocks as “resilient.” I, for one, picture my ninety-nine-year-old mother-in-law.
Until recently, my family was fortunate enough to share our home with her in Charleston, making for a three-generation household. She was a French war bride who endured the deprivation of the Great Depression and then the occupation of the Second World War.
I think about my mother-in-law often. I thought about her as I prepared these remarks. And I marvel at the sweep of her life, from watching the Nazis march into her country—and shoot and capture the young men in her village—to witnessing a man walk on the moon. The darkest chapter imaginable followed by something that defied imagination entirely. If you don't think change can happen quickly, you aren't paying attention.
Yet what strikes me most about her story is not necessarily the hardships that she faced so much as the fact that she emerged from them with an uncommon attentiveness to possibility. Resilience, in her case, was both the capacity to absorb a set of circumstances and the insistence to see beyond them. To marry an American soldier. To begin life anew in a country that refuses to be bound by uncertainty.
On the eve of our nation’s 250th anniversary, that distinctly American ethos has held since the time of our founding because every generation decided that it would.
Now, at this extraordinary moment to be an American under President Trump’s leadership, that inheritance belongs to you. Because while the disruptions that have defined the arc of your lives are substantial, so too are the possibilities that lie on the other side of them. Because, as the retrospect tends to reveal, the moments that can seem the most mired in uncertainty are often the ones where opportunity is most abundant.
Indeed, opportunity is not scarce in times of disruption. What is scarce is the poise to recognize it before the path is fully visible.
Opportunity, in short, is omnipresent—if only we summon the courage to find it. This nation has always known that. And now, as USC graduates, so do you.
And, above all, you know that you are ready for what comes next, not necessarily because the path ahead is clear, but because you have already demonstrated that it need not be.
You are strong, you are powerful of spirit, and you are tested.
You are the University of South Carolina Class of 2026.
Congratulations.
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