Let Him Cook

Partly due to prudence and partly due to law, until Monday evening no president had moved to fire a Fed governor since the institution was founded in 1913.

The point of the Federal Reserve is to give global investors confidence that monetary policy in the United States is keyed to economic conditions, not political ones. Your money is safe here because the White House isn’t turning the dial on interest rates every time the ruling party gets a bad poll. Meddling with the board would undermine that confidence, raising the risk of investing in America.

That’s why the law that created the Fed restricted the president’s authority to oust its governors, requiring him to show “cause” to do so. If he could fire board members for any ol’ reason and replace them with toadies, he could turn those dials after all.

The alleged “cause” for firing Lisa Cook yesterday was supplied by Bill Pulte, Trump’s appointee to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte alleges that Cook fraudulently cited two different homes as her primary residence on mortgage applications and has referred the matter to the Justice Department for prosecution. That’s the third Trump nemesis whom Pulte has found reason to investigate, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James being the other two.

He strikes me as the finance equivalent of “Eagle Ed” Martin, the sort of henchman who sees satisfying the president’s thirst for “retribution” as his primary and possibly only duty. He’ll probably end up as a federal judge.

“President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign,” Cook said in a statement, vowing to fight her termination in court. She stands a fair chance of winning: As recently as May, the Supreme Court hinted that the White House has less power to remove Fed governors than it does other presidential appointees. 

On top of that, the fraud claim against Cook sure looks like a pretext invented by Pulte to give Trump an excuse to seize control of the Fed. (If he succeeds in removing her, his appointees will soon constitute a majority of the board.) She hasn’t been criminally charged (yet) and was given no opportunity to respond to Trump’s allegation of fraud before he dropped the axe, as far as I’m aware, which means this world-shaking decision was based on nothing more than mere suspicion of malfeasance by an especially prostrate presidential toady.

If Fed governors can be fired based on nothing sturdier than that, the “for cause” requirement in the Federal Reserve Act is meaningless. The institution will be finished as an independent body, as will America’s status as the world’s safe haven for investment. Courts won’t want to reach that conclusion and the White House presumably realizes it, which is why it should have taken care to proceed by the book here—waiting to fire Cook until after she’s indicted, for instance, or at least giving her a pro forma chance to be heard before she was canned.

It didn’t. Either it didn’t occur to them to do so or they’ve already reached the point of authoritarian impunity where they’re only half-heartedly disguising their true motives. 

There are all sorts of recurring themes running through Cook’s firing that we’ve been chattering about here since 2022.

One is the president’s belief that the U.S. economy should be centrally controlled to a much greater degree than it has been historically, starting with trade policy made by executive whim and lately extending to extorting shares in the means of production. Bouncing a Fed governor because General Secretary Trump wants to set monetary policy himself is a nice example of socialism without socialism.

Another theme is the deprofessionalization of the federal government. Replacing career civil servants with unqualified lackeys who won’t restrain the leader is always a high priority for fascists, and Trump’s administration is no different. But for most of this year, his team focused on bureaucrats who serve in the upper echelons of the executive branch—top officials in law enforcement, the intelligence agencies, and other departments where we’ve traditionally given the president leeway to install his own people, as derelict as they might be.

Lately, however, the White House has extended its reach by moving to lower the standards for federal employees beyond its own immediate orbit. ICE waived its age limit for recruits and lowered the minimum age to enlist to 18; the FBI rescinded its requirement for a college degree and reduced training for new agents from 18 weeks to eight. You can imagine what sort of person might be enticed to join law enforcement by the prospect of lax standards and how personally loyal they’re expected to feel toward Donald Trump by signing up in a political climate like this one. That person will be armed and engaging directly with the public going forward.

Firing Lisa Cook is part of that more aggressive push to deprofessionalize parts of the federal bureaucracy with which the White House doesn’t personally interface. I don’t know who’ll replace her on the Fed board if this goes through (Bill Pulte, perhaps?) but whoever does will be a comparatively unfit flunky even more personally indebted to the president than a 60-year-old ICE rookie is.

The most distinctive authoritarian theme in Cook’s termination, though, is the arsonist posing as a firefighter.

“The American people must be able to have full confidence in the honesty of the members entrusted with setting policy and overseeing the Federal Reserve,” the president wrote in his termination letter to Cook, elegantly overlooking the fact that no one—no one—since the Civil War has done more to destroy public confidence in the U.S. government than Donald Trump.

His instinct to discredit people or institutions who’ve denied him something he wants is so overweening that he was whining about the rigged Emmy awards years before he whined about a rigged presidential election. In 10 years of covering his political career, I can’t think of a case where he suffered a meaningful setback and didn’t react by impugning the integrity or intelligence of his antagonist. There are no good-faith disagreements with Trumpworld, even on matters as basic as whether Fed independence benefits the U.S. economy on balance. There are only plots, schemes, biases, and conspiracies—or, at the very least, disqualifying stupidity.

As for Trump supposedly worrying about the appearance of impropriety if Cook remains on the Fed board, what can one say? He’s a convicted criminal, is advised by convicted criminals, has freed dangerous convicted criminals to reward them for their support, and is running an administration so corrupt that bribe-taking occurs in broad daylight. He created his own cryptocurrency to facilitate influence-peddling, for cripes’ sake. He wears the appearance of impropriety every day like a sandwich board. Scolding Cook for her supposed lack of ethics feels like a dark joke in that context, as if Trump is trolling her by purporting to remove her for offenses of which he’s obviously a thousand times guiltier.

And so, having started a fire, the arsonist now demands the authority to extinguish it. He spent months tearing down the Fed and its chairman in his daily rants; now he turns around and pretends to be troubled by shaken public faith in the organization if Cook stays on. He created a needless drag on the economy with his wheel-o’-tariffs trade policy, now he turns around and aims to counter it by purging the Fed board and slashing interest rates—never mind what that might do to inflation.

The pretext he’s claiming to remove Cook is so threadbare that I wonder if he even wants people to believe it. That was also true of the search of John Bolton’s home last week: As with Powell and the Fed, Bolton has been demagogued by the president for so long that onlookers realistically can’t help but assume that he’s being harassed for illicit political reasons rather than due to genuine wrongdoing. By making his vendettas so public, Trump seems to want the public to conclude that his administration is going after people because they’re enemies, not because they’re criminals.

And maybe he does want that.

All we can do in the case of Lisa Cook is hope that he gets away with it.

I think it would be better for America if Trump successfully seizes control of the Fed. Let him Cook—er, cook.

It won’t be better economically. A country where interest rates are tied to the president’s job approval instead of to jobs numbers is a country that’s on a predictable trajectory, especially when it’s led by someone who won’t think twice about prioritizing his immediate political needs over the long-term welfare of the population. If you want the dollar to lose its status as the world’s reserve currency and the “sell America” movement of this past spring to reignite, put a sociopathic game show host in charge of monetary policy instead of Jerome Powell.

It’s weird that America is becoming Argentina at the very moment that Argentina no longer wants to be Argentina, but America is a weird place in 2025.

The reason to reluctantly root for Trump against Cook is this: Nothing other than a MAGA-driven economic calamity stands a chance at this point of interrupting the fascist turn our country has taken.

Congress certainly isn’t going to do it. Republican voters aren’t going to do it either. They’re a moral catastrophe. What we’ve learned from the last 10 years and especially the last seven months is that the American right will not condemn a government that reliably favors its friends and punishes its enemies, no matter how ruthlessly that government behaves. There is no line Trump might cross in the name of owning the libs that will cause the average GOPer to lose sleep.

“What about swing voters?” you might say. “Even without hyperinflation, they might turn against Trump and elect Democrats in 2026 and 2028.” Sure—but that’s too late. At the rate we’re going, what will this country even look like in 2029? How many companies will have been nationalized? How will federal law enforcement operate? What sort of as-yet-unimagined penalties will the White House’s enemies be subjected to?

You do not need to suffer from “Rachel Maddow brain” to believe that this syndicate has no intention of handing over power to Democrats even if they do win an election. As in all fascist regimes, the core ideological principle of Trump’s administration is that the law must yield during emergencies—and pretty much everything is an emergency, it turns out. Especially election outcomes that threaten to derail their national greatness ideological project.

If you want Trump to lose political capital before he does any more civic damage, realistically the only way it will happen is if he drives the economy into the ground and infuriates his own base. Only if they personally start to suffer the consequences of his policies might they begin to object, and he knows it. It’s why so many of his worst ideas come with special carve-outs for “his people.”

Years ago, during his first term, one of his supporters memorably criticized a federal shutdown he orchestrated by complaining that the burden was falling on red states too, not just blue ones. “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting,” she said. That’s the problem we have now. There’s no chance of Trump being chastened until Republican voters start to suffer. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.

A Fed takeover and the havoc it would wreak would likely solve that. Admittedly, maybe not: One flaw in this argument is that Trump at 25 percent approval could well be crazier, more aggressive, and more fascist than he is at 44.3 percent. There’s no greater emergency necessitating autocratic rule, he might reason, than having his own political support collapse.

But he’s always been sensitive to his “numbers”—look how quickly he retreated on global tariffs after markets dove following “Liberation Day”—and I think it would genuinely jar him to see his cult begin to come apart at the seams. Pure narcissistic instinct might lead him to focus on rebuilding his popularity by easing off his worst impulses. And even if it didn’t, the reality of widespread discontent might at last cause Republicans in Congress to cease being egregious traitors to the U.S. Constitution and start reining in his power.

Rooting for Trump to take over the Fed isn’t rooting against America; it’s rooting for America by rooting against Americastan. Because Americastan is what we’re going to get, and what we’re getting right now, if something doesn’t change.