Trump Trying To Fire Fed Gov. Lisa Cook: Another Break-Glass Moment In A Month Full Of 'Em
We are a different country than we were one month ago.
Greg Sargent has an excellent and chilling wake-up call of a podcast at The New Republic today that makes the case that over the last month or so, the United States has been officially making its transition away from anything resembling a democracy, and into a full-blown authoritarian/fascist situation. He has historian and journalist Garrett Graff as his guest, and they line up the evidence, from Trump fully siccing the justice system on his political enemies (ordering investigations, the John Bolton raid) to his military invasions of American cities (LA, DC, soon Chicago and more), to cite just two obvious examples. (Dear Leader deciding what museums are allowed to exhibit, what one of America’s formerly most prestigious theaters is allowed to stage, Trump’s Gestapo’s continued terrorist campaign against all humans who look like they might speak Spanish, White House’s least fuckable Nazi Stephen Miller labeling Democrats as “domestic extremists,” and more. Read it all, and read Graff’s accompanying piece, “America Tips Into Fascism.”)
In the case of the military invasions, it’s clear that the people who live there don’t want these things, no matter how much sycophantic fluffers like Pete Hegseth or Pam Bondi lie and say otherwise, so as Graff states, there’s no serious arguing that Trump’s terrorism is being done for residents. It’s being done to them. The American people are his victims, unwilling, even though they’re saying “no” again and again. (Sound familiar? It should.)
Here’s an excerpt of Sargent’s and Graff’s discussion before we get to the point:
Sargent: So let’s get to the points you make in your piece about incremental movement down the slippery slope. Trump signed an executive order on Monday empowering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to establish specialized units in the National Guard that will be specifically trained and equipped to deal with public-order issues. Look, there’s clearly an effort by Trump and Stephen Miller to acclimate voters to the sight of troops in American cities. This is ostensibly to conduct domestic law enforcement, which is itself bad, but I think the real game here is to get Americans accustomed to the use of the American military against Americans. Maybe not military violence against Americans, but the use of the military to, in some sense, corral and control constituents in an American city inside the homeland. Am I overreading this?
Graff: Not at all. One of the things I was trying to do in my essay this week was we’ve warned for so long — not just in the last couple of weeks and months but the last couple of years — of the creep of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. And I think many Americans wrongly believed that there was going to be one clear unambiguous moment, like a light switch going on or off, where everything before this moment is a democracy, everything after this moment is an authoritarian fascist regime. And of course, that’s not what it was going to be like. That’s not what Germany was like in the 1930s. That’s not what Hungary was like in the 2000s. It’s a creeping incremental process — and that there’s a blurring of lines here, there’s a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat that goes unchallenged. And then you wake up one morning and the country is different.
And now we have the matter of Lisa Cook.
To be clear, Donald Trump has not actually fired Lisa Cook, the first Black woman (or Black person!) to serve on the Fed’s board of governors. Pardon us, this dick joke blog, for being so excessively nitpicky toward members of the serious DC pundit class and media who may have gotten that wrong.
He actually can’t fire her by royal decree. But he’s trying. He’s doing that thing where he HEREBY DECLARES and THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTERS and hopes everybody just goes along with it.
It works on a lot of these fucking idiots.
What is his justification? Mortgage fraud! You know, the thing he says everybody has done now. Adam Schiff? Mortgage fraud! Tish James? Mortgage fraud, mortgage fraud, mortgage fraud!
Pardon us if we suspect that Trump’s people landed on “mortgage fraud!” — besides how he’s got a real ass-rimming MAGA hack running the Federal Housing Finance Agency who is ever so eager to please Daddy — at least partially because Trump possesses a rotting real estate dementia brain, and therefore might remember the words “mortgage fraud” even during his sundowning sessions.
Who knows a hell of a lot about doing various kinds of real estate fraud? Donald Trump is who! Also Paul Manafort, the man Russia sent in to run Trump’s first campaign for “free.” And Texas AG Ken Paxton.
But whatever, fuck that, as Paul Krugman explains. To spend too much time discussing the ins and outs of whatever imaginary crimes Trump’s mouthbreathing pigfucks try to lay on his political enemies, or people he just hates because they’re Black women, is to play this game on the fascist’s turf.
“If you write about politics and imagine that Trump cares about mortgage fraud — or for that matter believe anything Trump officials say about the affair without independent confirmation — you should find a different profession,” says Krugman.
This is Trump finding any way he can to go after his enemies, to seize control of things his disgusting little decomposing hands can grab before they fall all the way off.
Krugman:
The important thing to understand is that we are all Lisa Cook. You may imagine that your legal and financial history is so blameless that there’s no way MAGA can come after you. If you believe that, you’re living in a fantasy world. Criticize them or get in their way, and you will become a target.
Trump has been doing everything he can to bully the Fed, because he thinks its refusal to lower interest rates is standing in the way of everybody seeing what a great and glorious economy he’s made, when in reality he’s smeared his gold-plated feces all over it and ruined it, just like he’s done to the White House walls, just like he’s done to the country. He’s been bullying Jerome Powell, the Fed Chair, whom he nominated, for months and months. Powell has been steadfastly fuck off about it.
So too with Cook, who has been on the job since 2022, and who according to her lawyer Abbe Lowell — the big guns — isn’t going anywhere, and is suing.
“President Trump has no authority to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook,” the lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement, a day after Trump cited allegations of mortgage fraud by Cook in [trying to — Ed.] firing her.
“His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis,” Lowell said. […]
“I will not resign,” [Cook] said. “I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.”
As CNBC — whose headline on this refers to it as a “firing,” not an “attempted firing,” AKA wrong — explains, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 says the president may only fire a member of the Fed’s board of governor’s “for cause.” Trump is lying and saying he’s doing this “for cause,” based on a bullshit investigation AG Nazi Barbie opened up all of last week based on the FHFA fluffer’s referral, but that’s extremely fucking flimsy, now isn’t it.
By the way, Donald Trump’s latest stupidass dictator move to fuck with the Fed is already having the kinds of effects his stupidass dictator moves usually have on the economy:
The U.S. Dollar Index, a measure of the dollar's strength against a basket of global currencies, declined sharply on Trump's announcement.
Cook, who has a permanent vote on the central bank’s rate-setting committee, was appointed by President Joe Biden to a term running until 2038.
Hopefully she can fight like hell and stay right where she is, otherwise oof, nice global economy we got here. Shame if the dumbest tyrant who ever lived were to happen to it.
How bad would that be?
Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania, said her firing, if successful, would mark “the end of central bank independence as we know it.”
Oh.
We are living in a different country now, indeed.
[Paul Krugman / CNBC / NBC News / New York Times]
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I’m a little bit concerned about how much I hate all Republicans in general and Trump in particular.
I used to be nice.
If you want a look at what happens when a dictator runs a federal bank. Look at Turkey or Argentina. The results weren't good kids