The Patriot Post® · Powell Gets a Probing

If an all-powerful Democrat or establishment Republican wanted to wreck Donald Trump’s presidency, he’d start by hamstringing the one thing that matters most to both Trump and the American people: the economy, stupid.

Lucky for us, there are no all-powerful beings among our elected officials. But there is one guy, one unelected official, who wields an extraordinary amount of power over the American president: the Fed chairman. That man is Jerome Powell, and he’s been a fly in Donald Trump’s economic ointment from the jump.

As the Washington Examiner reports, “Throughout his second term, Trump has targeted Powell for what he sees as a refusal to lower interest rates sooner, frequently dubbing him ‘Too Late.’”

And now, as Powell revealed in a video he released yesterday, he’s under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice for his Senate testimony last year about the exorbitant renovation costs of the Beltway-based Federal Reserve headquarters. Said an indignant Powell:

The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president. This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions — or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.

Trump, as a businessman and a builder, has been publicly critical of the cost overruns for the renovation project, and rightly so. The dollar amount, according to Trump, might be as high as $3.1 billion. For renovations? Whoa. Powell, for his part, denies that the price tag is that high.

Back in July, Trump suggested that Powell’s mismanagement of the project could itself be a fireable offense, but he didn’t pursue it further. “I think he’s terrible,” said Trump at the time. “I think he’s a total stiff. But the one thing I didn’t see him is a guy that needed a palace to live in.”

Yesterday, when asked about the investigation by NBC News, Trump had this to say: “I don’t know anything about it, but he’s certainly not very good at the Fed, and he’s not very good at building buildings.”

Good points, Mr. President. Asked about Powell’s claim that the investigation is purely political, Trump added, “No. I wouldn’t even think of doing it that way. What should pressure him is the fact that rates are far too high. That’s the only pressure he’s got. He’s hurt a lot of people.”

Interest rates are hurting the American people, and they’re a stubborn byproduct of the disastrous money-printing Autopen Presidency that preceded Trump.

As for the politically tinged nature of our nation’s unchecked and unaccountable central bank, our Nate Jackson noted its politicization back in 2022: “If anyone has acted politically, it’s Powell. He’s supposed to be ‘independent,’ but he’s not — he’s a Never Trumper who is overseeing a renovation of the Reserve building that has ballooned to about twice the original cost. While a couple of his board members have committed mortgage fraud. These people are so used to being above the law, and have no issue using — or ignoring — the law when it serves them politically.”

In the penultimate paragraph of his December 2018 letter of resignation to President Donald Trump, former Defense Secretary James Mattis wrote, “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

Mattis was a globalist, a shrewd political operator, and a slow-roller of Trump policies with which he disagreed — a man who, as I wrote in September 2020, had disagreed with Trump “on getting out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up Barack Obama’s ill-conceived and corruptly executed Iran nuclear deal, withdrawing our troops from Syria, reducing our presence in Afghanistan, pressing our NATO allies to pay what they’d promised, relocating the Israeli embassy to its rightful place in Jerusalem, and deploying the National Guard to our southern border to stem the tide of illegal immigration.”

I believe the unfolding events since then have shown that Mattis was wrong on every one of those issues, but he was certainly right that Trump deserved a secretary of defense war who was “better aligned” with him.

Similarly, Trump deserves a Fed chairman whose monetary-policy beliefs are better aligned with his.

Jerome Powell should resign his post. And he should resign it yesterday.