The Father, the Don, and the Fed Chair’s PostKnives out for the banker of Washington and the Bishop of Rome.
America’s quest to put sufficient economic pressure on Iran to buckle the government’s will continues: Threats of genocide are (for now) out, an ever-tightening blockade is in. Central Command announced this morning, per the Wall Street Journal, that “all Iranian vessels, vessels with active [Office of Foreign Assets Control] sanctions, and vessels suspected of carrying contraband, are subject to belligerent right to visit and search.” CENTCOM said yesterday that no ships have yet breached the U.S. blockade. Happy Thursday.
Trump’s Powell Paradoxby Andrew Egger Well, would you look at that: Donald Trump is threatening Jerome Powell again. The president said yesterday that he plans to fire the Fed chair next month, should he not step down from his post “on time.” “I’ll have to fire him, okay?” Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “I’ve held back firing him. I’ve wanted to fire him, but I hate to be controversial.”¹ Such threats are nothing new: Trump has long seethed over what he sees as the Federal Reserve chair’s intolerable reluctance to lower interest rates, and has pursued many fruitless strategies to jawbone him into doing so. What is new is how apparent it’s become that here, far from holding all the cards, Trump is caught in yet another negotiating trap of his own making. Powell’s term is up on May 15. Ordinarily, that would be the end of it: He would hand the role off to his successor without fuss. But right now Powell has no successor. Trump’s nominee for the position, financier Kevin Warsh, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. By law, Powell will stay in his current role unless and until the Senate confirms Warsh—or someone else. But why hasn’t Warsh been confirmed? Because of the determined opposition of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Why won’t Tillis advance Warsh’s nomination? Because he has sworn not to allow any Fed nominees to move ahead in the Senate until the Trump administration calls off its ludicrous criminal investigation of Powell over supposed cost overruns during the renovation of the Fed headquarters in D.C. And why is Powell under investigation in the first place? Because Powell, as head of an independent agency, has legal protection against being fired except for cause. All along, the Fed renovation “investigation” was a transparent attempt to get more leverage on Powell—either to twist his arm a little more on his interest-rates decisions, or to provide the legal predicate for Trump firing him after all. The president has barely tried to deny this: Last year, asked what Powell could do to assuage his concerns about the renovation-cost overruns, Trump replied that “well, I’d love to see him lower interest rates.” But it didn’t work. Powell refused to be bullied. In January, he publicly accused Trump’s Justice Department of threatening him with criminal indictment over a pretext. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions,” Powell said in a direct-to-camera video, “or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.” Last month, a federal judge agreed, invalidating a pair of subpoenas sent by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office to the Federal Reserve. There was “abundant evidence,” Judge James Boasberg wrote, that the “dominant (if not sole) purpose” of the subpoenas was “to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will.” Their legal legs cut from under them, Trump and Pirro have been resorting to sillier, more thuggish tactics: Prosecutors from Pirro’s office made an unannounced visit to the Fed building yesterday, seeking to “check on progress” via a “tour” of the renovations. The Fed, having declined to buckle under more dangerous pressures, practically laughed this one off. “As you know, Chief Judge Boasberg has concluded that your interest in the Federal Reserve’s renovation project was pretextual,” Robert Hur,² the Fed’s outside legal counsel, wrote to Pirro’s office after the incident. “Should you wish to challenge that finding, the courts provide an avenue for you; it is not appropriate for you to try to circumvent it.” Trump, then, is stuck. His investigation was supposed to give him the means either of bending Powell to his will or of getting the irritating Fed chair out of his hair. Instead, it has been completely thwarted—first by Powell’s courage, then by the courts. But the ongoing existence even of such a feeble and impotent investigation is enough to keep Sen. Tillis from giving his permission for the Senate to confirm Kevin Warsh. Far from accelerating Powell’s departure, then, the investigation now seems likely to prolong his stay. Okay, so: Why not just end the investigation? Many of Trump’s allies, no longer seeing much merit in pretending the Powell investigation is some righteous, apolitical action by Pirro that Trump has nothing to do with, are asking exactly this. “You want Jay Powell out of the way,” Bartiromo said during her interview with Trump yesterday. “Isn’t the easiest way to get him out of the way to end the probe?” And here we arrive at the most fascinating part of the whole business, at least when it comes to the president’s personal psychology: because Trump does not agree with this assessment. “Does that mean we stop a probe of a building that I would have done for $25 million that’s gonna cost maybe $4 billion?” he blustered. “Don’t you think we have to find out what happened there?” Trump wants Powell gone. If he dropped his probe, Tillis would drop his objection to Warsh’s confirmation, and Powell would be out as Fed chair in thirty days. But Trump remains dispositionally incapable of such a tactical retreat. Either he has become so high on his own supply that he has genuinely convinced himself Powell has committed vile crimes as part of the Fed renovation, or Powell has simply become so irksome to him that he cannot bear to see him go unpunished, or he just isn’t willing to give Powell the win. For whatever reason, he finds himself unable to make the one move that everyone save him can see would solve his problem immediately. Trump is a ratchet that turns only one way—toward further threats and more intimidation. Who cares if Powell won’t leave voluntarily or by law? Trump will just fire him, he insists—notwithstanding that his for-cause predicate has gone up in smoke. And who cares that Tillis will gum up the works? “That’s why Thom Tillis is no longer a senator,” Trump scoffed. Either Tillis will have to blink, or Trump will. Until then, Powell’s not going anywhere. Why Trump Fears the Popeby William Kristol Does might make right? It’s an age-old question, and there’s no great mystery about the Trump administration’s answer. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller articulated it clearly a few months ago, in the course of defending President Trump’s threats to seize Greenland:
According to Miller, in the real world, it’s power—not justice—that matters. The “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” rule, and the essence of those iron laws is that might makes right. This is the worldview of the Trump administration, and not just in foreign policy but in domestic policy. It’s also the worldview of the president, and not just for public but for private life (“when you’re a star . . . you can do anything”). That Trumpist view—that power is to be worshiped, that might makes right—can be dressed up in religious garb, whether through the unctuous sophistry of JD Vance or the grotesque weaponization of faith by Pete Hegseth. But the costume clearly doesn’t fit. The claim that we have no choice but to follow “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” indeed that we should exult in doing so, is fundamentally at odds with a Judeo-Christian world view. After all, if Miller is right, if those iron laws from the beginning of time are unchangeable and unchallengeable, then there is no God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Jesus of Nazareth doesn’t matter. Of course, if the Trumpist claim is right, if those iron laws since the beginning of time are all-powerful, then the Declaration of Independence doesn’t matter either. Whatever human rights we may think we should respect don’t matter. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. And that’s why the Trump administration and its surrogates have chosen to pick a fight with Pope Leo XIV. They’re attacking Pope Leo not simply because he’s the pope but because he’s the first American pope. He’s a threat to their ambition to change the meaning of America. And he’s popular here in America. A poll last month found that 42 percent of Americans had a positive feeling about the Pope, while only 8 percent had a negative view. Half said they were neutral or not sure. If you’re Trump, and you see a critic with those numbers, a critic who can command attention and who shows no signs of being afraid of you or of shrinking from a fight, you want to weaken him. You want to try to drive up his negatives and to drag him down into the polarized political mud in which all other American public figures exist. So you try to reduce him to just another political actor—to a radical leftist who’s “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Trump claimed that Leo only got elected “because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump.” Trump may be wrong to ascribe his own kind of political thinking to the College of Cardinals. But he’s not wrong to sense that their choice of Robert Prevost as the first American pope posed a kind of threat to him. After all, the first Polish pope helped liberate his home country from authoritarian rule. Trump and the Trumpists are worried that the first American pope could contribute to such a development here. And they should be. The view Pope Leo is upholding—that right matters, not just might—is an American one. It’s the view not just of Augustine but of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln attacked the heresy that might makes right. Lincoln in his great 1860 Cooper Union speech reversed the equation: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” The Trumpists fear Pope Leo not simply because he’s defending the views, and speaking to the communicants, of his church. They fear him because he’s defending the principles, and speaking to the citizens, of his country. Of our country. AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsMISSION ACCOMPLISHED?: The New York Times brings a quick vibe check on the ongoing state of things in Iran:
Nevertheless, markets seem to have determined the worst is behind us: The S&P is higher today than it was when the war began, and oil prices—while dramatically higher than before the war—are still well down from their peak-panic highs, despite maritime traffic remaining largely choked in the Strait of Hormuz. Hope springs eternal! BACK IN THE GOOD BOOKS: She may be totally crosswise from him on the war in Iran, but Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard knows how to keep the bossman happy. Yesterday, Gabbard sent the Justice Department a criminal referral for two former government officials who played a major role in Trump’s first impeachment in 2019: a whistleblower who revealed the existence of Trump’s efforts to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for “dirt” on his future presidential rival Joe Biden, and the former intelligence-community watchdog who handled the whistleblower report. CBS News reports:
DAILY BREAD: Okay, so it’s not exactly must-read news . . . but you could argue it’s a must-consume story. Caity Weaver’s megasized Atlantic odyssey to find the best free bread in America must be read to be believed:
Don’t betray her, or yourself: Read the whole thing. Cheap Shots
1
Say what you will about Donald Trump, you can’t deny that he hates to be controversial.
2
Yes, that’s the same Robert Hur who led the investigation into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents and found that he was unprosecutable because any jury would find that he wasn’t a criminal but just a doddering old man. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletters or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here. Having trouble with something related to your account? Check out our constantly-updated FAQ, which likely has an answer for you.
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