President Trump is out of control.
His latest attack on Jay Powell, his own appointee as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is so far beyond shameful as to be in a different moral universe.
Trump has been on a year-long tear pressuring the Fed to reduce interest rates and criticizing it when it hasn’t done so far enough or fast enough. Today, in a much-anticipated speech at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Powell actually gave hints that another rate cut would come in September.
But apparently that wasn’t enough for Trump. It seems he wanted Powell to actually “do” something to reduce rates immediately, even though Powell was just giving a speech and can’t act unilaterally.
“As usual, the Fed did NOTHING!,” Trump erupted on Twitter, at the beginning of a dizzyingly confusing tweet promising that somehow he has something “brilliant” up his own sleeve. Then, in the follow-up tweet, Trump wrote this: “My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?”
The mild-mannered chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, acting exactly according to law as part of a complicated and carefully balanced financial system, is now pronounced an “enemy” by the man holding the most powerful office in the world. The same man who appointed the chairman is now telling 320 million Americans that his own choice is an enemy. (If nothing else, what does it say about Trump that he appointed him?)
And not just an enemy, but a greater enemy than the dictator of a brutal, freedom-crushing behemoth, Communist China, with whom Trump right now is carrying on a massive (and flagrantly misguided) trade war.
This is reckless. This is vicious. This is unhinged. This is far worse than absurd; it’s unacceptable.
And it makes Trump an outright enemy of common decency.
