On 1/11, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell divulged (see #1) that the Trump Justice Department served grand jury subpoenas on the Federal Reserve as part of an investigation of perjury in testimony before Congress about the renovation of Federal Reserve buildings in Washington, D.C. It’s the same gambit – allegations of “lying” to federal authorities and Congress – utilized by Democrats against Republicans.
It was activated against Trump’s first National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, in 2017, and before that in 2005 targeting Scooter Libby. The threat loomed large throughout the FBI’s targeting of Trump and his campaign in Crossfire Hurricane and the ensuing Russiagate saga that consumed his first term. Now, salivating with the power for retribution, Trump’s people are throwing around the much-abused perjury allegation in the service of his policy impulses.
No, this coarsening of our politics didn’t begin with Trump. It began with the Democrats, and none more conspicuous than the sham Trump prosecutions beginning in 2023. Back in the White House, Trump and his people are eager to respond in kind. The Democrats have long been drunk on power; after all, they are the party of government, a government of ever-expanding power. Trump and his people are similarly in need of a field sobriety test.
There are legitimate debates to be had over the constitutionality of “independent” federal agencies like the Federal Reserve and about policy struggles over the appropriate level of interest rates. But this, the use of police powers to coerce a win in a policy debate? Ideologically, our modern Democratic party is closer on the political spectrum to Marxism and Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s NKVD head, and his famous dictum: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Move over Democrats, let Trump and his people take the seats next to Stalin’s henchman.
Trump clearly wants to flip the “affordability” script before the 2026 midterms in November. To do that, he’s convinced that he needs cheap money – a return of quantitative easing, or basement level interest rates, maybe forever. Cheap money absent a recession or depression is an invitation for 1970’s style inflation. A combination of Biden’s trillion-dollar spending bills and interest rates below historical averages produced the inflation that contributed to the resurrection of Trump in 2024. So, Trump wants to “flip the script” by being a Democrat, through fiscal incontinence and currency devaluation (easy money). Trump seems to have no reluctance in turning us into Juan Peron’s Argentina (an accumulated inflation rate of 300% over 6 years in the 1970s).
Trump regularly boasts about his smarts, and his opponents not so. Is he? Probably not because anyone who has the constant need to remind others of their exalted intelligence is hiding the fact that they are not. This kind of self-assured person can get us into trouble.
He is so smart that only he, and Democrats, contend that business taxes are only paid by businesses, foreign or domestic. A tariff is a business tax. It’s a tax on a business’s supply chain. Therefore, magically in his mind, these business taxes do not raise prices. Huh? Yes, hikes in mandatory minimum wages, capital gains, corporate income taxes do, but somehow a 15% tax at the port for a needed component is not. This is not smart. It’s stupid.
As of November’s CPI, inflation stubbornly remains above the Fed’s target of 2% (2.7-3%). The price of fuel has declined to mitigate the jump in the cost of living while Trump at the same time exacerbates it by inflicting a 15% or more tax increase on a business’s supply chain (Remember “Liberation Day”?), leaving aside the price inflation that accompanies a decline in market competition from the tariff wall. A smart person would know this, but apparently not this “genius”.
Obama, Biden, Harris were the American heirs of Juan and Evita Peron. Now, let’s add Donald Trump to this new Mount Rushmore of governmental mismanagement and coarseness. Were those predecessors any smarter than him? No, they just had the commanding heights of the culture to run interference for them. They were as coarse as him in their thinking and behavior.
We have developed a tradition of coarseness in our politics. Are we any better than the turnstile regimes in Latin America? One has to wonder.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Video message from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell”, Jerome Powell, video on X, at https://x.com/federalreserve/status/2010510130970849338.