Self-appointed ‘Chief Law Enforcement Officer’ Trump is seizing everything he can
WASHINGTON DC – The US Federal Reserve Bank Governor Lisa Cook may seem an unlikely figure to serve as one of the last remaining barriers between President Donald Trump and the crony capitalism that he now appears to covet at the heart of his government. But fate has suddenly granted Ms Cook a central role in America’s continuing daily drama.
President Joe Biden nominated the economics professor to serve as one of the US central bank’s seven governors back in 2022. Her 14-year term began the following year after she narrowly secured US Senate confirmation, becoming the first black woman ever to serve on the Fed’s board. She also sits on the Fed’s 12-member committee that sets interest rates in the United States – and which has infuriated Trump by failing to lower them.
Now, Trump wants Cook gone. He announced on Monday that he was firing her, a move that completely destroys the independence of the Fed, and ascribes powers to the President that neither the US Constitution nor the courts have granted him.
Ms Cook is facing allegations of mortgage fraud levelled against her earlier this month by Bill Pulte, a pro-Trump attack dog who now runs the government’s top housing regulator. He alleges that Ms Cook falsified bank documents and property records to obtain loans on more favourable terms when she acquired a second home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She currently faces no charges, nor has been convicted of any crime.
Ms Cook says she is not leaving her post, nor does she recognise Trump’s legal authority to dismiss her from a position that Congress authorised her to occupy until January 2038. “I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy”, she said in a statement issued by her lawyer on Monday night. “No cause exists under law” for Trump to fire her, she said, and her lawyer vowed to “take whatever actions are needed to prevent this illegal action”.
Critics of the White House believe that Pulte was deliberately deployed to seek out reasons to undermine Cook, in order to permit Trump to launch a fresh assault on the Fed. He has spent several months intimating that he might eventually fire Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, whom he accuses of being too tardy in lowering the nation’s interest rates. He has also levelled false accusations against the Fed Chair regarding what Trump deems the over-inflated costs of renovating several Fed buildings.
Trump’s targeting of Cook comes at a time when the President is on a tear in his quest to expand the powers of his office. Having announced last week that the US government is now taking a 10 per cent stake in Intel, the California-based chip manufacturer whose CEO he previously alleged had connections to Beijing, he is also now in talks with rival Nvidia, proposing to allow the company to export its AI chips to China in exchange for furnishing the government with a share of its revenues.
“Trump Seems Pretty Socialist These Days”, argued Bloomberg’s columnist David M Drucker last week, noting that “if a Democrat were demanding a stake in intel or special fees from Nvidia, the GOP would be screaming”. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill are deeply unsettled by the President’s actions. Choosing his words carefully in order not to enrage the White House, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said he was “uncomfortable” about Trump’s use of federal powers to force private companies to bend to his will. Intel was “feeling like a semi state-owned enterprise a-la-CCCP”, he said, using the Cyrillic acronym for the USSR.
Trump is also testing his powers in a number of other spheres. After last week’s FBI raid on the home and office of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, an ex-Trump official who has become one of his thorniest Republican critics, the President denied any advance knowledge of the operation. But he then described himself as the nation’s “Chief Law Enforcement Officer”, a role that, in fact, is fulfilled constitutionally by the traditionally independent Attorney General.
Chris Christie, the former Republican Governor of New Jersey and a former ally of the President, rounded on Trump in an interview with ABC News. He said the President “sees himself as the person who gets to decide everything. He doesn’t care about separation [of powers]. In fact, he absolutely rejects the idea that there should be separation between criminal investigation and the politically elected leader.”
Trump immediately rounded on Christie, threatening to launch an investigation of him as well.
On Monday, Trump’s barnstorming activities continued. He issued a proclamation that bans the burning of the American flag, even though, in 1989, the US Supreme Court deemed destruction of the Stars and Stripes an exercise in constitutionally-protected free speech. The Attorney General has now been ordered to begin criminal investigations, with Trump warning that flag burning would suddenly incur a one-year jail term.
He also said he expects to rename the US Department of Defense, reverting to its former name of the Department of War. When reporters in the Oval Office observed that only Congress has the constitutional authority to make that decision, Trump said on Monday “we’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along”.
