The Last Independence

Donald Trump, Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve

“The price of apathy toward public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” — Plato

In a moment equal parts performance and threat, Donald Trump held aloft a draft letter in the Oval Office—its purpose simple, its implications seismic: the firing of Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve.

He showed it to a dozen House Republicans like a showman offering a glimpse behind the curtain. Should I send it? he asked, with the sly air of a man who already had. It wasn’t a question. It was a provocation—a smirk aimed not only at Powell, but at the entire postwar economic consensus.

We are past the point of irony. Past the point of norms. This is something older. Something darker. The merger of grievance and governance. The death of independence. The politicization of monetary policy—not as a matter of theory, but as a test of fealty.

The president is no longer governing. He is orchestrating.

And if Powell is fired without cause, it won’t be a policy dispute. It will be a monetary coup.

The Federal Reserve was designed to resist exactly this kind of interference. Its independence is not ornamental—it is constitutional, statutory, foundational. The Fed Chair can only be removed for cause—meaning criminal or ethical misconduct, not political disagreement. As Paul Krugman once put it, central banks exist to say no when politicians want to juice the economy before an election. In translation: when politics conquers policy, money burns.

Firing Powell because he won’t cut rates fast enough isn’t strategy. It’s arson.

Legally, Trump likely can’t do it. The Federal Reserve Act is unambiguous. Courts would almost certainly block it—in normal times.

So Trump did what Trump does: invented a scandal. He seized on a long-planned $2.7 billion renovation project for the Fed’s buildings—initiated before Powell took office—as his pretext. Powell welcomed an Inspector General review. Even Elizabeth Warren defended him. The signal was clear: this wasn’t about fiscal prudence. It was about narrative.

But the fire didn’t catch. MAGA has their eye on different conspiracies now—like the Epstein file. And that distraction, too, will pass.

Legal scholars across the ideological spectrum have weighed in:

“There has to be a showing of misconduct, and Powell would have a lot of avenues to challenge the administration.” — Lev Menand, Columbia Law
“Fraud and gross negligence must be bona fide.” — Peter Conti-Brown, Wharton School
“This is clearly manufactured faux outrage to justify Powell’s for-cause removal.” — Jeremy Kress, University of Michigan

But legal viability is no longer the point.

As Menand also said: “In normal times, Powell wins ten times out of ten. But these aren’t normal times.”

Trump is not trying to win a legal argument. He’s trying to win a power struggle.

Should he act, his replacement won’t be an economist of distinction. It will be a loyalist. A flatterer. A camera-ready mouthpiece whose chief qualification is devotion.

There are names already in orbit—familiar, pliable, and handpicked for obedience.

Larry Kudlow, the former CNBC host and Trump’s National Economic Council director, is a perennial contender. He’s not a central banker—more of a TV pitchman. But that’s the point. Kudlow’s job has never been to analyze. It’s to reassure, to sell, to smile as the ground shifts beneath him. He would nod through any rate cut Trump wanted and go on air to justify it as genius.

Judy Shelton, Trump’s failed nominee to the Fed, is another. A onetime advocate for the gold standard who questioned the very notion of central bank independence—until Trump was in charge. Her views change with the political winds, which makes her ideal in a room where loyalty outranks logic.

Stephen Moore, co-author of Trump’s 2016 tax plan and a frequent Fox News presence, was Trump’s original nominee to the Fed before bipartisan opposition forced him to withdraw. Moore has no credentials in monetary policy—but he has a proven record of defending Trump on everything from tariffs to rate cuts. If appointed, he would treat the Fed not as a stabilizing force but as an extension of the campaign.

Others circle the shortlist. Arthur Laffer—Trump’s favorite supply-sider, known for the Laffer Curve, a piece of economic folk art first sketched on a hotel bar napkin and now enshrined in the Smithsonian—epitomizes trickle-down orthodoxy and is prized more for symbolism than rigor. David Malpass, who carried the president’s worldview to the World Bank, is another name in the wings. And John Allison, who once argued the Federal Reserve shouldn’t exist at all, rounds out the ideological fantasy roster.

Each brings a different angle. But the result would be the same.

Not stewardship. Not expertise. Subservience.

And when the world’s most powerful central bank becomes a puppet, its true currency—credibility—evaporates.

Yields spike. The dollar stumbles. Capital flees. The mere perception that American monetary policy can be dictated by political whim sends tremors through every trading floor on earth.

This wouldn’t be a crash. It would be a slow hemorrhage. The quiet erosion of the last institution that once stood apart. When the Fed is no longer independent, nothing is.

First Powell steps down. Then others follow. The dam breaks. In their place: operatives. Enforcers. The Board becomes a throne room. Monetary policy becomes campaign messaging. Unemployment is massaged. Growth is exaggerated. Bond markets flinch. Mortgage rates climb. Foreign buyers retreat. The IMF warns. The euro rises. The yuan edges upward. The U.S. economy begins to sag under the weight of unreality.

This isn’t speculative fiction. It’s already rippling outward. Just this week, Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, praised Powell as “the standard of the courageous central banker.” Stefan Ingves, former head of Sweden’s Riksbank, called Trump’s moves “deeply worrisome.” The shock is already international.

Look to Hungary. Look to Turkey. When central banks lose independence, the result is always the same: inflation, capital flight, sovereign downgrade, and recession.

Markets don’t care about ideology. They care about risk.

And a politicized Fed is the ultimate risk.

So Frankfurt watches. Lagarde speaks. And Beijing acts. The digital yuan expands into trade financing. Brazil signs on. Kenya follows. Then Malaysia. Riyadh sells oil in euros.

What is lost is not just credibility—it is primacy.

And what of public opinion?

Trump’s approval hovers below 45 percent. His disapproval crests over 50. But the base is unmoved. The party is silent. The institutions buckle.

Most Americans don’t track or understand the Fed. But they feel its effects—on mortgages, inflation, jobs. They may not see this as a coup.

But that’s what it is.

And the consolidation is now complete.

Trump doesn’t want to manage interest rates. He wants to own them. He has neutered the courts, subdued the DOJ, weaponized immigration. Now he comes for money itself.

There are no referees left. Only instruments. Every bailout flows through him. Every crash is his to cause—or to exploit.

He has seized the pen that writes the future. And what he writes is no longer constrained by fact, law, or custom. It is the script of an emperor.

---

I just got back from a beach vacation. One afternoon, I sat back and watched children build sandcastles—fragile, beautiful things made of care and imagination. They worked patiently, passing buckets, smoothing towers, defending their little creations against wind and tide.

And then came that kid. There’s always one.

The one who doesn’t build. Who doesn’t plan. Who doesn’t care. Who waits until the walls are almost perfect—then sprints in with glee and stomps them into ruin.

Donald Trump was that kid. Only now, the sandcastle is the American state.

The question is no longer can he?

It’s who will stop him?

---

Coda

“The Big Money” - Rush

Rush’s The Big Money is often heard as a critique of capitalism’s excesses, a high-speed ride through the corridors of finance and influence. But when monetary policy is no longer a neutral tool, but a weapon in the hands of an authoritarian—the song becomes something darker. Something prophetic.

“Big money goes around the world / Big money underground / Big money got a mighty voice / Big money make no sound…”

These opening lines encapsulate the dual nature of Trump’s monetary war: it is loud in threat, silent in consequence. His letter to Powell is performance. His grip on the Fed is subterranean. The big money make no sound—until the foundations begin to quake. Until the dollar is no longer trusted. Until the institutions fall.

In Geddy Lee’s icy vocal delivery and Neil Peart’s precise, almost surgical drumming, you feel the tension: that money is no longer simply traded or earned. It is manipulated, mythologized, conscripted into spectacle.

“Big money got a mean streak / Big money got no soul…”

There is no soul in the dismissal of Powell—only power. There is no soul in replacing stewards with sycophants. Kudlow, Shelton, Moore, Laffer—these are not policymakers, they are avatars of devotion. They are performers on Trump’s stage, actors in the monetary theater.

“It’s the power and the glory / It’s a war in paradise…”

Trump doesn’t just want control of the Fed. He wants the appearance of inevitability, the pageantry of conquest. That’s the “glory.” But it is a war in paradise—because monetary independence, while imperfect, was one of the last functioning checks. It was the sandcastle the children were still building.

“The big money isn’t open arms / Or the people’s choice…”

The new Fed, under Trump’s thumb, won’t be democratic. It won’t be deliberative. It will not be the people’s bank. It will be his.

“Big money pull a million strings / Big money hold the prize…”

And there’s the core. The final check turned blank. He controls immigration. He controls the courts. And now he wants to control the very levers of credit and capital. When Trump fires Powell, he isn’t just making a personnel change. He is seizing the prize: the power to pull every string in the American economic system.

Rush, in their laser-focused, technocratic way, laid the blueprint for what happens when power escapes its ethical constraints. When big money—amoral, mobile, untethered—becomes a sovereign force.

This is what happens when that force gets a name, a face, a signature on the dotted line.

---

“Different Trains: America-Before the War” - Steve Reich

If The Big Money is about control, Different Trains is about consequence.

Steve Reich’s 1988 composition for string quartet and tape, built around the haunting juxtaposition of American train travel and Holocaust transports, creates a music of memory—fragmented, repetitive, insistent. It begins with innocence: train whistles, porters, children’s voices. And then it fractures into dread. Voices from survivors. Screeching brakes. The rhythm becomes mechanical, brutal. You begin to feel that something once hopeful—mobility, progress, speed—has been weaponized by history.

In 2025, the American state is being crushed not by accident, but by design. Reich’s piece offers the spiritual framework for understanding what that loss sounds like—not just institutionally, but emotionally. It’s a requiem for a system that was supposed to carry people forward, but instead delivered them to ruin.

“From Chicago to New York…”
“From New York to Los Angeles…”
“And in Europe, very different trains…”

The repetition, the cadence, the loops—all echo the machinery of governance turned hollow. Now, the Fed becomes a puppet. In Different Trains, the trains become instruments of fate. One set carries American children across states. The other carries European children to death camps.

And that’s the silent terror inside today’s story: two republics, two different trains. One that still believes in economic guardrails and legal process, however flawed. And one that no longer bothers with pretense. One that still builds. And one that stomps.

Trump doesn’t fire Powell for strategy. He fires him to break the spell of rules. And that’s when we switch tracks. That’s when the rhythmic hum of democratic process becomes the scream of emergency brakes. The train is still moving. But we no longer know where it’s going—or who’s driving it.

In Reich’s music, there’s no climax. Just motion and memory. It’s not a march. It’s a dirge made of speed. The very sound of a civilized nation forgetting what it promised itself.

What we are witnessing isn’t just political change. It’s civilizational reprogramming. A shift from conscience to calculation. From transparency to threat. From public service to private empire.

And like Reich’s strings, the warning signs repeat—not because we haven’t heard them, but because we refuse to listen until the doors have locked and the tracks are set.