Every day, President Trump grows bolder.
We can all feel it. Each news cycle brings a claim of authority or an exercise of power that would have once shocked the country. Now, Trump’s presidential radicalism and his open scorn for our laws and traditions barely register.
Last week began with President Trump declaring that the United States had “taken over” the sovereign nation of Venezuela and that he would personally oversee the distribution of its oil revenues. Congress is shut out of participation in this adventure, despite the clear commands of the Constitution. But not a peep from the Republican leaders of the legislative branch—just more submission.
The week ended with the killing of Renee Good by one of the ICE operations that increasingly resemble the activity of a new national police force in America—masked, militarized, and operating with little visible restraint and a swaggering, unprofessional contempt for the people of the communities they descend upon, all of which are governed by the president’s political opponents.
This week opens with two more consequential steps along the same road.
Step One: The Federal Reserve
The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, nominally over renovations to the Fed’s headquarters in Washington. But Powell’s unusually direct public statement made clear what this is actually about. He is being punished by Trump for refusing to bend US monetary policy to presidential will.
Jerome Powell is not a fiery individual or radical rabble-rouser. He’s a banker and a bureaucrat. But he sounded defiant in his statement last night. It made his remarks more ominous.
Congress purposefully insulated the Federal Reserve from political pressure for a reason. Presidents have strong incentives to juice the economy before elections. Independent central banks exist to resist that temptation—to set interest rates based on evidence, for the good of the national economy, not the political desires of the president.
What we are now witnessing is a very old story. Autocrats everywhere see that if they control the central bank, they control the economy’s pulse. Every nationalist strongman, tinpot dictator, or corrupt caudillo wants easy money. That’s because easy money produces a sugar high in the economy—rapid growth, soaring markets, political applause. But as John Maynard Keynes warned, “debauching the currency” is also the surest way to undermine an economy. Inflation inevitably follows, and then savings disappear, inequality deepens, and dependence on the state grows.
That is why presidential pressure on the Fed is never just about interest rates. It is about power.
Jerome Powell said it plainly: the threat of criminal charges from Trump’s Department of Justice is a consequence of the Federal Reserve doing its job. That statement alone should stop Americans cold.
Prosecutors investigating a central bank chair because the president dislikes monetary policy is not normal politics. It is another alarm bell. We need to wake up, or something very much like this could happen:
SIDEBAR: How Autocrats Break Central Banks
In the early 2010s, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, began publicly attacking his country’s central bank for keeping interest rates “too high.”
When Erdogan’s criticism didn’t work, he had prosecutors open investigations into bank officials. Governors of the institution were fired, and its hard-won independence collapsed.
The result was predictable. Inflation soared above 70 percent. Savings were wiped out. The middle class shrank. Political power flowed upward as citizens became dependent on cronyism and staying in the state’s good graces to survive.
Economists warned at every step. Erdoğan ignored them—and consolidated power anyway.
He still has it.
Control the central bank, and you don’t just control money. You control the future.
The United States is not Turkey. But institutions fail the same way everywhere: Pressure; political apathy; abject party obedience; civic confusion; autocratic control; corruption; mission failure.
Step Two: Elections
In an interview with The New York Times last week, President Trump admitted he wanted to use the military to stop the counting of votes in the 2020 election.
Read that sentence again.
Trump said he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines after his loss in the 2020 election. He questioned whether the Guard would have been “sophisticated enough” to uncover what he continues to claim was massive fraud.
Then on Saturday, Trump was asked by reporters about the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota and whether the FBI would share evidence in the case with state investigators. Trump gave a perfunctory answer, then said this:
“It’s a very corrupt state. I feel that I won Minnesota. I think I won it all three times…I did so well in that state every time. The people were crying every time. After that, it’s a crooked state. California is a crooked state. Many crooked states. We have a very, very dishonest voting system.”
On the face of it, Trump’s claims are insane. He lost Minnesota fair and square three times by 44,593, 233,012, and 137,947 votes. He lost. We all know his fragile ego cannot bear that arithmetic, so he lies.
But this is second-term Trump. He is not musing. He is setting his administration’s policy: Only elections he wins will henceforth be recognized as legitimate.
Our Constitution places primary responsibility for managing elections with the states (they weren’t stupid, the Framers). Because of that anti-authoritarian electoral structure, we have in practice and in law fifty separate elections for federal offices. It’s hard to seize control of them.
But Trump is already trying to rewire the machinery of our elections,: executive orders expanding federal authority over voting systems, Justice Department retrenchment from voting-rights enforcement, demands for state voter-registration lists, and repeated flirtations with deploying the military or federalized National Guard units in the name of “law and order.”
Add to this the transformation of ICE into a roving, heavily armed domestic force disproportionately deployed in Democratic areas, and the pattern is no longer subtle.
Control the money. Control the force. Control the vote. These are the essential strategic moves of authoritarian rule in the 21st Century.
So what do we do?
Each us have the same primary assignment. The fundamental task of journalists and citizens today is to see what is directly in front of us and name it.
Most Republicans, and all of MAGA, refuse to do this. They avert their eyes or wrap each new escalation in procedural excuses, comforting verbiage. But polls show there is increasing anxiety about the direction Trump is taking the country—and the democracy—and so there will be increasing opportunities to join with disaffected Trump voters.
Can’t imagine ever doing such a thing? We are still Americans. It can happen—and must happen. And remember: Winning political movements make converts. Losing political movements hunt heretics and burn witches.
The first step in defending a free society is the hardest: open your eyes. See the truth. Say it. Then put your shoulder to the wheel.
—Terry