On Monday night, President Donald Trump announced he was seeking to fire Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, after days of escalating hints and speculation. In moving to dismiss Cook, who was confirmed by the Senate to her seat in 2022, Trump sought to legally justify his position by pointing to “sufficient cause” — unproven allegations that she had committed mortgage fraud.
Through a spokesperson, Cook was unequivocal in her response and suggested she was ready to do battle. “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022.” Her attorney, Abbe Lowell, pledged to “take whatever actions are needed to prevent his attempted illegal action.”
Like all things Trump, there’s more to his action than meets the eye. Cook’s firing comes against the backdrop of the president exerting extraordinary pressure to bend the nation’s central bank to his will and lower interest rates. He has often mused about firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell in a bid to assume greater control of U.S. economic policy.
And make no mistake: This is about control, and it goes far beyond the Federal Reserve.
As Charlie Savage of the New York Times pointed out, in its May decision that allowed Trump to oust Democratic-appointed members of independent agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, before their terms were finished, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority “pointedly said the Federal Reserve would be different” and “directly stated that it did not want the Fed to be so subject to presidential caprice.”
The justices should have known their instructions would fall on intentionally occluded ears, because this president is full of caprice, among other things.
To reasonable people who have been paying attention, recent events have shown that only seven months into his second term, Donald Trump is ruling with a rod of iron.
On Aug. 22, the FBI searched the home and office of the president’s former national security advisor John Bolton, who became one of Trump’s foremost critics and most hated enemies. Reports have said the agents were looking for classified documents pertaining to national security.
The list of the president’s enemies is very long, but Bolton sits at the top — mainly because he’s a Republican and a former staff member who left the first Trump administration in 2019 and, in a scathing memoir, spilled the beans about what it was like to work for a president who is incapable of separating fact from fiction.
Trump has openly vowed to wreak vengeance on people he believes wronged him, and he has had his Justice Department open investigations on numerous former officials, such as former special prosecutor Jack Smith and former FBI Director James Comey, among others. Bolton, though, has long been one of Trump’s primary targets. The former national security advisor not only wrote a book in which he claimed Trump didn’t know what he was doing, he has continued to relentlessly criticize him on television for the past five years — and particularly in the last few weeks ahead of the president’s summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
In interviews on CNN and posts on X, Bolton portrayed Trump as incompetent, out of his depth and being had by the canny Putin. “In Alaska,” Bolton posted, “President Trump did not lose, but Putin clearly won. Vladimir has his old friend Donald back.” (Even after the raid, Bolton continued his verbal assault on Trump, lambasting the president’s “utterly incoherent Ukraine strategy” in a Washington Examiner op-ed published on Monday.) Although Trump has denied it, these statements likely pushed him over the edge.
What Bolton has said about him is important, and it’s perhaps best summarized by something he explained to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last year following one of Trump’s rambling press conferences: “Trump can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false.”
Bolton went on to say that although Trump “consistently told falsehoods” during the briefing, “it was not deliberate lying, rather that [he] espoused what he believes in his mind.”
“In his mind,” Bolton explained to Collins, “the truth is whatever he wants it to be and that’s what you heard today.”
With the administration’s action against Bolton, Trump seems to be sending a very loud shot across the bow of any would-be apostates in his orbit who might want to take a public stand against him. Betrayal will be dealt with harshly. But it’s worth considering that Trump is especially antagonistic toward Bolton, not just because of his disloyalty but because of the specific criticisms he routinely makes against the president. Bolton hasn’t accused Trump of lying so much as he has accused the president of actually believing the nonsense he says most of the time. That distinction is important — and it’s quite different from the usual accusation lobbed against Trump, that he manipulates the truth to make himself look better.
In recent weeks, Trump has begun to fire anyone who presents facts that contradict his version of reality. He fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer for releasing a revised jobs report belying his public assurances that the U.S. job market is better than ever. Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey A. Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which assessed that the bombing of the Iran nuclear facilities had not “obliterated” the facilities as Trump insisted had been done. These are people who were simply doing their jobs, which involved releasing data and analysis that might conflict with whatever Trump has chosen to believe is true. Now, the word has gone forth: This will no longer be tolerated.
It’s hard to know where the lines between lying, exaggeration and delusion are with Donald Trump. So much of what he says is hype, which has long been accepted as just part of his bizarre personality. But in this second term, something seems to have shifted. Where it used to be apparent that Trump usually knew the truth and was just deflecting or defending — either taking credit for something he didn’t do, or blaming others for something he did — he now seems to be living in a bubble of misinformation, excessive flattery and delusion. And it is all being fed by sycophants and henchmen who have created a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Some of them have abandoned their own judgment and critical thinking to see Trump as having almost supernatural abilities due to the fact that he survived two impeachments, several criminal trials, sex scandals, an assassination attempt and even encouraged an attack on the Capitol — and yet he was returned by voters to the White House. And there are others, notably those with pre-existing agendas like deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, who see the utility of an easily manipulated president who is distracted by the fact that he can indulge his every whim, from tearing up Jackie Kennedy’s beloved Rose Garden to ordering the National Guard and other federal agents onto the streets of Washington, D.C, because one of his minions nicknamed “Big Balls” was apparently assaulted.
Trump clearly believes he is omnipotent now. He’s drunk with power, beyond all restraint. Even Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal announced “the presidential id is now unchained” in an editorial on the Bolton raid.
But Trump has also become extremely insular, relying only on his close coterie of loyal aides — and apparently believing whatever he wants to believe. His bold pronouncements bear no relationship to reality anymore. On Sunday, he bragged on Truth Social about “now [having] the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had, some in the 60’s and even the 70’s.” In reality, his polls are sinking. Yet his fawning followers continue to reinforce their Dear Leader’s fantasy.
Did someone give Trump a fake poll and he believes it, or is he so far gone that he now just throws out ridiculous numbers he knowingly makes up to fool his followers? I suspect a lot of this is fed to him by his loyal disciples — and probably some not-so-loyal adversaries. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “President Trump…unfortunately lives in this disinformation space. Around Trump there is a disinformation bubble.” That could be the Russian FSB, Fox News or Laura Loomer, the extremist gadfly who has Trump’s attention and wields great influence on personnel throughout the government.
Last week, Trump appeared in the Oval Office wearing one of his trademark red caps. But this one didn’t say “Make America Great Again.” It said “Trump Has Always Been Right About Everything.” In the MAGA bubble in which he now lives full time, that may be true. For the rest of us, it’s a dire warning that the man who wears it no longer lives in the real world.
Salon
