Donald Trump has spent the first year of his second term whining more about Joe Biden than anyone else on earth, but his handpicked Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, is a close second. The president has pressed the Fed chair to lower interest rates with heavy-handed tactics, and the more Powell ignored him, the greater the fury from the Oval Office.
Indeed, the president has resorted to juvenile taunts and name-calling, publicly condemning Powell as, among many other things, a “moron” for failing to follow the White House’s misguided demands.
But Trump apparently still has another tactic in mind that he hasn’t yet pursued. The Washington Post reported:
President Donald Trump on Monday said he might sue Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell for what the president called ‘gross incompetence,’ injecting new tension into the already strained relationship between the White House and the independent central bank.
During a Mar-a-Lago press conference, standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump peddled familiar complaints, before concluding: “It’s gross incompetence against Powell. We’re going to probably bring a lawsuit against him.”
As part of the same exchange, the Republican said he hadn’t ruled out trying to fire the Fed chair he personally chose for the job, overlooking the inconvenient fact that he doesn’t have the authority to do so, and he publicly vowed not to after markets fell in response to related rhetoric in April.
But putting that aside, it’s important to emphasize that the White House, as part of an apparent intimidation campaign, has been making related threats for months. In August, Trump wrote online that he was “considering allowing a major lawsuit against Powell to proceed,” and press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted he was serious about this.
Like many of the president’s other threats, nothing came of this. And though Trump apparently hasn’t given up on the idea, it’s unlikely that he’ll follow through.
What’s more, there’s no reason to assume that such a civil suit would even be possible. “It wasn’t clear what specific claims Trump was referring to Monday, or how or when a suit could be brought,” the Post’s report added.
But I’m also curious about the implications of such an effort. If litigants can file civil suits against government officials over perceived “gross incompetence,” wouldn’t that lead to an avalanche of such cases?
Given Team Trump’s brazen and routine incompetence, it isn’t difficult to imagine the president and administration officials facing a whole lot of lawsuits along these lines if he were to open such a door.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
