Nick Timiraos

some sort of effort by the Justice Department to investigate or take a legal action against the people that Donald Trump doesn't like.

It was the first time he said what, you know, many people around the Fed have believed for months, which is that this isn't about building costs, overruns.

We don't.

We don't see that, you know, this all fits with a pattern of...

Interest rates are too high for the president's liking.

And so there are other ways to put people on notice if they don't get on the team.

There's no longer a way to weaponize private pressure against the Fed if it's no longer private.

So by telling the world, here's what is happening and here's what we think about it, it allows the Fed to redefine the field on which this unprecedented clash is playing out.

If there have been presidents who have publicly and privately pressured Fed shares, it's normal for the president to not love when the Fed is raising interest rates or not cutting interest rates.

But you'd have to go back to the Nixon administration to find examples of this kind of pressure being applied.

And even then, I don't think Nixon did anything like this to the Fed.

There have certainly been people around the president who have hoped that if they turn up the heat enough, eventually this frog is going to jump out of the pot.

Just make this as difficult as you can because, you know, you're sending a message to more than the current Fed chair.

You're sending a message to everybody that this is what you will face if you don't think very hard about giving the president what he wants.

You know, the timing of this is also remarkable because Lisa Cook, the Fed governor who's going to be in the Supreme Court next week, her attorneys have been arguing that she's being dismissed over a pretext.

And they can now point to this and say, see, look, this is what Trump actually wants.

He wants to just get control of monetary policy.

And the Supreme Court justices can't unsee what Powell said on Sunday night.

On Sunday night, you had a Republican senator from North Carolina, Tom Tillis, who is retiring, and he's on the Senate Banking Committee, which is the committee that has jurisdiction over the Fed that will oversee the confirmation of the next Fed chair.

He said, I will not vote on any nominee for the Fed, including the next chair, until this is behind us.