Maybe President Trump has read more history than his detractors give him credit for. Trump 2.0 has appeared to take a lot of inspiration from the transformational “If I have the power, why not use it?” Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, and in his attempt to wrest control over the economy from the Fed (created by The Second Worst President Ever before Biden wandered into the White House, Woodrow Wilson), Trump seems to be emulating another effective and transformational President whom he has previously praised, “King Andy Jackson.”

Jackson famously killed the predecessor to the Federal Reserve, the Second Bank of the United States. The Second Bank of the United States had been chartered for twenty years before Old Hickory took aim at it. It was a hybrid creation, a private institution with exclusive authority to manage the nation’s economy, particularly through the management of currency, without Presidential or Congressional interference. on a national scale. Jackson believed that the decisions of Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Bank, was biased, in league with Republicans, and not worthy of the trust the bank’s dubious authority required. Sound familiar? He also believed that the Bank of the United States was unconstitutional.

In early 1832, Biddle, in open alliance with the Jeffersonian Democratic- Republican Party’s leaders Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster submitted an application for a renewal of the Bank’s twenty-year charter four years before the charter was set to expire. This was a partisan political move to force Jackson, leading a new breakaway populist offshoot party into making a contentious decision prior to the 1832 presidential election in which Jackson’s Democrats were likely to have to defeat Clay. Jackson was not the man to back away from a fight. (Sound familiar?) When Congress voted to reauthorize the Bank, President Jackson vetoed the bill with a veto message accusing the Bank of the United States of pitting “the planters, the farmers, the mechanic and the laborer” against the “monied interest” that represented the elite and powerful against the interests of the American public. Guess who had the public behind him, and who won what was called “The Bank War,” the popularly elected President of the United States?

Now we have the War against Lisa Cook. President Trump said on Monday that he was taking the extraordinary step of removing Lisa Cook, a Biden appointee to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in 2022, in what the always objective New York Times calls “a legally dubious maneuver that could undermine the independence of the nation’s central bank.” Or did they write that in 1832?

US law allows the President to fire a member of the Board “for cause” without specifying what constitutes cause. Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleges that Cook has engaged in mortgage fraud, which seem to be popular among Democrats lately, since both Letitia James, New York’s “Get Trump!” Attorney General and Adam Schiff, the champion of the Trump Deranged, are similarly accused. Pulte claims he has evidence that Ms. Cook had illegally designated both a condominium in Atlanta and a home in Ann Arbor, Michigan as her primary residence when taking out loans so she could obtain a lower interest rate. He referred the case to the Justice Department, which has opened a criminal investigation at his request.

Being under investigation for financial fraud can justifiably be called “cause” when the individual being fired has such power over the nation’s economy. At very least, an individual in Cook’s position has an obligation to go on leave under these circumstances, though best practice (you know, ethics?) would be to resign voluntarily in the best interests of the Fed and the nation.

Nah, Cook says she refuses to leave, and will fight her dismissal in court. I view that all by itself as cause to fire her. She’s a Democrat, she has posted social media comments expressing the belief that the President is a fascist, and there is a preponderance of evidence that she cannot be trusted to make decisions for the Federal Reserve that are not designed to undermine the current administration.

But wait! There’s more! Christopher Rufo, the conservative gadfly who uncovered the scholarly cheating by now-removed Harvard President Claudine Gay, also found evidence of academic misrepresentation in Cook’s work. He was right about Gay, and if his assertions about Cook are accurate, her position of trust is no longer tenable.

Nothing in the Constitution permits Congress to confirm a member of an Executive Branch agency whom the President doesn’t have the authority to fire. (President Andrew Johnson was impeached for taking that position.) That, the vague “cause” provision, Cook’s obvious partisan leanings, her refusal to leave quietly, the mortgage fraud allegations and the likely academic fraud strongly suggest to me that Trump will win his “Lisa Cook War, “even as the Axis news media trots out the “Trump retribution” slur in Cook’s defense, just as they are using it to defend Schiff and James.

Somewhere in Heaven or Hell, King Andy is smiling….

________________

Sources: NYT 1, NYT 2, New York Post