Washington’s Power Games: When the President Wants to Storm His Own Central Bank

The cabinet meeting has already dragged on for more than two hours when Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy makes a joke that unintentionally hits the core of the Trump administration: “I don’t think Pete or Bobby could hold those poles for two and a half hours,” he says, referring to the cameramen who have been holding their equipment aloft since the start of the meeting. It is a moment of unintended irony - while the ministers joke about physical fitness challenges, the president wrestles with the Federal Reserve for control over American economic policy. Trump sits in the Cabinet Room this Tuesday afternoon, flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, explaining to the assembled press why Fed Governor Lisa Cook must be fired. “She seems to have committed a violation, and you cannot have a violation,” he says, while Cook has already mobilized her lawyers. It is the provisional climax of a power struggle that fundamentally calls into question the independence of the American central bank.

The president as master of ceremonies of his own show

For forty-five minutes Trump speaks before he first passes the floor to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The cabinet meeting has become a public stage where ministers compete for the president’s favor. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick gets so lost in his praise (“This is the greatest cabinet working for the greatest president”) that he forgets to finish his actual point about university grants.

Meanwhile, Trump proudly announces that 84,000 federal employees have been laid off while private companies have created half a million new jobs. “These are the jobs that make money, that create a better life,” he explains, as if the distinction between public and private were a moral category. The irony that he himself stands at the top of the largest public employer in the country seems to escape everyone.

In this choreographed chaos remarkable details emerge: Trump claims gas prices are at $2.25 per gallon - almost a dollar below the actual average of $3.18. He promises furniture manufacturers in the Carolinas new protective tariffs and encourages them to train their children and grandchildren in woodworking: “It will happen like magic.” Kennedy announces “breakthroughs” in autism research for September without citing scientific foundations.

The capital as an experimental field

Outside, in the streets of Washington, 2,000 National Guardsmen are patrolling. Trump has declared the federal capital his personal security laboratory and demands the death penalty for every murder in the city - regardless of the fact that D.C. has abolished the death penalty. A reporter from the very right-wing Epoch Times recounts at his request her pistol attack two years ago. “I bet you see a big difference on the streets now,” Trump tells her. She thanks him and mentions her unborn child. The costs of militarizing the capital are estimated at one million dollars a day. At the same time, Trump celebrates an allegedly unprecedented series of days without murders in Washington - a claim that was already refuted in the early morning by a deadly shootout. The city had previously recorded 16 consecutive days without homicides this year, but such details do not disturb the narrative.

While the ministers joke about their “fitness challenge” - 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups in ten minutes - they apparently miss the news that Taylor Swift has become engaged to Travis Kelce. Trump, who only months ago posted online “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”, later routinely wishes the couple “good luck” when a reporter asks him about it.

The meeting reveals a paradox: A president who brands government as the problem uses all its power to enforce his vision. He attacks Fed Chair Jerome Powell as “the wrong man” and suggests that he will soon have a majority in the central bank’s leadership. He threatens states with funding cuts if they do not enforce English requirements for truckers. He touts “Operation Warp Speed” as one of the greatest achievements of politics while his vaccine-skeptical secretary of health sits next to him.

At the end of these two and a half hours remains the image of an administration oscillating between delusions of grandeur and pettiness, between the staging of strength and the reality of institutional resistance. Trump may speak of magic when it comes to reviving the furniture industry, but the real magic trick lies in how he tests the boundaries of presidential power while his ministers applaud and the cameras roll. In this White House every day is a performance, and the audience - the American public - can only watch as the show goes on.

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