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2026-01-13 20:30:00

The right likes to pretend that President Donald Trump is antiwar. This has always been more useful delusion than fact, but there was once a half-truth buried in there. During a 2015 Republican primary debate, Trump broke with GOP orthodoxy by calling the second Iraq War a “big, fat mistake.” At rallies, he promised to stop “using our military to create democracies in countries with no democratic history.”

For the right-wing intellectuals who take cues from isolationist Pat Buchanan, this rupture was an opportunity. These men had long recommended that the United States stop trying to export democracy and import immigrants. Trump gave them a vessel; they gave him substance.

In his 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” writer and future White House national security strategist ­Michael Anton made the most famous argument for Trump as antiwar. Norms did not matter, Anton wrote. The West was dying. Trump was an anti-globalism antidote to decline. Under him, the US would no longer wage “endless, pointless, winless” wars, Anton pseudonymously promised. He would focus on America first.

However suspect the logic of an antiwar Trump, it has persisted for more than a decade. When then-Sen. JD Vance pledged his support for the president, after once wondering whether he was the next Hitler, he said it was because Trump had “started no wars.”

But casting Trump as “Donald the Dove” was always ridiculous. In 2016, Trump’s opposition to the Iraq invasion was simply that we’d lost a war. He supported invasion in the early 2000s and, to this day, is mainly upset we didn’t take the oil on the way out. Trump’s barbs at his 2016 opponent made clear the actual problem he saw. The issue with US foreign policy was not war, but, as Trump groused, that “Hillary Clinton favors what has been called ‘military adventurism.’”

“Adventurism” has become the buzzword that MAGA wields to contrast themselves with previous regimes, even as they fight the same conflicts and forge new ones. The US lost when it ­invaded countries like Vietnam and Iraq because those campaigns were based on flimsy pretexts with abstract, unattainable goals and sold to the public as virtuous missions. In December, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained the Trump administration strategy to Fox News as “not isolationism,” but also “not adventurism,” which he defined as when “there’s a problem in the world and the only solution to it is for the United States to send military assets to go solve it.” If only the US waged leaner and meaner wars, without sentimental moralizing, it would win. This is why Trump, who claims he’s stopped at least eight wars, is now overseeing what he and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insist on calling the Department of War.

The idea, outlined in a National Security Strategy (NSS) memo released in December, is that America should win the fights we choose, and should choose those fights based solely on our “core national interests.” The document defines these “interests” so broadly—“freedom of navigation,” preventing an “adversarial power from dominating the Middle East,” ensuring the power of US quantum computing—that one struggles to imagine a reason that would not qualify. But this haziness has not stopped right-wing proclamations of a new age of restraint. “No more undefined missions. No more open-ended conflicts,” now–Vice President Vance told Navy cadets last May. “We ought to be cautious in deciding to throw a punch, but when we throw a punch, we throw a punch hard, and we do it decisively.”

Despite such talk, Trump has acted less like a shrewd realist and more like a bully. Immediately after retaking office, he threatened to take back the Panama Canal and annex Canada and Greenland. Last June, American B-2 bomber planes struck Iran. He’s ratcheted up drone strikes in Somalia. And on Christmas Day, he ordered airstrikes on Nigeria.

Then, the big one: Early this year—after military buildup in the Caribbean and more than 100 deaths from boat strikes—the US made good on threats to go after Nicolás Maduro, attacking Venezuela and capturing the president. The reasoning wasn’t human rights, or even specious claims that Venezuela was flooding the US with drugs. Trump was explicit: It was to get oil.

There were no more bromides about democracy. Instead, it was “peace through strength” with “kinetic” strikes. “In rejecting ‘adventurism,’ the Trump administration is saying mainly that it wants to avoid protracted wars,” explained Stephen Wertheim, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a historian of US foreign policy, told me. But this approach, he said, “leaves in place enormous scope for military activities below that threshold” that “may end up entangling” the US all the same. Without a wholesale reckoning with American attempts at global primacy, US foreign policy will be in permanent crisis, Wertheim said.

The NSS, which Anton reportedly authored, makes plain the contradictions in MAGA’s critique of adventurism. The document says the rest of the world should be our concern only if a nation “directly threaten[s] our interests.” But if our national “interests” are defined as being “the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country,” protected by “the world’s most powerful, lethal, and technologically advanced military,” who shouldn’t expect a fight?

Trump suggests the way to square this circle is to shrink the map. The NSS describes a restoration of “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” or what Trump calls the “Donroe Doctrine.” But Venezuela made clear what that means. We ousted Maduro over erroneous claims about national security, and to seize oil. Suddenly, the new GOP’s anti­war foreign policy sounds a lot like old GOP pro-war foreign policy—except in Latin America, not the Middle East. When FBI Director Kash Patel declares we must treat narcotraffickers like “the al-Qaedas of the world,” that is not a critique of adventurism. It is adventurism coming home.

In 2025, federal agents in military gear dropped from a helicopter to raid an apartment building in ­Chicago. Days later, Hegseth was asked, half-jokingly, by Fox News whether a young soldier is more likely to deploy to the Middle East or the Midwest. “Well, I’ll tell you this,” Hegseth ­answered. “The era of reckless adventurism around the globe is over.”

Under Trump, the wars will continue—from Chicago to Caracas. It’s not a reckless adventure; it’s all part of the plan. Until Trump says it isn’t.

2026-01-13 20:30:00

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Friday morning, the US House of Representatives approved a bill that would get the Department of Energy (DOE) out of the business of energy standards for mobile homes, also known as manufactured homes, and could set the efficiency requirements back decades. 

Advocates say the changes will streamline the regulatory process and keep the upfront costs of manufactured homes down. Critics argue that less efficient homes will cost people more money overall and mostly benefit builders.  

“This is not about poor people. This is not about working people,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), who grew up in a manufactured home, on the House floor before the vote. “This is about doing the bidding of corporations.”

The average income of a manufactured home resident is around $40,000, and they “already face disproportionately high energy costs and energy use,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at Environment America. That, she said, is why more stringent energy codes are so important. But the Energy Department, which oversees national energy policy and production, didn’t always have a say over these standards. 

Starting in 1974, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, became tasked with setting building codes for manufactured homes. But HUD last updated the relevant energy-efficiency standards in 1994, and they have long lagged behind modern insulation and weatherization practices. So in 2007, Congress assigned that task to the DOE. It still took 15 years and a lawsuit before President Joe Biden’s administration finalized new rules in 2022 that were projected to reduce utility bills in double-wide manufactured homes by an average of $475 a year. Even with higher upfront costs taken into account, the government predicted around $5 billion in avoided energy bills over 30-years.

At the time, the manufactured housing industry argued that DOE’s calculations were wrong and that the upfront cost of the home should be the primary metric of affordability. Both the Biden and now Trump administrations have delayed implementation of the rule and compliance deadlines, which still aren’t in effect. 

This House legislation would eliminate the DOE rule and return sole regulatory authority to HUD. Lesli Gooch, CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade organization, describes it as essentially a process bill aimed at removing bureaucracy that has stood in the way of action. “The paralysis is because you have two different agencies that have been tasked with creating energy standards,” Gooch said. “You can’t build a house to two different sets of blueprints.”

Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), agreed and called the move “commonsense regulatory reform” in a letter urging his colleagues to support the bill. Ultimately, 57 Democrats joined 206 Republicans in voting for the bill, and it now moves to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain. 

If the bill becomes law, however, the only operative benchmark would be HUD’s 1994 code and it could take years to make a new one. While more than half of the roughly 100,000 homes sold in the US each year already meet or exceed the DOE’s 2022 efficiency rules, the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimates that tens of thousands are still built to just the outdated standard. “Families are struggling,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the council, and he does not expect HUD under Trump to move particularly quickly on a fix. “I have not seen this administration lowering energy bills.”

For now, though, it’s the Senate’s turn to weigh in.

2026-01-13 08:31:03

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear a pair of cases brought by a transgender girl in West Virginia and a transgender woman in Idaho who argue they should be able to play on women’s school sports teams. On the surface, the cases invoke headline-grabbing controversies over the fairness of transgender women and girls competing against cisgender female athletes. But beneath that, they have the potential to produce sweeping consequences—either aiding or devastating trans people’s ability to fight back in court when state laws and school rules discriminate against them.

The science of trans women athletes is sparse and the subject of intense disputes. As I’ve reported before, it’s well established that their athletic performance declines after hormone therapy, but the data varies on whether this decline is enough to bring them in line with cisgender women.

A total of 29 states have nonetheless banned trans girls and women from K-12 through college from participating on women’s sports teams. Last year, in response to a Trump executive order called “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” the NCAA and the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee both changed their policies to categorically exclude trans women from the women’s division.

“We all know what it feels like when you can’t participate, and we know the pain that comes from being excluded and being told that you can’t play,” said ACLU senior counsel Joshua Block, one of the lawyers on the West Virginia case, at a press conference in early January. “Bans like West Virginia’s exclude transgender kids from everything athletics has to offer.”

But the states that brought the issue to the Supreme Court argue that cisgender women are inevitably at a physical disadvantage when they compete against transgender women, and as a result lose out on opportunities. “With increasing frequency, female athletes have been sidelined from their own teams, championship competitions, and winners’ podiums,” the state of Idaho wrote in its brief. (For context, NCAA president Charlie Baker testified in 2024 that he knew of fewer than 10 in 500,000 college athletes who were transgender.)

To understand the deeper issues at stake in the two cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J and Little v. Hecox, you have to look back six years to June 2020, when the court issued a landmark decision that has so far stood as the high-water mark for transgender rights. In Bostock v. Clayton County, the court ruled 6-3 that Title VII, the federal law banning sex discrimination in workplaces, also forbid discrimination against gay and trans workers. “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” conservative justice Neil Gorsuch thundered in the majority opinion. After all, if a boss fires a male worker for marrying a man, but has no problem with a female worker marrying a man, the difference is their sex. Gorsuch applied the same logic to transgender people, using the example of male and female workers who both identify as women.

The Bostock ruling was a massive civil-rights victory for transgender people. Yet it only applied to workplaces. The justices declined to say whether other federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination—in health care or education, for instance—protect gay and trans people in those contexts, too. In subsequent decisions, they also sidestepped a related issue: Whether, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, judges should hold laws that treat trans people differently than cisgender people to a high legal bar, as they do for other protected classes.

Both these questions boil down to a simple one: Is discrimination against trans people legal? It’s a question that’s become more relevant than ever in the six years since Bostock, as a viciously effective anti-trans movement has taken hold of national politics. Right around the same time Bostock first arrived at the court in 2019, Christian conservative activists looking for a new wedge issue identified, through public polling, that voters could be swayed by messaging raising fears about trans women in women’s sports. Republican politicians in places like Idaho and Mississippi soon began passing state laws that banned trans girls from girls’ school sports teams, arguing that it was unfair and unsafe for them to compete with cisgender girls. Powerful conservative advocacy groups and donors invested in spokespeople like Riley Gaines, the former college swimmer who became an anti-trans activist after tying for fifth with a transgender woman, as I’ve previously chronicled.

Not only have their efforts successfully shifted public opinion, they helped pave the way for other kinds of anti-trans legislation—targeting trans rights in doctors’ offices, schools, bathrooms, and beyond. When President Donald Trump regained office, he promptly rolled out a suite of anti-trans executive orders and instructed federal agencies to no longer acknowledge the existence of transgender identity. Now the Supreme Court is poised to weigh in on whether this stance has legal merit.

While the two cases raise similar legal questions, they involve trans women who have been through different levels of medical transition. West Virginia v. B.P.J. centers on 15-year-old Becky Pepper-Jackson, a transgender runner who has lived fully as a girl since fourth grade and who received gender-affirming treatments that stopped her from going through a testosterone-driven puberty, according to her brief. In the spring of 2021, she was preparing to enter middle school in Bridgeport, West Virginia, and wanted to try out for the girls’ cross country team. But before she could, the state legislature passed a law banning trans girls from playing in girls’ school sports “where competitive skill or contact is involved.”

With the support of her mom and help from the ACLU, Pepper-Jackson sued, arguing that the new state law violated both Title IX—the 1973 federal law forbidding sex discrimination in education—and the Equal Protection Clause. In July 2021, the district court agreed to temporarily block West Virginia’s law while the case played out. Pepper-Jackson, now in high school, currently throws shotput discus on the girls’ track and field team. “I play for my school the same reason other kids on my track team do—to make friends, have fun and challenge myself,” she said in a statement the week before the hearing. “I’ve had my rights and my life debated by politicians who’ve never even met me.”

The other case, Little v. Hecox, involves 25-year-old Lindsay Hecox of Idaho, a transgender woman at Boise State University. She ran track in high school and hoped to try out for the Boise State women’s cross-country team her sophomore year of college, after a year of testosterone suppression, as NCAA rules at the time required. When the state legislature passed a blanket ban on trans women and girls participating in women’s athletics in 2020, Hecox sued. The district courts put the Idaho law on hold, and though Hecox didn’t make the women’s cross-country team, she later played women’s club soccer. (In a wrinkle, she asked the Supreme Court to throw out her part of the case, saying she is trying to focus on graduating. “I am afraid that if I continue my lawsuit, I will personally be subjected to harassment that will negatively impact my mental health, my safety, and my ability to graduate as soon as possible,” she wrote in a court filing. The justices will decide whether to throw out the case after Tuesday’s hearing.)

So what comes next for transgender athletes hoping to play on their school’s sports teams? It’s theoretically possible that the justices will decide the Idaho and West Virginia trans sports bans are a kind of sex discrimination banned by Title IX, using the same logic Gorsuch laid out on Bostock. (Recall, Gorsuch argued it impossible “to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”) Such a ruling would lay the groundwork to overturn trans sports bans nationwide. And it would also help students challenge other anti-trans restrictions at school, from bathroom bans to pronoun rules to forced outing policies.

But even the ACLU admits this outcome is unlikely, given the conservative tilt of the court. “We know we have an uphill fight,” Block said. “Our hope is certainly that we prevail, but we also hope that regardless of what happens, this case isn’t successfully used as a tool to undermine the rights of transgender folks more generally, in areas far beyond just athletics.”

Block has good reason for pessimism. While five of the justices who sided with trans rights in Bostock still sit on the court, in the last year alone, the court has green-lit Trump’s trans military ban, a State Department rule prohibiting gender updates on passports, and a Tennessee law criminalizing doctors who treat trans minors with puberty blockers and hormone therapy. In the medical care case, Gorsuch—the author of Bostock, that groundbreaking ruling that the federal law banning workplace sex discrimination also shielded workers from anti-LGBTQ discrimination—remained totally silent during oral argument. In the decision, he joined the court’s other conservatives, who concluded that Tennessee’s law wasn’t a kind of sex discrimination, but rather treated people differently based on age and medical diagnosis. On Tuesday, he’ll have another chance to speak up about his reasoning.

In lieu of a favorable ruling, the best the ACLU and other trans-rights advocates can hope for is a kind of damage control: a narrow decision that recognizes sports as a special case in which there’s good reason to separate people by sex, but declines to weigh in on what Title IX means for trans students on other issues in school and reserves judgment on the constitutional standard judges should use to analyze laws that single out transgender people.

At worst, the justices could rule that anti-trans discrimination doesn’t warrant a higher level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause. This kind of ruling would essentially tell judges to “rubber stamp” state laws that target transgender people. Jenny Pizer, the chief legal officer of the LGBTQ civil rights organization Lambda Legal, explained (ahead of the decision in the medical care case) that such a ruling would “declare open season to continue with these attacks on trans young folks and transgender people more broadly.”

On top of that, the court could say that Title IX simply doesn’t ban discrimination against trans students—which would likewise have far-reaching consequences. “If they are right that Bostock doesn’t apply to Title IX, a principal could expel someone for being trans, and it wouldn’t violate Title IX,” Block warns. “People could be bullied for being trans [and] receive no protection.”

Some anti-trans activists, including Gaines, hope the court will go even further and rule that Title IX requires states to ban trans girls from girls’ sports. The Trump administration has taken this position over the last year, with the education department investigating and punishing schools that let trans girls play on girls’ teams. But in September, the US solicitor general filed a brief asking the court not to decide this question.

The high schooler at the heart of the current case knows that the battle at the court on Tuesday is about much more than whether she can play track and field with her friends. “I know this case isn’t just about me or even just about sports,” Pepper-Jackson said in her statement ahead of Tuesday’s argument. “It’s just one part of a plan to push transgender people like me out of the public life entirely.”

“Someone has to speak up for what’s right and defend our freedoms,” she added. “That’s why I’m proud to stand up alongside my mother for what I believe and who I am, and I want other transgender kids to know they are not alone.”

2026-01-13 07:49:44

If the ICE officer who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week is not prosecuted criminally, or even if he is, can he also be sued?

Legal experts have different takes. Last week I spoke with a police misconduct attorney in Minnesota who seemed hopeful about the odds that Good’s family might face in court. Others I spoke with were somewhat less optimistic. Winning lawsuits against cops who kill “is challenging by design,” as Michelle Lapointe, legal director of the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights advocacy group, wrote on the group’s website.

To flesh that out, I caught up with Lauren Bonds of the National Police Accountability Project, a national group that works with civil rights attorneys to file lawsuits over police misconduct. Our conversation below, edited for length and clarity, explores the legal hurdles to beating an ICE officer like Good’s killer, Jonathan Ross, in civil court.

It’s notoriously tough to sue police, but it’s even harder when the officer is federal. What are the challenges?

You’re absolutely right: All the problems you have with suing a regular law enforcement officer exist, and then you have additional barriers. There are two distinct pathways to sue a federal officer for misconduct or excessive force: One is a Bivens action—a court-created pathway that allows you to sue federal agents for constitutional violations. And then there’s the Federal Tort Claims Act, a statutory provision that allows for these lawsuits to move forward.

The problem with Bivens is it’s been really, really narrowed in recent years by this particular Supreme Court. First there was Hernandez v. Mesa, a 2020 case where a Border Patrol agent shot and killed a child on the other side of the border in Mexico. And the court said it didn’t fit within the narrow confines of Bivens. And then there was a case in 2022, Egbert v. Boule, that foreclosed any new Bivens action: Basically the court said that this type of civil rights violation is something you can pursue under Bivens, but if it’s anything new, we’re not going that far.

The Federal Torts Claims Act (FTCA) is where more people are going to get relief for violations by federal officers. It basically says that any tort that you would suffer under state law [such as false arrest, assault, or battery] you can sue the federal government for—with vast exceptions: There’s one that comes up a lot for law enforcement cases, the “discretionary function” exception, which says an officer can’t be sued for anything that he or she needs to use discretion for. Courts have done a good job of interpreting that to mean discretion in terms of policymaking decisions, but some courts get it wrong. So those are the two pathways—they’re both narrow, and they’re both complicated.

There’s the issue of qualified immunity for police officers, or even sovereign immunity for the federal government, right?

Sovereign immunity [a legal principle that says the federal government can’t be sued without its consent] wouldn’t come up in an FTCA case, because it’s a statute in which Congress waived sovereign immunity and agreed to be sued under certain circumstances. It does come up as a defense when [the government is] saying, Oh, this case falls within an exception, but they can’t assert it otherwise.

If you were to file a constitutional claim under Bivens, they could invoke qualified immunity, another protection that law enforcement officers have; it asks whether there is case law in the circuit that would have put the officer on notice that their conduct was unconstitutional. [If not, the officer is essentially off the hook.]

A lot of courts have taken that requirement to an extreme place, basically saying it’s got to be identical facts—like there are cases that have been thrown out on qualified immunity because a person was sitting with their hands up versus standing with their hands up. That level of granularity has been applied to defeat civil rights claims. And so it’s a difficult barrier to overcome.

Given how hard it can be to sue, what about criminal charges?

It’s definitely possible. There isn’t any immunity from criminal prosecution that federal officers are entitled to, none that I’m aware of anyway. I know this issue came up when some ICE raids were planned to take place in San Francisco back in early fall, with the DA of San Francisco asserting that she did have authority to pursue criminal action against ICE agents if they broke California laws.

What about the Supremacy Clause? It protects federal officers from state prosecution if they were performing their federal duties, right?

The Supremacy Clause protects federal officers when they’re engaged in legal activity, and so if their conduct is illegal, they wouldn’t be protected. So in Minneapolis, if the officer engaged in a Fourth Amendment violation, he’d be beyond the protection of the Supremacy Clause.

This issue has come up with California, too. The Trump administration is suing California over new state legislation that would create a crime for wearing a mask and obscuring your identity if you’re a law enforcement officer. And it’s suing Illinois [for a state law that allows residents to sue ICE agents in certain circumstances]. Those lawsuits have asserted that the Supremacy Clause makes these [state] laws unconstitutional—that you can’t take any action against federal law enforcement officers under state law.

Have you heard of cases in this past year of ICE officers being sued or prosecuted for misconduct?

I haven’t seen any prosecutions yet. In terms of lawsuits, we’ve seen an increase in FTCA cases against DHS agents.

Regarding the recent killing in Minneapolis, what do you see as the main path to accountability, and the main challenges?

There’s going to be all the standard barriers that we talked about, including the Supremacy Clause defense, particularly because you have so many high-ranking federal officials, including the president and Secretary Noem, who are saying that this shooting was the right thing to do and was consistent with him carrying out his obligations.

On the civil side, this could be a potentially difficult Bivens or FTCA case. I would note, since we’re on the heels of January 6: Ashli Babbitt, the woman who died during the Capital insurrection, filed a FTCA case, or her family did, and got a $5 million settlement from the government. It’s hard to factually distinguish these cases.

The federal government has authority to settle a case like that, but since the Trump administration is taking a very opposing position against Good, the woman who died in Minneapolis, I would be surprised if they would be willing to put money on the table.

2026-01-13 07:36:06

Minneapolis remains on edge after the ICE killing of Renée Good last Wednesday. As ICE and Border Patrol operations intensify—Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that “hundreds more” agents are being sent to the city—residents continue to spill into the streets, filming, heckling, and tracking federal vehicles, block by block.

Following this drama closely is reporter Amanda Moore, who puts it simply: “Yeah, it’s chaos.” Over the weekend she captured confrontations she describes as “extremely violent,” including a St. Paul gas station scene where agents “busted out the window of a car.” (According the DHS, the man driving the car was a Honduran national with a final removal order.)

Amanda says the mood is a mix of fear and fury, with residents watching arrests unfold up close and, at times, finding themselves surrounded by “masked men… banging on your windows carrying guns.” Her bottom line on the enforcement posture: “Everything is very aggressive.”

Even the timing, she notes, might be a signal of escalation. Amanda says Sundays were normally a day off from the front lines—“you could do your laundry and watch TV.” With the ramp-up of federal agents, “I guess not anymore.”

Check out her latest dispatch.

2026-01-13 04:15:47

In their swift march toward installing a kind of Oval Office monarchy over the past year, the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority has signaled that it would give the president unfettered power over federal agencies, even ones Congress tried to carve out as independent from partisan politics. But last spring, the GOP wing attempted to insulate the Federal Reserve, whose independence is a cornerstone of retirement accounts and the global economy, from presidential manipulation. In a mere sentence in a shadow docket order, they assured investors that the Fed was simply different from all other agencies, and so President Donald Trump could not fire its leaders at will. 

The idea that the justices could empower Trump but also contain that power is a folly we see repeated throughout history. It is the hubris of a group of people who think they can control a would-be authoritarian; that he will be useful to their purposes without ever turning on them. If you give someone like Trump every power but one, he will find a way to take the last one too. 

And so late Sunday, news broke that the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, over testimony he gave to Congress about the renovation of the Fed’s Washington headquarters. On Sunday night, Powell, who has tried to avoid a confrontation with Trump for months, released a defiant video accusing the administration of using the Justice Department investigation as a back-door means to control interest rates. “This unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure,” Powell said. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.”

That is exactly right. The GOP-appointed justices foolishly thought that if they insulated the governors of the Fed from presidential removal without cause, that would be enough to secure the board’s independence, and with it the economic stability that comes with an independent body setting monetary policy. But the court’s rapid expansion of presidential power elsewhere had already swallowed that possibility. 

In 2024, as Trump was staring down a criminal trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election results while running for president, the Republican-appointees rode to his rescue with a shocking new doctrine of presidential immunity. In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court’s rightwing majority announced that presidents could not be prosecuted for criminal acts that are within their core powers, and have near total immunity for other official acts. What counts as a core power is not entirely clear, but one of them is: the power to investigate and prosecute. Roberts’ infamous decision in Trump v. United States did not just protect Trump from prosecution, it gave him the power to use criminal investigation and prosecution to harass, intimidate, impoverish, and coerce anyone—even with sham prosecutions ginned up for political purposes. 

With the immunity case, Roberts handed Trump a loaded weapon. Now, he is using that weapon to take control of the Fed. Even though the norm of prosecutorial independence was not ironclad, Trump v. United States discarded the idea that the attorney general serves the people rather than the president. Further, it okayed the use of the DOJ’s prosecutorial functions in the furtherance of a presidential crime. “The Trump Court said explicitly that the president’s exclusive and preclusive power over investigation and prosecution includes the power to direct sham investigations and prosecutions, i.e., ones that have no lawful basis,” former New York University School of Law dean Trevor Morrison told me last year. Prosecutions no longer need to be tethered to reality. 

Back in office, Trump’s administration has taken the decision to heart: the president himself is unconstrained, while politically-motivated prosecutions hound his critics. You can see that in Trump’s October directive to Attorney General Pam Bondi, which he accidentally shared publicly, to investigate three people he doesn’t like: former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Leticia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California who oversaw Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. While there is no such public directive from Trump to Bondi or his longtime toady Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney in DC, ordering up an investigation into Powell, it’s clear that the prosecution is Trump’s brainchild. Trump has spent months contemplating Powell’s removal while criticizing the expensive renovation project.

Powell isn’t the first member of the Federal Reserve that Trump has targeted. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over Trump’s attempt to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook while a criminal case against her proceeds—one that likewise appears to be bogus and inspired by a desire to take control of the Fed.

Frighteningly, the Fed does much more than set interest rates, and control of its bottomless money supply and other powers could transform it into a slush fund to reward loyalists and family members and to de-bank and financially destroy Trump’s enemies. Moreover, access to the Fed’s coffers could allow Trump to circumvent Congress’ spending authority, transforming Trump into a government of one. What could be more tempting to a wannabe king?

The idea that the justices could give Trump such a weapon but control where he aimed it was always absurd. The immunity decision built upon a series of rulings issued by Roberts which embraced the so-called unitary executive theory, the idea that the president must have total control over the executive branch. This theory has been a hobbyhorse of the right since the 1980s, used to circumvent Congress and agency expertise in favor of deregulation. Since Trump’s return to office, the justices have deployed the theory to greenlight Trump’s power grabs, including his assertions of complete control over independent agencies—the ones the justices promised were somehow different from the Fed.

In recent years, critics have warned that the unitary executive theory is a fast-track to autocracy, because agency expertise and independence are key elements of modern democracies. The all-powerful presidency envisioned by the unitary executive theory, by contrast, mimics authoritarian takeovers in countries like Turkey and Hungary where democracy has recently eroded, giving an intellectual gloss to what looks, under Trump, to be a constitutional coup. But Roberts and his colleagues have plowed ahead, using Trump’s power grabs to create their long-sought uber-powerful presidency. Roberts’ opinions justified this expansion of presidential power on the grounds that the president was uniquely democratically accountable; but predictably, the more power he has given Trump, the less accountable he has become.

The criminal investigation of Powell demonstrates Trump’s insatiable desire to control the levers of the economy. It also shows how silly Trump’s allies in robes have been in assuming that Trump would stay within the limits they set for him. A thoughtful court would have surely realized that handing the president control over almost every lever of power would give him the tools to take over the rest. But this court’s GOP-appointed majority has rushed breathlessly forward, not willing to contemplate either the ramifications of their own actions or the limits of their power.