To execute his authoritarian takeover, President Donald Trump requires the devoted service of willing accomplices. He needs loyalists in strategic positions who will bend or break the law to carry out his designs, from unleashing state-sponsored retribution against enemies to illegally renditioning people to foreign gulags to occupying American cities with U.S. troops.
Trump, plainly, has become newly emboldened in recent days. But another thing that makes this moment so ominous is that his accomplices also appear to be newly emboldened. They are acting freshly unconstrained—brashly, arrogantly certain they will never face accountability no matter what they do to carry out Trump’s corrupt bidding.
Case in point: Trump’s appalling new effort to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s board of governors. On Monday night his anger at Cook peaked as he announced that he’s removing Cook—who has infuriated him for months by helping to keep interest rates higher than he wants—essentially declaring Fed independence a dead letter.
Yet this maneuver may yet backfire on Trump—in part because the accomplices helping carry it out have grown almost absurdly brazen in doing so.
The move appears to be illegal, though Trump may still get away with it. The law allows a president to remove a Fed board member “for cause,” which has generally meant something like a real reason grounded in actual misconduct, not a fake reason that the president pulled out of his rear end.
But Trump’s letter firing Cook claims he can do this for cause “at my discretion,” meaning he gets to declare something “cause” by simply saying so, as The New York Times’s Charlie Savage notes. The courts will decide whether the executive power includes this nearly limitless authority, and while Supreme Court precedent here is complex, a win for Trump is not at all assured.
Enter Trump’s accomplices. The “cause” he cited is the charge that Cook committed mortgage fraud, a claim manufactured for him by William Pulte, a staunch Trump loyalist who heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees mortgage markets. Pulte tweeted “findings” that Cook has fraudulently declared several principal or primary residences for mortgage purposes.
Tellingly, Pulte has done a similar maneuver for other Trump foes like Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both Democrats. They’ve all denied wrongdoing, but all three have been referred to the Justice Department for prosecution.
The real question this raises is: Why is Pulte scrutinizing mortgages that just happen to belong to many high-profile opponents of Trump, and how did he come to select these targets? Experts recently told me that this use of the FHFA mortgage-fraud process appears highly suspect at best. When a Washington Post reporter asked FHFA to identify the procedural basis for Pulte to single out these targets, she received no answer.
Pulte is apparently manipulating agency processes for the express purpose of creating a pretext for referring matters involving Trump’s designated enemies to DOJ. As Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin points out, it’s probable that the only way the mortgages of three leading Trump foes could all face scrutiny is if Pulte personally ordered it. That’s an “abuse of office,” Levitin writes, and a “far greater offense” than anything Cook, Schiff, or James might have done.
Indeed, Pulte should be pressed on whether the White House was directly involved in the decision to single out those three for examination. Did someone in the White House direct Pulte to target them—and others in the future as well? Did the White House ask Pulte to search these mortgages for a pretext for DOJ referrals? If not, has the White House at least tacitly blessed Pulte’s moves? It’s hard to imagine something of this magnitude proceeding without White House approval.
Guess what: We may soon learn more on this front. Cook just announced that she’s suing to challenge her firing, and people with experience in mortgage law and governance tell me that Cook’s lawyer, well-known D.C. attorney Abbe Lowell, has a major opening in the coming litigation. He can use the discovery process to shed light on why Pulte targeted these mortgages and on any White House involvement in that.
“I’d be highly confident that Abbe is going to explore every avenue of discovery to determine what role, if any, the White House played in instigating this investigation,” Benjamin Klubes, a former acting general counsel at HUD and now a white-collar criminal defense attorney in D.C., told me. Notably, Lowell is also James’s attorney, so he’ll have two avenues to explore. “Abbe will definitely focus on Pulte’s role to determine how and why he chose these targets,” Klubes said.
If and when all this becomes the story—when Pulte’s misconduct and any White House involvement in it gets flushed out into the open—it may suddenly start looking very different from what Trump hoped.
We’re seeing a deepening sense of impunity among many of Trump’s willing accomplices. Pulte’s posting of these internal “findings” about senior officials on social media itself suggests that he feels thoroughly unconstrained. Stephen Miller recently responded to protests of U.S. troops in Washington, D.C., by arrogantly threatening to send in more military and/or law enforcement resources, in direct defiance of the city’s residents. The maltreatment of wrongfully-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia relied on vile and corrupt public conduct by many senior DOJ and Department of Homeland Security officials, which is only getting more brazen.
Scholars of authoritarianism tell us that the existence of cadres of willing accomplices who are not just eager to bend or break laws to carry out the leader’s designs, but also come to see themselves as utterly unconstrained by any prospect of accountability, is itself a telltale sign of descent.
“The loyalists around Trump are much more open and much bolder in their authoritarianism than they were six months ago, because they’ve learned fight by fight that they can get away with it,” Harvard professor Steven Levitsky told me. “So we’re in a very dangerous moment.”
Democrats should be making it absolutely clear, right now, that anyone who carries out corrupt or illegal orders for Trump cannot count on bureaucratic obscurity to shield them from political or legal accountability later. Yes, Trump might preemptively pardon top officials who are legally vulnerable. But Democrats should pointedly pose the question: Do you really think it’s wise to count on Donald Trump to secure you from jeopardy later?