Trump’s Attempt to Fire Fed Governor Is More Terrifying Than It Seems

Donald Trump’s move to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for unproven allegations of mortgage fraud is unprecedented. It also raises the troubling likelihood that the administration is using a federal agency to make its way through an enemies list.

In a shocking instance of presidential meddling with the central bank, Trump on Monday announced that he was removing Cook, the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board, for cause. Cook, for her part, refused to step down and responded with a statement: “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so,” she said. “I will not resign.”

As Georgetown Law professor Adam J. Levitin wrote Monday at the blog Credit Slips, it’s far from clear that the allegations against Cook (of misconduct unrelated to the carrying out of her duties) can even constitute “cause.” The accusations are also quite flimsy.

But what may be most notable is how the attempted firing of Cook came about. The allegations of mortgage fraud were laid out by Bill Pulte, the MAGA director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who claimed Cook declared two primary residences.

As Levitin observed in an earlier post calling for Pulte’s resignation, it’s unlikely that the FHFA head just happened upon the alleged fraud “in some routine audit or the like.” Rather, he wrote, Pulte likely directed Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac “to pull her application”—an unheard-of move.

Taken with the Trump administration’s evidently politically motivated mortgage fraud claims against Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Cook’s corrupt firing raises the troubling possibility that Pulte is working through a list à la Richard Nixon’s list of political enemies to be targeted by the Internal Revenue Service.

“Unless Pulte somehow had particular knowledge about issues with Cook’s application, which is unlikely, then one has to conclude that Pulte handed Fannie and Freddie a list of political enemies and asked for their loan files for review,” Levitin wrote. “That’s got to be how the DOJ indictment of Senator Adam Schiff and NY Attorney General Letitia James arose too.”

Missouri Republican Representative Mark Alford was told to “take Trump’s head out of your ass” by a constituent on Monday as he had his own town hall turn on him. 

“I am pissed, and I’m pissed at you, because I have emailed you because it’s easier for me than to try to talk on the phone without profanity,” said Fred Higginbotham, a longtime Polk County resident who said he was at risk of losing his family farm. “I would appreciate you taking your father’s U.S. Constitution book, read it, study it, make your own lines underneath it, and get Trump out of office. The man is a dictator.”

Higginbotham went on to tell Alford that he may lose his family farm because of state and federal disdain for farmers and bias towards the wealthy. 

“You wanna straighten out the budget? Start taxing corporations and the wealthy like we’ve been telling you. Do you think we’re idiots? Do you think we don’t pay taxes? Do you think that we don’t have to make budgets? … You know nothing about what a working-class citizen does. Come down here … and start trying to pay your medical insurance.... You need to take your head out of Trump’s ass and start doing your representation of us!” 

This isn’t the first time Alford has drawn the ire of his own constituents in a town hall. Back in February, Alford was booed relentlessly for attempting to justify billionaire Elon Musk’s power over government personnel as a completely unelected official as head of DOGE.

Alford tried to soften the blow on Monday, thanking Higginbotham for his military service and acknowledging that running a small business was “tough” and trying to explain why his office never answered constituents’ emails. 

“I really want to have an open line of communication. You know, sometimes I’m even in my office, and my staff doesn’t really like this, but I answer the phone,” Alford told Higginbotham. “When I’m in the district and when I’m in D.C. If I have free time, I’m not in a committee meeting or on the House floor, I like to answer the phone because I like to hear from people like you.” 

But this may have fallen on deaf, angry ears. 

Alford isn’t the only Republican to face the music this month. Last week, Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman was booed for refusing to acknowledge that Trump’s tariff war will hurt consumers and stating that inflation hadn’t gone up when it has. New York MAGA hardliner Elise Stefanik was called a “Nazi” and a sellout at her last town hall over her support for Trump and refusal to release the Epstein files. And chants of “vote him out!” rained down on Mike Flood earlier this month.  

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker slammed President Donald Trump for planning to bring National Guard troops to Chicago while defunding state and local law enforcement.

During a press conference Monday, the Democratic lawmaker said that Trump’s plan to replicate his takeover of Washington D.C., and bring federal forces to the Midwest wasn’t a response to rising crime.

“Crime is dropping in Chicago. Murders are down 32 percent compared to last year, and nearly cut in half since 2021. Shootings are down 37 percent since last year, and 57 percent from four years ago,” Pritzker said, adding that property crimes in Chicago had also decreased in the last year.

“So, in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump’s military occupations, take note. Thirteen of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago,” Pritzker said. “Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

The governor continued, pointing out that cities in Tennessee and Mississippi have higher crime rates than Chicago. “And yet Donald Trump is sending troops here? And not there? Ask yourself why,” he said.

Pritzker accused the president and Republicans of cutting more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally. He added that Trump had cut $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs, $71 million for law enforcement grants, and $137 million for child protection measures.

“Trump is defunding the police,” Pritzker said.

While speaking to reporters earlier Monday, the president balked when asked whether he would consider sending National Guard troops to Republican-led cities and states that experience high rates of crime. In Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people, more than half of those cities were in states led by Republican governors.

Pritzker told Trump to stay out of Chicago. “You are neither wanted here, nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties, and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy,” he said.

Florida apparently has no intention of shutting down Alligator Alcatraz.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier revealed Monday that the state is planning to keep the ICE facility up and running, despite a court order demanding that it shut down within the next two months.

“We’re going to continue operating the facility,” Uthmeier told news outlet WINK over the phone, referring to the state-operated 3,000-person migrant detention center erected in a swamp and flood zone. “We believe that it’s a fully lawful facility. This is an effort by environmentalists, by the left, by Democrats and by honestly this judge, to stall our immigration enforcement efforts.”

“They do not like the deportations,” Uthmeier said, noting that he had filed a notice to appeal the court ruling.

Climate activists and the Miccosukee Tribe sued the government on the grounds that the immigration agency had violated a federal law by erecting the migrant detention center without conducting an adequate assessment of its potential impact on the Florida Everglades.

That proved to be a winning strategy last week, when U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams gave the government 60 days to dismantle the hastily constructed concentration camp, ordering the removal of the site’s lighting, fencing, and generators. Williams also ordered the facility to halt ongoing construction and to accept no new detainees.

The project, which has been described as having horrific living conditions by detainees and former employees alike, is projected to cost American taxpayers $450 million per year in operating fees. Florida’s state government is expected to front the costs, filing reimbursement claims through the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA, which the Trump administration has spent months trying to dismantle.

President Donald Trump is so obsessed with punishing Democrats that he’s pretending red states don’t have a crime problem.

While speaking to reporters Monday, the president balked when asked whether he would consider sending National Guard troops to Republican-led cities and states that experience high rates of crime.

“Sure, but there aren’t that many of them,” Trump said. “If you look at the top twenty-five cities for crime, just about every one of those cities is run by Democrats.”

In Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people, 16—more than half—of those cities were in certifiably red states. These included Tennessee, Ohio, Arkansas, Texas, South Carolina, Missouri, Utah, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.

Four of those states were among the six to send National Guard troops to Washington D.C., which was notably absent from the recent list of the most crime-ridden cities.

But while a state like Ohio has a whopping four cities on the high-crime list—including Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, and Akron—Trump has set his sights on another city, in Illinois: Chicago. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has been a vocal critic of Trump, and hasn’t flinched at the president’s previous attempts to intimidate the city.

Twenty-two out of 30 of the cities on Newsweek’s list were led by Democratic mayors. While mayors are not powerless to contribute to crime prevention, funding for public safety initiatives and other programs, the rates of violent crimes are primarily driven by gun violence, which is a state and federal issue.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration terminated 69 of the 145 community violence intervention grants awarded through the DOJ, cutting a whopping $158 million in grants.

On the same day that Donald Trump said many Americans yearn for a dictatorship, his administration took a page from the book of dictators everywhere and unfurled a giant banner of the president’s face on the facade of the Department of Labor.

The banner, which features Trump’s steely second inaugural portrait, as well as the logo for Trump’s America 250 programming and the motto “American Workers First,” currently drapes over the windows of three stories of the building, according to photos posted online. Beside it are an American flag and a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt with the same text.

The department on which the banner hangs, under Trump, has undergone drastic cuts and pursued an agenda hostile to unions and workers.

Remarkably, this is not the first time a government building has displayed Trump’s visage. A banner with the same Trump presidential portrait, alongside one of Abraham Lincoln, was hung on the Department of Agriculture building in the spring, drawing comparisons to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Un.

As Trump’s scowl looms, Big Brother–style, over Washington, D.C., the president continues his federal takeover of the nation’s capital, usurping local law enforcement and pushing a draconian military occupation, with no end in sight.

President Donald Trump’s meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took an unexpected turn Monday when the U.S. leader decided to bring up the topic of forced prostitution.

The White House meeting spanned several geopolitical issues, including potential unification of South Korea and North Korea, economic partnerships between South Korea and the U.S., as well as South Korea’s political stability, which has been on shaky ground since former President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in December.

But then Trump dropped a seemingly unrelated doozy into the afternoon conversation: Japan’s sex-based war crimes.

“The whole issue of the women. Comfort women,” Trump remarked, seated beside Lee. “Very specifically, we talked and that was a very big problem for Korea, not for Japan. Japan was, wanted to go, they want to get on. And—but Korea was very stuck on that, you understand.”

The term “comfort women” was a euphemism coined by the Japanese military to describe women or girls who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II, according to the Association of Asian Studies. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of women were victimized by Japan and forced into military sex slavery during the war, which amounted to the largest case of government-sponsored human trafficking in modern history. The continued use of the phrase “comfort women” has been roundly criticized for minimizing the harm and gravity of Japan’s actions.

The topic is still a heavily charged political issue for the two nations, especially as surviving victims seek formal recognition of the atrocities by Tokyo.

But as Trump attempts to push his numerous ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein into the rearview, it’s no surprise that he doesn’t understand why South Korea would have a difficult time moving past the abuse. The president has, after all, been found liable for sexually abusing women in the past.

In 2015, Japan apologized to the South Korean victims and reached an agreement with the conservative leadership in South Korea at the time to give 1 billion yen—or $6.8 million—in reparations.

Regardless, Lee called the matter a “heartbreaking issue” for South Koreans last week, noting that the 2015 arrangement was “very difficult to accept” for many victims in the country, but that it was nonetheless “undesirable to overturn it.”

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee on Monday sent a to subpoena the estate of deceased serial sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

“It is imperative that Congress conduct oversight of the federal government’s enforcement of sex trafficking laws generally and specifically its handling of the investigation and prosecution of Mr. Epstein and [his former partner Ghislaine] Maxwell,” Oversight Committee Chair James Comer wrote in a letter alongside the subpoena. “It is our understanding that the Estate of Jeffrey Epstein is in custody and control of documents that may further the Committee’s investigation and legislative goals.

The subpoena demands things like Epstein’s infamous 50th “birthday book” that includes a letter from Trump, flight logs, bank information, anything that “could be reasonably construed to be a potential list of clients,” and more. Comer’s committee has already spoken to William Barr, who was attorney general when the Justice Department indicted Epstein in 2019, and Alex Acosta, who as federal prosecutor in 2007 refused to press charges against Epstein, giving him the sweetheart plea deal that allowed him to continue his sex trafficking.

This subpoena has the potential to cede new information, an opportunity that hasn’t been raised since Trump’s Justice Department conveniently declared the case closed in July. Trump, who has spent all of his time trying to convince the public that none of this matters despite having a well-documented close friendship with the infamous serial abuser, has yet to comment on the Oversight Committee’s subpoena.

As questions swirl about recurrent bruising on the back of Donald Trump’s right hand, the 79-year-old president’s injury was clearly visible—without the daub of mismatched makeup with which it’s usually covered—during his public appearances early on Monday.

The bruising was spotted repeatedly during a Monday morning executive order–signing, and again during an afternoon meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung. While Trump has previously sought to hide the mark with a (quite conspicuous) smear of concealer, observers noticed on Monday that it was exposed, despite apparent efforts by the president to hide his bruised hand from view.

In Trump’s second term, the bruising has been spotted regularly, in at least February, April, June, and July, thus giving rise to speculations about the president’s health—including as to whether he is receiving undisclosed intravenous treatment.

Such concerns mounted in July, as images circulated of the hand bruise as well as of swelling in his ankles. At the time, the White House attributed the swollen ankles to “a benign and common condition,” chronic venous insufficiency.

As for the bruising, the White House cites “frequent hand shaking and the use of aspirin”—a dubious line, given that the mark appears on the part of the hand subjected to the least, if any, pressure during a handshake.

This can be seen in a video, posted by a communications staffer, of Trump greeting Lee Jae Myung outside of the White House. The South Korean president shakes Trump’s right hand, making contact only with the area around the bruise. When Myung goes to rest his left hand on the back of Trump’s right, he abruptly grabs the president’s sleeve instead, perhaps to deliberately avoid touching the empurpled part.

More than 180 employees at the Federal Emergency Management Administration sent Congress a letter Monday, warning that President Donald Trump’s efforts to phase out the agency could make way for another Hurricane Katrina-level environmental disaster.

The letter argued that the Trump administration’s mismanagement of FEMA had undone critical emergency rules, gutted essential federal programs, and saddled the agency with insufficient and inexperienced leadership. “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the letter stated.

More than 150 FEMA employees signed the letter anonymously, while only 36 signed their names. The agency has already lost one-third of its workforce since Trump entered office, who either quit or were fired. FEMA’s former acting head Cameron Hamilton was fired in May after defending the agency Trump claimed he would like to “phase out.” The employees wrote that they wanted better protections from “politically motivated firings.”

“I think the unfortunate reality is that our agency is on such a dangerous trajectory and drastic action is needed,” said one FEMA employee behind the letter, who spoke to The Washington Post under the condition of anonymity. “Congress passed laws after Katrina to protect Americans and FEMA from inadequate leadership, inaction, and unpreparedness, but I don’t think Congress realizes how many of those laws have been broken, been violated.”

Signed into law in 2006, the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act granted FEMA with more power and responsibility—but in its efforts to dissolve the agency, the Trump administration has undone much of this legislation.

The letter advocated that FEMA be removed from the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, and made into an independent Cabinet-level agency. Trump has previously said that he would like DHS to take full control of disaster responses.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem however, was widely criticized for her pitifully delayed response to the deadly flooding in Texas earlier this summer. Noem severely botched FEMA’s Texas response by reportedly failing to renew contracts with companies staffing FEMA call centers, and instituting a policy that required her to personally sign off on all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000.

Noem’s “review of contracts is superfluous, given that FEMA is already required to develop ‘pre-scripted mission assignments’” the letter stated. Noem has been charged with running the agency alongside David Richardson, who has no experience at all in emergency management, and didn’t even know that the United States had a hurricane season.

The Trump administration’s response to the deadly flooding in Texas “proved the inefficiencies, ineffectiveness, and dangers of the processes and decisions put forth by the current administration,” the letter stated. Noem, in denial of her own disastrous work, claimed that the federal response in Texas was a model for what’s to come.

The group of FEMA employees also wrote that the administration’s decision to scrap federal programs related to climate change were particularly dangerous.

“This administration’s decision to ignore and disregard the facts pertaining to climate science in disasters shows a blatant disregard for the safety and security of our Nation’s people and all American communities regardless of their geographic, economic or ethnic diversity,” they said.