Trump Announces His Surprising Pick for Next Fed Chair: Kevin Warsh

Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve actually has a long history as an inflation hawk, not the most obvious choice for a president who keeps pushing for lower interest rates.

Trump announced on Truth Social Friday morning that Kevin Warsh, 55, will be his nominee to lead the central bank. “I am pleased to announce that I am nominating Kevin Warsh to be the CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM,” Trump wrote. “I have known Kevin for a long period of time, and have no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best. On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’ and he will never let you down.”

Warsh is a former Federal Reserve governor who worked as an economist for the White House during the George W. Bush administration. In April 2009, as unemployment skyrocketed during the Great Recession, Warsh was especially concerned about interest rates being lowered too much, seeing inflation as a greater risk.

“I continue to be more worried about upside risks to inflation than downside risks,” Warsh said during a Fed meeting at the time. During those years, he helped manage the financial crisis with then–Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, who was New York Fed president at the time and would later become treasury secretary under President Obama.

In recent months, Warsh has changed his tune and spoken favorably of lowering interest rates, which seems to have caught the eye of President Trump, who otherwise wouldn’t have made the seemingly conventional pick.

Trump has railed against Powell for not lowering interest rates enough, even pushing an unprecedented criminal investigation into the Fed. But amid that controversy, Warsh’s nomination will now go to the Senate Banking Committee, and after a public hearing, the Senate will vote on whether to confirm him.

Some Republican senators, such as Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis, have said they would hold up the president’s Fed nominations while the criminal investigation continues, echoed by leading Democrats.

“No Republican purporting to care about Fed independence should agree to move forward with this nomination until Trump drops his witch hunts of the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Governor Lisa Cook,” said Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the banking committee.

Federal prosecutors in Minnesota are floating the possibility of a mass resignation in protest of the Justice Department’s response to the recent ICE killings of two U.S. citizens.

Prosecutors expressed their frustration to U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, Donald Trump’s appointee to lead the Minneapolis office, irate over the Justice Department’s retroactive smear campaign to justify the deaths of ICU nurse Alex Pretti and award-winning poet Renee Nicole Good. In an act of defiance, federal prosecutors in the state have reportedly told Rosen that they might resign en masse, leaving the office to crumble under the weight of the unattended workload, officials told The Washington Post Thursday.

It’s not an empty threat: At least one prosecutor in the office’s criminal division has already resigned, reported the Post.

But ICE’s time pillaging Minnesota is almost up.

Border czar Tom Homan, who recently took the reins of ICE and its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, told reporters Thursday that he is working on a “drawdown” plan to scale back the number of agents occupying the North Star State.

He noted, however, that he is “not surrendering the president’s mission in immigration enforcement.”

But the way that federal agencies have gone about enacting that agenda has been nothing short of illegal. The chief federal district judge in the state declared in a legal memo Wednesday that ICE had violated 96 court orders since Operation Metro Surge began last month.

“ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence,” Chief U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz wrote.

In just a few short weeks, Operation Metro Surge has conducted militarized raids across Minnesota, terrorizing residents while carrying out what state officials have described as “unconstitutional stops and arrests, all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.”

The White House just gave a wild explanation for why Tulsi Gabbard was spotted lurking around a federal raid at the Fulton County, Georgia, election office on Wednesday.

Having been completely sidelined from the typical responsibilities of the director of national intelligence, Gabbard has spent months leading an investigation into President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the results of the 2020 presidential election, White House officials told The Wall Street Journal Thursday.

Gabbard has reportedly regularly briefed Trump and his chief of staff Susie Wiles, as well as other well-known election deniers Cleta Mitchell, a far-right activist with the ear of the president, and Kurt Olsen, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign who helped mount the “Stop the Steal” lawsuits.

Gabbard is expected to produce a report on her findings—but we wouldn’t advise election denialists to get their hopes up. Gabbard’s other so-called investigations haven’t gone too well. Last year, her attempt to prove that former President Barack Obama had committed treason fell hilariously flat.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Gabbard was tapped to look into the president’s favorite conspiracy theory, because she’s known to spread far-fetched conspiracy theories herself—specifically ones pushed by Moscow.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is leaping into action to protect American citizens by banning … something that is already illegal.

Speaking at a press briefing at the Capitol Thursday, Jeffries announced that, as a condition of supporting legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security as it continues its deadly immigration enforcement crackdown in Minneapolis, Democrats will demand a ban on deporting American citizens.

“In what country are we living in if it’s controversial to prohibit [the deportation] of American citizens?” Jeffries said. “That shouldn’t even be a discussion.”

It shouldn’t be up for discussion because it is already illegal. Deporting American citizens is not permitted under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which outlines the rules for deporting noncitizens. It also violates a 1958 Supreme Court ruling that found stripping a person of their American citizenship violated the Eighth Amendment protection against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

But the Trump administration is still doing it anyway, sweeping up American citizens as part of its dragnet immigration enforcement efforts.

Senate Democrats also pitched immigration reforms such as requiring federal agents to wear body cameras, banning the use of face masks, and enforcing a new code of conduct. But they’re missing the point.

It seems that Jeffries, along with his Senate colleagues, haven’t quite grasped the fact that the cruelties of Donald Trump’s lawless immigration crackdown are not subject to reform because they are already lawless. Instead, Democrats will continue to find ways to soothe their conscience while filling the coffers of federal agencies that allowed American citizens to be killed in the streets.

Even ICE’s enormous 2026 budget has its limits.

Landowners in Oklahoma City are backing out of a deal with the federal agency, nixing plans to develop a new ICE facility in the area after agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt announced the terminated contract on social media Thursday morning after meeting with the property owners at 2800 S. Council in the southwest portion of the city.

“The owners are not residents of Oklahoma and this is the only property they own in Oklahoma City,” Holt wrote. “The owners of the property at 2800 S. Council confirmed to me this morning that they are no longer engaged with the Department of Homeland Security about a potential acquisition or lease of this property.

“I commend the owners for their decision and thank them on behalf of the people of Oklahoma City,” Holt added. “As Mayor, I ask that every single property owner in Oklahoma City exhibit the same concern for our community in the days ahead.”

The property at 2800 S. Council road is a 26.8-acre warehouse. Its owners are listed as OKC Logistic Park LLC, a leasing company based out of Kansas, according to the Oklahoma County Assessor database.

The Homeland Security Department issued a letter to the city last month indicating that the agency intended to “purchase, occupy, and rehabilitate” the spacious depot with the intention of housing up to 1,500 people. The agency also noted the potential addition of “tentage and a guard shack,” fencing, and “holding and processing spaces” to the property.

In response, the city government recognized that it had little recourse to prevent DHS from creating a facility in the city due to the Constitution’s supremacy clause. But city leadership wrote that “decisions about land use are best made locally,” and implored DHS to listen to feedback from residents who might be affected by the center’s creation.

The mayor’s office also petitioned members of Congress, asking them to express support for the city as it attempted to negotiate with Homeland Security.

The property owners’ stark reversal comes in the immediate wake of a packed Oklahoma City Council meeting that took place Wednesday, in which droves of local residents filled City Hall in order to oppose the facility’s construction, reported KFOR, an NBC News affiliate in Oklahoma.