It’s easy enough to decry Donald Trump’s attempted takeover of the Federal Reserve as yet another swerve toward authoritarianism. He is breaking with decades of precedent and allegedly the law to attempt to fire Lisa Cook, a Biden-era appointee to the bank’s board of governors. It appears to be part of his campaign to demand lower interest rates, which is a lousy policy when inflation hasn’t quite cooled. Trump has done little otherwise to bring prices down. His aggressive tariff regime, certainly, will punish many families — especially when it’s not coupled with a new industrial policy or jobs program.

If Trump has, in almost every instance since taking office in January, shoved up against the boundaries of presidential and constitutional powers, behaving like the voracious strongman he

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