Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Trump will stop at nothing in his quest for imperial power and will destroy the credibility of US Treasury debt

 

telegraph.co.uk

If you think it’s alarming now, just wait for Trump to wreck the bond market

The White House’s push for for expanded presidential power threatens US economic stability

 

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

8 April 2025

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Donald Trump is systematically purging every US government institution, a pattern familiar to anybody who has studied the caudillo regimes of Latin America, or the playbook of today’s Putin-Orbán-Erdoğan prototypes.

It is a racing certainty that he will soon do the same to the Federal Reserve, forcing the central bank to cut interest rates into the teeth of rising inflation, with epic consequences for the world’s dollarised financial system and for €39 trillion (£33 trillion) of offshore dollar debt contracts and swaps.

Late last week he fired the head of the National Security Agency and its top officials at the behest of Laura Loomer, a fringe conspiracy theorist, who whispered into Trump’s ear that they were disloyal to the Maga movement.

He has already fired the heads of the FBI’s intelligence division, its counterterrorism division and criminal investigations division, as well as the heads of the Washington and New York offices.

He has fired the top brass of the US military, starting with a preemptive strike on the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. An earlier chairman – General Mark Milley – refused to ratify Trump’s attempted coup d’etat on Jan 6 2021.

“We don’t take an oath to a king, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the constitution,” said Milley in his parting shot.

But Trump also fired the three judge advocates general, who are legally independent by Congressional statute and have the authority to decide which military orders should be disobeyed – such as Trump’s order to “just shoot” American protesters, on American soil, during the Black Lives Matter saga.

That obstacle will not recur. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said the three judges had been sacked to stop them posing any “roadblocks to orders given by the commander-in-chief”.

You can go through the list, agency by agency, extending to the universities and private law firms, and even to the muzzled editorials of some of America’s once great newspapers: the purge is Bolshevik in ambition.

Does anybody in their right mind think that Trump will spare the Fed’s Jerome Powell as the two men gear up for an almighty clash over US monetary policy? “CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!” bellowed Trump in capital letters on Truth Social on Friday.

The Fed will indeed cut rates this year but not until it is able to see through the confusing blizzard of tariffs and the ricochet retaliation of an angry world.

Powell told Congress that the tariff shock is much bigger than expected and may set off “persistent” inflation rather than just a one-off jump in the price level. He came close to damning Trumponomics as a recipe for low-growth stagflation. That is a red flag to a bull.

The current debate over whether or not Trump has the legal power to fire Powell entirely misunderstands the character of the Maga revolution. America’s rule of law is for guidance only these days.

You could say it was ever thus. Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court after it blocked the New Deal. He failed, and unleashed tax investigations to settle scores, as did Richard Nixon. But Trump is an order of magnitude more outrageous.

Powell will not go without a fight. “I will never, ever, ever leave this job voluntarily until my term ends under any circumstances,” he said during Trump 1.0.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the administration could sideline Powell by appointing a “shadow” Fed chairman, who could steer the markets by issuing forward guidance. But this does not overcome resistance from the Fed board and the hawkish regional presidents.

A secretive team of Trump loyalists drew up a 10-page report before the election proposing more radical measures. These include forcing the Fed to “align policy with administration goals” or even to make the president an “acting” member of the Fed board.

Trump could purge members of the seven-strong Fed board one by one until they get the message. The law states that the president can terminate the 14-year term of a Fed governor “for cause”, usually meaning malfeasance or neglect.

But Trump has just abused his tariff powers on an heroic scale by invoking fictitious “emergencies”. He could no doubt stretch the meaning of “for cause” to anything he wants. The Supreme Court has the last say, but Trump-appointed justices have already shown a strong leaning towards an imperial presidency.

In any case, there are other methods to bring the Fed to heel.

Maga vigilantes are intimidating American judges by having pizzas delivered to their homes – a mob tactic to say “we know where you live”. So we can assume that recalcitrant members of the Federal Open Market Committee will face this sort of treatment.

The major US banks are raising their inflation forecasts to 4pc or higher this year. This inflation will hit before the last three price shocks – Covid, the Putin commodity spike and Biden’s overspending – have faded from immediate memory. It is exactly how inflation psychology becomes embedded.

A variant happened in the 1970s. Nixon bullied the Fed into expansionary policies, with some choice language on “the myth of the autonomous Fed” that later surfaced in the Oval Office tapes.

Loose money stoked inflation, so Nixon ordered a freeze on prices and wages in 1971, declaring war on “gougers”. It was very popular. Illiterate policies often are.

If Trump succeeds in extracting rate cuts from the Fed and tax cuts from Congress, the same problem is going to arise. So my assumption is that he will blame the symptoms and will resort to price controls.

The elephantine difference is that US federal debt was 34pc of GDP in 1971. Today it is 122pc on the Fed measure, and galloping upwards. The fiscal deficit is over 6pc as far as the eye can see.

The US does not have the domestic savings to fund this debt appetite. The savings rate has collapsed to 0.6pc of national income. It was 12pc in the 1960s.

Foreign investors have been plugging the gap. This soaks up a large part of the world’s savings – the underlying cause of America’s trade deficit.

If you think the stock market gyrations of the last few days are terrifying, just wait until Trump destroys the credibility of the Fed and of US treasury debt, the anchor of the global system.

He could order a captive Fed to relaunch quantitative easing and buy the bonds, but to do that when inflation is running hot would be seen by the whole world as naked fiscal dominance. It would set off a price spiral and a collapse of the currency – the sort of outcome seen over the decades in Latin America, or Erdoğan’s Turkey.

The end destination is a return to US capital controls to stop foreign funds and US investors from taking their money out of America. A man willing to impose 116pc tariffs – including pre-existing ones –  on Chinese goods and shut down the biggest bilateral trade relationship in the world as if it were a TV reality show will stop at nothing.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/08/trump-sell-off-is-bad-wait-until-wreck-us-bond-market/

Andrew Sullivan today: The GOP Congress has long since become the equivalent of Putin’s Duma — a rubber-stamp body designed solely to support the executive branch

 Here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(shadow banned by Elon Musk)

War is the father of everything awful

  

 War is the father of debt, and of the Navy Seal barbarians in Congress who know how to destroy but not how to build:

... a lethal band of expert killers ... the current generation of ex-SEALs, who mostly came of fighting age during the Gulf War and the war on terror, have eagerly embraced a more combative style of politics — one that favors partisan warfare, legislative brinksmanship and an open embrace of Trump. ... it draws on the combativeness at the heart of what several of the members called the SEALs’ “warrior mentality”: the sense the SEALs will do whatever it takes — short of opposing Trump outright — to achieve their objective. ... they see the objective of their mission as tearing down an irreparably broken system rather than working within that system to pass bills. Judged by this metric, the former SEALs have been diligent foot soldiers in the MAGA movement, especially insofar as they have green-lit the Trump administration’s more aggressive efforts to extend his authority over independent agencies created by Congress and concentrate policy making power in the executive branch. ...

More.

 

The legal system is about to be clogged with multiple battles over Trump's second and imperial presidency, which has deployed Elon Musk as the embodiment of the line-item veto which it does not possess

It's a strange day when I find myself agreeing with Ed Markey.

. . . “The courts, if they interpret the Constitution correctly, are going to stop Musk, are going to stop Trump,” Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Thursday.

“Article One is the Congress. Article Two is the president, Article Three is the judiciary. There is not an Article 3.5 where Elon Musk gets to do whatever he wants to do,” Markey said. “They are trying to rewrite constitutional law in this country.” . . .

Three weeks in, the growing storm of lawsuits means some of this young administration’s most extraordinary applications of unilateral presidential power could be reined in. But the litigation also conjures a scenario that no one wants to think about: what would happen if the administration refused to recognize court rulings — even one handed down by the Supreme Court?

This is a particularly acute matter because it’s the Justice Department, which is now operating under Trump’s firm hand, that’s responsible for enforcing the law. The constitutional remedy for a president who breaks the law is impeachment, but Republicans have twice shown that they will not hold Trump to account in such trials, making moot this key check on power envisioned by the founders.

“That is the doomsday scenario,” Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department special counsel and NYU law professor, told CNN’s Burnett. “So far, they are complying with all the court orders, but what happens come the day that they do lose at the Supreme Court?” Goodman asked.

“If they really want to push it, we are in a real constitutional crisis.”

From the story here.

Repealing the 22nd Amendment is a great idea, but not Republican Andy Ogles' (TN-5) idea of revising it to allow Trump a third term but not Clinton, Bush 43, nor Obama

 Constitutional amendment to allow Trump third term introduced in the House

Ogles' idea that Trump was denied the power inherent in two successive terms is an admission that the 22nd Amendment limits the power of the executive.

Is the Congress so limited? No.

Is the Judiciary so limited? No.

The 22nd Amendment is an unfair limitation on the power of the executive. 

That is why we have dueling tyrannies, one of the legislative, and one of the judicial.

The one has put us $36 trillion in debt because it has the power of the purse. The other has jammed a code down our throats from time to time because in Marbury vs. Madison the Supremes arrogated to themselves the final say on the meaning of the constitution.

The founders intended the three branches to be separate, contending, equal powers.

The 22nd Amendment prevents the executive from contending beyond two terms, and so we are condemned to focusing unnaturally on who will be president every four years, which has the ironic effect of exalting the presidency to the point that there is all this hubbub all the time about the imperial presidency when our real masters are others, a neat trick those masters work like mad to pull and pull and pull.

Term limit everybody, or term limit no one.

5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans votes 10-6 to block Biden's 2021 executive order mandating Covid-19 vaccine for U.S. government workers

Heh heh.

Story.

What rot from AP Obama: "Watergate and Jan. 6 are rooted in the same ancient thirst for power at any cost"

 "Two presidents tried an end run around democracy."

Give me a break.

Presidents are term-limited by the constitution. Even if by hook or by crook one of them managed to steal his reelection, out he goes after that because it says so. Everyone agrees with this. No one questions it. No president would get away with staying in office one day longer than the second term permits.

If you want to see the ancient thirst for power, look at the Seniority list for the US House. 

Some of those placeholders have been holding on to power there for decades.

Seven go back to the 1980s.

Thirty-eight go back to the 1990s.

Sixty-eight go back to the 2000s.

They've watched presidents come and go since Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton.

Of the top fifty by seniority, just eleven are Republicans.

Of the top 113, just thirty-eight are Republicans.

75 remaining senior Democrats are the foundation in the House of the people pressing their power hungry vendetta against the private citizen, Donald Trump. They are also the foundation in the House of the people robbing Americans blind and putting the country $30 trillion in debt.

What we have is a tyranny of the legislative. An imperial presidency isn't even in sight.

The only coup in view is the cuckoo who wrote this story.

Taliban blunders story by NBC is complete rubbish designed to absolve the Taliban: What the Taliban did was intentional and precisely gives them the cover these naive reporters bought hook, line and sinker

In their push to retake Afghanistan, the Taliban made the security situation much more precarious by breaking prisoners out of prisons — including hardcore fighters housed at Bagram Air Base, Taliban officials acknowledged to NBC News.

Two Taliban leaders said in an interview that their biggest blunder was “releasing thousands of prisoners, among them hardcore Islamic State commanders, master trainers and bomb-makers. They were very trained people, and they are now organizing themselves.”

The Taliban itself was never designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, but the Haqqani network, which has close ties to Al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence, has long held that distinction.

More. 

The idea that the Taliban is not a terror organization is a lie, a fiction maintained by our lunatic US State Department and its friends in the press.

White House: Yes, The Taliban Is a Terrorist Organization   

GOP accuse Obama of "negotiating with terrorists," WH says Bergdahl was POW.

By JOHN PARKINSON and LEE FERRAN

June 4, 2014, 6:19 PM

But Tuesday White House National Security Council spokesperson Caitlin Hayden noted that the Taliban was added to the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT) by executive order in July 2002, even if it is not listed as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the State Department. Either designation triggers asset freezes, according to the State Department, though they can differ on other restrictions imposed on the target organization. The Treasury Department told ABC News the Taliban is still on their SDGT list.

Elise Stefanik is on the side of The Body Snatchers' Donald Trump, not the one we voted for

The Trump we voted for promised a 10-point America First Plan which was ALL ABOUT IMMIGRATION, not climate, not tax cuts, not Obamacare, etc., especially ending DACA immediately by executive order and building NEW actual wall, not replacing existing with bollard fencing.

Trump ran on reversing Obama's illegal DACA executive order, but here he is still advocating DACA amnesty

Trump used you.

Anthony Bialy forgets "supporting Arab spring", which destabilized the Middle East and North Africa and flooded the west with refugees

. . . and unconstitutional executive orders, record number of Supreme Court slapdowns, Attorney General held in contempt of Congress, bailouts of big businesses and banks while millions lost their careers, savings and homes, rock-bottom interest rates for eight years depriving savers, insurance companies, pension funds and states of needed income . . ..

Update: And! And! Benghazi!

How could I have forgotten Benghazi?

Trump was going to overturn Obama's illegal DACA executive order on day one, instead he's renewed 373,610 under it since January 2018

A whopping 373,610 illegal aliens have received DACA renewal just since January 2018:

During the presidential campaign, Trump promised to “immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties in which he defied federal law and the Constitution.” Fast-forward almost three years later, and we see that this very amnesty created a global incentive to come here with children and obtain immediate amnesty. The campaign promise is long overdue, and the consequences of keeping the amnesty culture are intensifying by the day.

 

Repeal the 22nd Amendment, 2019 edition

Limiting the president to two terms when House and Senate members are not so limited increases the political power of the legislative over the executive, contrary to the founders' vision of separated and balanced powers. The executive is automatically lame on reelection as a consequence, and the Congress knows it and exploits it.

The growth of the so-called "imperial presidency" in the post-war has been simply a response to this infringement on the executive. To be sure the individual responses of the executive often become offenses in and of themselves, but nothing has been more offensive in the history of the Republic than Congress' sorry record of unimpeded theft of the American people's money and its headlong leap into the spending abyss. 

Like guilty dogs caught peeing on the carpet of the Constitution, the Congress occasionally bows its head and cedes a little power back to the executive in one form or another, the latest example on display being the National Emergencies Act of 1976. With that the Congress is quite content to let the executive take all the political heat for making the difficult decisions in extremis while posturing as defenders of the Constitution. They win both ways, and the president loses. Congress' incumbents know they'll be back for the long run, but the president won't.

Repealing the 22nd Amendment would actually put more of the onus on Congress these poseurs to do their damn job for a change instead of dumping it all on one person while crying "Tyranny!" after he acts to clean up their puddle. And that's why it won't happen.

But it still should.

Donald Trump is a self-hating fool and a wimp, and so is Mr. Missing in Action, Rush Limbaugh

Only a self-hating fool and a wimp would have signed this bill, and only a self-hating fool and wimp would defend the self-hating fool and wimp who signed it. It's like Steve King voting to censure himself.

Donald Trump has proven himself over and over again to be unworthy of being our leader (repeal and replace Obamacare fizzled, tax cuts for corporations not for working stiffs, outrageous federal spending increases, and now a complete cave on immigration, all in two years!), and Rush Limbaugh has proven himself over and over again to be unworthy of being our spokesman for still defending the guy responsible for it, same as ever.

We need people in charge of our movement who have a killer instinct, instead of the lay down and die instinct on display in this disgusting episode of betrayal and talk radio sycophancy.

Terrible Budget Bill Will Be Used Against Trump in 2020:

I read enough of this [border bill] to know that the things in this bill are a giant middle finger to Donald Trump [By signing it Trump gave HIMSELF the finger]. ... This is an Obama-era policy that has been re-implemented in this budget bill [Obviously Trump was just kidding about promising to reverse the two DACA executive orders immediately ... tick tock tick tock 2+years says the clock]. ... And don’t forget, folks, there are a lot of Republicans in on this [Like Donald Trump!]. ... I went back and forth, too, on signing this or not and shutting down [says the lazy ass without principles who could have read everything being said on Twitter on the Thursday before by reliable people on our side calling for a veto of this pig of a bill but didn't and sat silent when he should have called for a veto like Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter]. ... You can say goodbye to anything we or Trump wants coming out of Congress from the moment the Democrats win the House, over [Funny how Ronald Reagan got tax cuts passed without control of Congress]. ... But, you know, elections have consequences, and there are a lot of Republicans that retired [Still blaming less than 10 retirements which flipped for what was a 40+ seat catastrophe because Trump and Republicans failed to deliver on the campaign agenda]. ... Fifty-five Republicans quit! They resigned [total lie].

What was Trump's 10-point immigration plan during the 2016 campaign?

What is Donald Trump’s 10-Point immigration plan?:

5. Cancel President Obama’s executive actions

The GOP nominee would end the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration policy, better known as DACA, under which roughly half a million young people brought to the U.S. as children have received temporary legal status. Trump would also cancel President Obama’s DAPA program, or Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, which would give similar status to undocumented parents of American citizens. That program has been frozen as it faces court challenges.

 

FL Governor Ron DeSantis signs executive order removing Sheriff Scott Israel

Gov. DeSantis Removes BSO Sheriff Scott Israel From Office; ‘I Have No Interest In Dancing On His Political Grave’:

Governor Ron DeSantis said on Friday afternoon that he has signed an executive order removing embattled Broward Sheriff Scott Israel from office.

Governor Ron DeSantis was at the Broward Sheriff’s Office headquarters where he delivered a short statement saying he has suspended the Sheriff. DeSantis was joined by parents of victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre.

Investors Business Daily has a sensible editorial on birthright citizenship

Birthright Citizenship: It's About The Law, Not Mob Rule:

As Daniel Horowitz recently noted, the only legal justification for granting citizenship to illegals comes in a footnote to the Supreme Court's Plylor V. Doe decision. In it, ultra-liberal Justice William Brennan claimed that illegal aliens had a right to claim jurisdiction under U.S. law. But it's never really been decided as a separate issue by the Supreme Court.

So on strictly constructed constitutional grounds, Trump is right. Whether you hate him or not.

Of course, the counter-argument to that is: We have allowed this system to go on for so long without direct challenge it now has the force of law. That is a legitimate legal argument. It deserves serious consideration, either by Congress or the courts.

And that's our point. As bad as we think birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants is, any decision should be a matter of law and democratic process, not of screaming and name-calling. We have a Congress. We have a court system. The president has, in effect, challenged them to do their job. So they should do it.

If they don't, then Donald Trump, as the nation's chief executive, is well within his rights to issue an executive order if he thinks birthright citizenship represents a violation of the Constitution and threatens harm to the nation. It's his duty.

He has precedent. Axios.com quoted Trump telling reporters Wednesday that, if President Obama can "do DACA, we can do this by executive order."

Priceless: Yale historian Timothy Snyder blames Democrats for Hillary's loss

Here, on May 1, 2017, in Historian Timothy Snyder: “It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a coup and overthrow democracy:

 '"On Tyranny" is a suggestion of things that everyone can do. ... [T]he other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016.' 

Funny how he lets that little slap slip at the end of an interview about his fears. It is the great, unacknowledged truth of Election 2016.

The rest of it reminded me of myself in 2009.

When I saw how leftists started trashing Obama one year in to his presidency it dawned on me that the tyranny I had feared from an Obama presidency had been a misplaced fear. Then the stories of Obama's laziness started to surface, and the personal details about his penchant for watching sports on TV, traveling, fine dining and playing golf. The guy got captured by the trappings of the office. Only then was it clear that there was nothing existential to fear. And then the guy punted on Obamacare, letting the House and Senate duke it out, creating a grotesque. And after reelection, he actually made the Bush tax cuts permanent and fixed the AMT.

Wow. What a revolutionary!

If Snyder breathed into a paper bag for a minute or two, he might realize that Trump's first midterms are upon us and only now is Trump starting to realize what presidential power is all about. The thing is, it's way too late. He has already squandered his political capital in year one, failing at job one, which is to get the order of the agenda correct. This was partly the result of making lousy appointments across the board in the first place, many of whom have gone on to blow up like so many Clinton bimbo eruptions but without the sex. By generally being incompetent like any true outsider would be in Washington Trump was at a huge disadvantage from the start anyway. But the people who could have helped him didn't because Trump got elected in part by insulting them.

This presidency is already much like Obama's, a creation of the House and Senate, not of the president. Recourse to executive orders to get what you want but can't get the ordinary way is a sign of weakness, not strength. It shows that the master is the slave. 

Few presidents get three important things done. Trump has one major accomplishment but it wasn't the one people remember the fearless leader championing at every venue of 2015 and 2016. So far the corporate tax cut is not translating into unequivocal results for the people. As a percentage of civilian population, employment remains over 6 million behind the pre-Great Recession average.

"Hillary isn't president" is something to be truly grateful for, but sooner or later it will dawn on the Trumpists that Trump isn't either.

Matthew Continetti is delusional, imagines Republicans after 2010 "overreached", thinks Democrats might after 2018

Here, when in reality the so-called Tea Party Congress utterly capitulated.

It continued to ratify the new level of Obama's spending from fiscal 2009 onward, increased 25% overnight and kept there through the end of his presidency.

The Congress wasn't supine just in respect of the spending, either. John Boehner explicitly ceded the agenda to Obama after his reelection in 2012. Congress did nothing to hamstring an imperial president bent on ruling by decree. It was the Supreme Court which had to repeatedly rebuke the Obama administration, which simply ignored the court and kept on doing it.  

One can only wonder what Continetti would call it if Congress had actually exercised its constitutional power of the purse instead of lining up at the hog trough to lap it up with the rest of the pigs. Probably something about the tyranny of the legislative, or some such rot.

The Detroit News is pushing Kethledge for Supreme Court, the guy who reversed a deportation order of a criminal alien

The Detroit News, here, suffering as it does from a mental disorder known as libertarianism.

Kethledge is being pushed by the Republican Establishment as easier to confirm, in other words by the open borders crowd. For a reason.

The nitwits out there are getting into the weeds of "aggravated" in order to explain this away, some ignorantly equating "aggravated" in the law with "violent", which is hardly controlling. All sorts of things which aren't inherently violent are defined as aggravated by the law, including things which are obviously violent. For example, illicit trafficking in controlled substances and firearms are aggravated, as are money laundering, receipt of stolen property, disclosing classified information (Hillary), fraud (Obama), forgery, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Kethledge ignored the meaning of aggravated in the law in the case described, which suggests he might well dismiss the law in other circumstances when it is attractive to do so, for whatever reason.

There are better candidates than Kethledge who would enforce immigration law instead of try to find an excuse to get around it, which is also what Obama tried to do with the DACA executive order.