Trump Fires Fed Governor
The title pretty much says it, the first president in US history to do so. More and more of his actions seem to be moving us toward an autocratic state. Curious to hear thoughts?
A bit ironic since what he’s accusing her of doing isn’t too far off from what he’s been convicted of doing
Time to buy gold
Hardly surprising.
Trump's playbook is and has been clear for a long time. Anything that he has credibly been accused of doing, he will accuse someone else of doing. Whether that is harmful to democracy or has any basis in fact or is an intelligent nor justified thing to do has no bearing on the subject. The point is that by accusing others of something he's done, he gives himself the ability to point out that "everyone does it!" or that his opponents are hypocrites, even if (or perhaps especially if) he's knowingly lying about it.
Mr Trump wants three things: the approval of men he sees as strong and the appearance of same, invulnerability from prosecution, and money. Everything else is tangential. Remember that, and everything he does and says makes sense. Running for office in the first place was a publicity stunt, which is why he was so obviously unprepared to be President, and running a second time was to protect himself from prosecution and to enrich himself.
The case in NY was absurd on its face. The attorney general ran for the office promising to get Trump on some unknown crime--this is incredibly unethical and an obvious abuse of power and she should be disbarred for it. Then, the judge denied Trump a requested jury trial on a technicality (his lawyer forgot to file some form in time). The case itself was built on a house of cards where they accused Trump of overinflating his assets when sending them into Deutsche Bank, even though the documents explicitly told Deutsche Bank to do their own due diligence on valuations and to not rely on their word. There was also no victim (DB got repaid all of its money with interest). What's more, the judge and prosecution (but I repeat myself) purposely deflated the value of Trump's properties, citing the harshest and most unfriendly valuations--they literally did what they accused Trump of doing but in the inverse.
The fed governor is actually credibly accused (because it was on her mortgage application) of falsely claiming a vacation home as a primary residence.
The case was an obvious case of fraud, because the Trump Organization stated two different values on their tax returns and on their mortgage applications. That's fraud, plain and simple. Stating that you are committing fraud is not exculpatory. These very obvious facts, which are in the public record, were confirmed in pretty much every detail by multiple members of Mr Trump's political and business entourage (including the fucking CFO). The fact that you think this is somehow up for dispute is what is actually absurd. It is possible that Mr Trump's run for President brought additional scrutiny down on him, as did his refusal to share his financials as every other modern POTUS candidate had done, but again, that doesn't somehow mean he isn't a crook.
At the end of the day, a jury of his peers convicted Mr Trump for a number of counts of tax fraud charges, and some criminal charges, all of which had been corroborated by close Trump associates, including the CFO of the Trump Organization.
I see. So the simple accusation on the part of a known criminal, known tax cheat, and famously compulsive liar is "credible" while the confession of Mr Trump's CFO and his conviction by a jury of his peers is "politically motivated."
This is why most people who don't get their news solely from Fox or Mr Trump's Twitter account don't trust conservatives in general. You live in an alternate universe.
What, pray tell, would be evidence that Mr Trump is a crook? If not, you know... the evidence from his mouth, from the mouths of those close to him, and the judgements of both judges and juries?
He claimed that his 11,000 SF penthouse is 33,000 SF and then tripled the valuation. That's fraud.
Does the law permit a fed governor to be fired for committing mortgage fraud? It appears that it does. And if that's the case, then we're not talking about autocracy--we're talking about using the levers of power in a strategic way.
Do you know how tempting it is for so many people to declare their investment property, for example, a primary residence? By doing so, they can drastically lower their down payment and get a materially better interest rate. It's incredibly tempting. Most people, however, decide to not commit mortgage fraud, and the vast majority of people who go forward with the mortage fraud aren't a fed governor.
No, we're talking about autocracy, because we're talking about firing someone because you disagree with their views. We're well past the point where we give Mr Trump the benefit of the doubt on things like this, because he has a long and (for his part) proud record of doing things like this. We all know that Mr Trump doesn't give two shits about corruption or fraud, because he's the most corrupt President we've ever had, a convicted fraudster multiple times over. He's the Spiders Georg of Presidential fraud/corruption charges.
If it were possible he was taking a principled stand to root out corruption, that would be a different story. But this is the man who wanted a known pedophile as his Attorney General.
Yes, many people do it. I don't condone it for them, or for a governor of the Fed. I have little sympathy for her. I just think that the title of this thread gets to the most accurate point - Mr Trump is doing this to consolidate executive power and remove anyone who opposes him ideologically, not because he wants to root out fraud, but because he wants to make it easier for himself to do it.
Lisa Cook is an obvious diversity hire who never should have been appointed to the Fed Board of Governors in the first place.
And it’s not as if Trump fired her out of thin air. Cook is currently under investigation by the DOJ for mortgage fraud. She should have resigned on her own.
Out of genuine curiosity, what makes her just a diversity hire in your eyes? Is it just that she’s a black woman?
Because her CV is honestly pretty impressive. Taught and conducted research at Harvard and Stanford. Directly advised the Nigerian and Rwandan governments on banking/economic reforms. Studied physics, Marshall Scholar, PhD from Berkeley. Has been involved with the government as a senior economist for over a decade.
I’m not sure what the median CV looks like for Fed Governors, so I can’t really benchmark this. But at first glance this doesn’t exactly shout “unqualified diversity hire”.
In the eyes of MAGAs, if you are a woman or a person of color, but you do not support Trump, then you are a diversity hire. If you are a white male and do not support Trump, then you are a libtard. It's really that simple lol
I don't know if she's a diversity hire. But surely a bunch of degrees from fancy schools, known for being the champions of heavily favoring diverse applicants, can't be the proof that she's not a diversity hire. If anything, I'd say a chief signal of a diversity hire is a high ratio of academic accomplishments to non-academic accomplishments. A haul of degrees is basically the playbook.
How do you think she got those degrees and positions in the first place, if not through affirmative action for being a black woman?
The issue is that the standard of law isn’t applied in both directions. Ken Paxton has done the exact same thing Cook is accused of doing. Yet why isn’t he under fire as AG of the one of the largest states? What about Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court justice, taking millions in undisclosed payments?
I’m all for holding members of government to the standards of law and cleaning out corruption, but it’s a complete farce unless everyone is held to the same level.
I don't agree with firing the Fed governor but I don't buy these 'slippery slope to dictatorship' arguments either. If you look at Trump's actions broadly, and politicians historically, nothing he does is more autocratic than anyone else.
For example people make a big deal that he wants to ban flag burning. Yet you can easily find video of politicians over the years, on both sides, looking to ban flag burning. Hillary Clinton among them.
Another example is his investment in Intel. Yet we have Obama making an even more invasive investment in US automakers, and Biden with example after example of government overreach into the private sector . . one totally absurd one was the BEADs program, where he set up an entirely new federally-funded rural broadband program for the sole purpose of spiting Starlink and Musk.
Before the libs come after me let me just say:
But no one seriously thinks that THIS is the autocratic policy. It fits a larger pattern, but this is an absolute straw man argument.
First off, it's a pretty big stretch, even for a conservative, to compare Obama's bailout of American automakers with Trump's investment in Intel. Second, no one really gives a shit. No one thinks Mr Trump wanting to invest in Intel is somehow a sign that democracy is on it's knees. Mr Trump's attempts to purge the federal bureacracy of anyone who might conceivably disagree with him, and his gutting of actual expertise in favor of blind loyalty, very much are the actions of a would-be autocrat.
No, he isn't. If you weigh things objectively then the very least bad things he's doing are par for the course. Maybe. It's everything else which is discouraging. The constant attacks on every possible institution, the deliberate erosion of trust in every possible store of expertise... all of that is directly designed to undermine the foundations of our entire system of government.
If you look at any given action of Mr Trump's in a vacuum, then few of them are egregious. When you take them all together, you see an unprecedented pattern of attacks on all of the traditions, norms, and laws which underpin the entire concept of representative democracy.
As we have seen time and time again, critical thinking is not Dr. Rahmadick's forte. Blind support for Trump is.
I used those two examples because they (along with the Fed firing, which I obviously didn't mention because it's already the topic at hand and I disagree w/ it) are the exact examples used by my lib friends when they go crazy over Trump becoming a dictator.
If you're denying those, then I can't even imagine what case you're making that he's become a dictator. What did I forget? National Guard in DC? Give me a break. I'm actually in DC right now as we speak. Been here since Monday. You hardly see the NG anywhere. And all indications are that the residents who care about quality of life actually appreciate it . . it's only the partisans who don't.
Or what about deporting people to third countries with no due process?
Or dropping a rug pull coin to let foreign autocrats and criminals bribe you?
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