National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) President and CEO Jesse Van Tol released the following statement on President Donald Trump’s attempted firing of Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board:
On the one hand, it’s a shocking development for any American president to undermine the Fed’s independence and subvert the laws that protect its work from the turmoil of politics. That’s the stuff of tin-pot dictators and banana republic autocrats. But for this president, who has consistently targeted Black leaders and achievers for demotion and degradation throughout his time on the national stage, attempting to illegally fire Lisa Cook is all too predictable.
Dr. Cook deserves due process like anyone else. She also deserves recognition for her incredible achievements, rising to one of the most important jobs in American economics despite being born into the deprivations and violence of Georgia in the 1960s.
Let’s be clear: This is not about Dr. Cook, not really. President Trump is desperate to expand his own personal power past all lines drawn up in our laws and founding documents, especially where trained professionals attempting to exercise sound policy judgment come to decisions that displease him. He wants the Fed at his beck and call, but rightly fears how markets, employers and trade partners will react to sabotage of the central bank’s firmly codified independence. This is a trial balloon of sorts, an experiment to see whether he can get away with yet another assault on the traditions and institutions that made America the world’s haven. That he chooses to do so by targeting the only Black woman to ever serve in Dr. Cook’s role – rather than by trying to illegally fire the Chairman, as he has repeatedly hinted he might – says infinitely more about the president than it does about her.
you are absolutely right, he wants to be a dictator for sure.