'Five alarm fire': Trump attempts to fire Fed board member, inviting economic calamity

The Rachel Maddow Show

Rachel Maddow, MS NOW

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4.5 • 34K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Donald Trump is attempting to violate the independence of the Federal Reserve Board by claiming the power to fire one of its members, Lisa Cook, exposing the United States economy to the risk that its credibility will be reduced to the compromised level of Trump's. Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize-winning economist, talks with Rachel Maddow about why Trump is playing with fire he doesn't understand.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We will have more coming up on that breaking news story about President Trump attempting, attempting to fire, purporting to fire a member of the board of the Fed, the board of the Federal Reserve.
0:14.1	Again, I say he is attempting to do that.
0:16.2	He is purporting to do that because under a sort of black letter reading of the law, that is not necessarily
0:22.4	something he has the legal authority to do. But he is trying to do it tonight. We will have
0:27.0	more on that story coming up this hour. Today, this afternoon, the Democratic governor of Illinois,
0:33.3	J.B. Pritzker, gave President Trump and the Trump administration a hard shove back after the
0:40.1	president threatened once again that he wants to send in U.S. active duty troops and National Guard
0:45.3	not only to the streets of Los Angeles and not only to the streets of Washington, D.C., but also he
0:50.8	says now he wants to send them to the great city of Chicago. The Democratic mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, and the Democratic governor of Illinois,
0:58.4	J.B. Pritzker, have both aggressively and very publicly pushed back against those threats from Trump.
1:05.5	Today, the governor in particular made the kind of, I guess it's, I guess you'd say, the kind of formal,
1:14.2	forceful shove back that might very well go down in the history books.
1:21.0	Watch.
1:23.5	I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in this city and as a state and as a country.
1:37.8	If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will
1:47.9	heed, both here in Illinois and across the country. Over the weekend, we learned from the media
1:54.9	that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago.
2:05.1	This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against,
2:10.6	and it's the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing
2:20.9	is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American.
2:31.4	This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification
2:36.8	to deploy the military in a blue city, in a blue state, to try and intimidate his political
	...

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