Welcome to the beat, everyone. I'm Ari Melbourne. Well, this late August time is typically slower in Washington.

We see people come and do the visits or go look at government buildings. But right now, President Trump is seizing this time when Congress is out and many people tune out of politics to try to seize powers at the limits of presidential authority.

Trump continuing to deploy federal troops in the streets, changing the look and feel of what

was very recently a more peaceful normal Washington now with these militarized scenes.

And Trump is claiming he can unilaterally fire a member of the independent Federal

Reserve, Lisa Cook, seen there with the chairman Powell. And he's trying to tip the majority

of what has always been this legally independent central banking board. This builds on the

president's longer efforts to use partisan pressure against the board's leader,

Powell, to try to take economic actions that would boost Trump's administration.

There's more to it than that, more details, but that's the bottom line.

And the Fed, of course, is crucial to the nation's economy to try to prevent or manage risk and even financial crashes.

And while the Fed's record's not perfect on all of that,

basically no one in finance thinks that it would be better or improved

if it had more partisan interference, that's from either party,

or a MAGA takeover, which is what Trump is trying to do here.

No other president has tried to move like this.

And many different presidents, of course, have dealt with monetary and economic policy.

You're looking at two of them going in and out of our most recent severe financial crisis

in the 2008 period, separate from sort of the pandemic adjustment. That was the big one.

But neither of them ever tried anything like this. Fed governors cannot be legally fired over policy, even if you're mad and

you think they miss the warning signs of something as big as the housing bubble. So Trump's social

media post, which is new, where he claims he can fire a cook, is itself already legally dubious as a breakdown

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