Good morning. It's Saturday, July the 19th. We're watching the fallout this hour from the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files, awaiting a ruling on the Trump DOJ's motion to release secret grand jury transcripts in the case, as well as a response

to the $10 billion lawsuit that Donald Trump filed last night against the Wall Street Journal

over its recent reporting about his ties to the late convicted sex offender.

We begin this hour with the president's ongoing war on his own hand-selected chair of the Federal Reserve.

Donald Trump's attacks on the Fed are not just about its chairman, Jerome Powell.

In fact, they're not really about Jerome Powell at all.

The attacks are about whether we still believe America's central bank should be insulated from political interference.

It's about turning one of the most trusted financial institutions

in the world into a partisan weapon. And it's understandable if you don't think that much about the Fed

at all. But the consequences of Trump's relentless attacks on Powell are more dangerous than many

Americans realize. The Federal Reserve is not like most other government agencies. It wasn't designed to

dance to the tune of presidents or follow the ups and downs of election cycles. It, like many

central banks around the world, was explicitly designed to resist the short-term whims of politicians

and elections. Its core mission is to stabilize prices and to promote maximum

employment. It does that by setting interest rates and ensuring financial stability. Its job is

highly technical, long-term, and grounded in pretty specific economic data, not late-night

tirades on truth social. The Fed's independence is no accident. It's the product of

decades of hard-learned lessons when politicians try to wrench control of monetary policy, which

influences the supply of money separate from fiscal policy, which concerns taxes and government

spending. When that happens, it can result in

recessions, runaway inflation, shattered markets, and broken public trust. Look at authoritarian

regimes like Turkey, where central banks have been effectively taken over by politicians.

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