recove recovery. when people say nothing matters, he still has 40% approval, the economy does matter for how people think about the politics of the presidency. yeah, the economy does matter and the point i was trying to make is you can make an argument for what trump is saying about interest rates. you can make a decent case that we need to keep interest rates low because the economy is soft and has a lot of room to grow. but if you make that case, it totally undermines everything he s been saying in public about how this is the greatest economy ever. so it s kind of clear he doesn t believe what he s been saying for the last two years. right. the idea being if the economy and the recovery are so robust, that then it can take a few it can take a few fed rate hikes because it s strong and it will keep going. but if you re freaking about that it shows that you actually think the economy is actually kind of weak and vulnerable. right. now, of course, we can t put it past trump to
together. the other thing, if i may-s that janet yellen would have been a lot less likely to raise rates than jay powell. and trump made the choice to not reappoint janet yellen because the washington post reported he thought she was too short. she s 5 3 , and therefore he wanted someone taller. that s what the washington post reported. so if he wanted someone who wasn t going to raise rates, he could have stuck with janet yellen, but he didn t. it s honestly one of the most insane and delicious ironies in a sort of macabre sense of this era that the first woman to ever run the fed reserve board, who did an incredibly good job i think by and large, who actually is sort of sympathetic to the dovish inclination that s trump naturally has, gets canned because she s, quote, too short, replaced with a guy who, jon, trump is now railing against in public in a way that to play the if obama this done game is a bright line toward dictatorship that conservatives tend to freak out about.
it s sort of like markets 101. but i think, you know, it s sort of funny to laugh at mnuchin. but he s sort of your classic wall street guy. this is someone who came from goldman sachs. he ran this bank called one west. he foreclosed on 50,000 people. and i would actually argue that some of this market jitters and volatility is like the direct by-product of the policy that awful these wall street bankers that trump chose to fill his administration with have been making. right? they deregulated a huge portion of the dodd frank act which was passed after the last crisis. janet yellen, the former fed chair, has been warning about the debt markets overheating for corporate debt. like they ve been making policy choices to let wall street run wild. and when wall street runs wild they get reckless and that s dangerous and can lead to crises. that s a very good point. we have of course seen this before. jon, you wrote a piece about this sort of the economy and the president s political for
rather than listening to the traditional republican voices who almost got him to keep the government open, at the last moment, trump changed. one thing i can tell you is part of the calculation that people in that orbit and close allies of the president are making is if this shutdown goes on through the beginning of nancy pelosi s ascent to the speakership, their hope is it will have the effect of her overshad e doing of her taking that role and shifting the conversation away and toward donald trump s favorite topic, which is, of course, the wall. that s remarkably cynical. but now we have ann coulter as the jimny cricket of donald trump who wants a white christmas. we saw it in the midterm election. he doubled down while unemployment was at 3.7% and there was job growth and he doubled down on the caravan story. terrorists, rapists, invasion,
kind of a nihilism to what trump is doing. he feels cornered, chris. he has these scandals closing in. he s not going to pass any legislation with a democratic house. and my concern is that he burns down the house with him as we go, ratcheting up trade wars, ratcheting up the dysfunction in our foreign policy, playing politics with the government shutdown and paychecks of hundreds of thousands of americans. that s what i think should worry us. the one thing that could possibly get through to him is the looming economic downturn, the tanking stock market, the negative economic indicators, all these actions have a real consequence and they re going to make his difficult reelection that much harder. senator boxer, you can see he s spooked by that, reporting suggests that he s saying it in public, berating the fed chair and maybe threatening to fire him, which is not something that happens that often. do you think fundamentally