Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times
The administration has accused Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, of mortgage fraud and has said it will refer the matter for criminal prosecution to the Justice Department. The reason is transparent: President Trump wants to boost an economy that’s under duress from his policies, and so he wants the quick fix of lower interest rates. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell won’t be pushed into that, so the President is putting pressure on the Fed: threatening to fire Powell, publicly scrutinizing the agency, and now pressuring one of the governors to resign so he can replace her. Cook says she is ready to push back, but this is just getting started, and it won’t be the administration’s last attack on the Fed.
In one sense, this is simply crude, thuggish behavior: if you can’t get what you want, intimidate the people who are in your way until they give in. It’s the way every autocrat, and petty tyrants everywhere, operate.
But, it’s also remarkably resourceful in the context of American government. The presidency is a powerful office, but it has always had constraints - checks and balances among the branches, the divide between federal and state power, a norm of independence and professionalism in some agencies and legal independence for others. Presidents have always chafed against these constraints and looked for ways around them, but for the most part have not attacked them head on.
This administration is different. The President consolidated party control in his first term, neutralizing Republican senators and members of Congress as well as Republican state lawmakers as a check. In his second term, he is waging an intimidation campaign against Democrats in Congress as well as against Democrat-led cities and states. He is consolidating control over the judiciary, having chosen three justices on a Supreme Court that is rubber-stamping his actions. Within the agencies under his legal control, he has shattered any norms of independence. Each accretion of power has supported the next, like a string of acquisitions in a growing business empire. Party control allows him to put pliant nominees on the courts and in federal agencies; obedient courts and agencies in turn allow him to, for example, use the military and federal law enforcement as instruments of intimidation.
Now he’s up against an agency that is not under his legal control, and he’s finding creative ways to use his consolidated authority to get what he wants—in this case, by using the formerly-independent prosecutorial power of the Justice Department to personally threaten a Fed governor.
This is not the administration’s only act of autocratic ingenuity—for example, calling a mid-decade census under new rules to give Republicans an edge in Congress. They don’t think about authority in terms of what they’re allowed to do, or even what they can get away with. They see formal authority as leverage they can use to accomplish any goal. They use investigations and government contracts as leverage on law firms, who are now not only avoiding litigating against the administration, but are being deployed to work on its behalf. They use government contracts and merger approvals as leverage on media companies. They uses tariffs and export controls as leverage on American manufacturers.
To keep up, we need to be just as creative in thinking about power. The next time we consider whether the administration can accomplish one of its goals, we shouldn’t ask whether they have the authority to do it, but whether they have the leverage. If some state official won’t go along with a demand, could she become the target of a criminal investigation? An IRS audit? A leak of private information held by the government? Attack pieces in the newspaper or on TV? Would her children find their college applications rejected? How many officials, or professors, businesspeople, attorneys, etc., will even try to make a stand when those are the stakes?
I would dismiss all of this as conspiracy theory if they weren’t doing it proudly, in the open. Publicity amplifies the effect of the intimidation. Today, it’s Lisa Cook, but the audience is every person in America who might have some reason to get in their way.
This understanding of power has not sunk in for the Democratic Party, at least not from looking at the way we’re approaching the midterms. Looking at the campaigns we’re running, I see candidates saying they’ll be fighters for healthcare, or that they “know how to stand up to bullies,” as if there’s going to be a moment when a Democratic member of Congress can make a heroic stand against some piece of administration-backed legislation. There won’t be. They will continue to use their authority and leverage to accomplish their goals, deaf to the protests of Democrats in the streets or in the Capitol.
Against the administration’s expansive view of its own power, the only way out is winning elections. Until every Democrat, in every seat, is thinking about how to inspire more people to join us in building a strong majority that wins, this era of intimidation will continue. Lisa Cook is not the first target, and she won’t be the last.