MW How Bessent's attack on the Fed could hurt Trump

By Brett Arends

This isn't the critique MAGA needs

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's attack on the Fed reads like a MAGA self-own.

Washington and Wall Street are buzzing about Scott Bessent's attack on the Federal Reserve.

But it's an open question whether the Treasury Secretary's broadside against the independence of the central bank will end up helping the MAGA White House, or hurting it.

And, maybe more immediately, whether it will help Bessent with his boss, or the reverse.

Bessent wrote a short version of his attack on the Fed for the opinion section of The Wall Street Journal, but the full version was published in a journal called the International Economy.

It's quite a doozy. It leaves more hostages to fortune than Bessent may have realized.

What are independent observers to make, for example, of Bessent's complaints about the erosion of the Fed's independence? Most of Wall Street feels the same way; they want an independent Fed. But is this a wise comment to make when you work for a president who is currently engaged in the biggest assault on that independence in over 50 years?

President Trump has just fired a sitting Fed governor and is threatening to fire the chairman - unprecedented moves that have shocked most of the Street. As we report today, the president and his advisers may also be gearing up to replace some of the Fed's regional-bank presidents as well.

Bessent insists that "monetary policy should not be made in the White House." Once again, Wall Street agrees with him wholeheartedly. But is this a diplomatic statement when this White House is quite openly trying to make monetary policy? Not only has President Trump publicly announced that the Fed's current interest-rate policy is wrong, but he has declared what rates should be - 1%, apparently, or less, which is about three-quarters below where the Fed (and the markets) want them.

Actually, President Trump has gone further. He has subjected the Fed chairman to sustained personal abuse in public for refusing to tailor monetary policy to the White House's demands. He has also disparaged the official inflation figures on which interest-rate policy is being made, and fired the person in charge of producing them. The president argues - without any supporting evidence - that the true inflation figure is about 0%.

It doesn't end there.

Bessent also criticizes the Fed for the apparent blunder of keeping interest rates too low for too long in the past, and for failing to stop inflation soon enough by raising them.

But President Trump has spent the past seven months berating the Fed for keeping interest rates too high, and for being too vigilant about inflation. Which is it?

The Treasury Secretary also slams the Fed for intervening to bail out past governments in Washington for their "poor fiscal policies" and "fiscal irresponsibility," meaning massive budget deficits.

How will this strike President Trump, who has just passed the biggest budget-busting bill in American history?

Bessent also complained that the Fed's policies in the last decade had helped drive up asset prices, unfairly helping the rich and hurting the poor; that they had intervened in free markets, effectively picking winners and losers in the economy; and that the Fed had engaged in so-called quantitative easing, meaning the purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds with printed money, in order to drive down long-term interest rates. (Bonds are like seesaws: When the price rises, the yield or interest rate falls).

Yet all of these are policies that President Trump has either endorsed in the past or might need to in the very-near future.

The president has already made no secret that he likes policies that drive up asset prices, boasting when stock prices are up and blaming his predecessor when they are down. He reversed his "liberation day" tariff agenda in April after it tanked the markets, and there was little dispute about what caused the policy reversal. "This is a good time to buy DJT," he tooted on Truth Social, hours before announcing the policy change.

Whenever he does anything in the future that does the same, critics can just quote Secretary Bessent's own comments back at him.

Trump's tariffs explicitly intervene in the operation of financial markets, picking winners and losers. Under President Trump, the federal government in recent months has partially nationalized U.S. Steel and taken a 10% stake in computer-chip giant Intel $(INTC)$.

That sits oddly with Bessent's complaint that the Fed suffers from "the same political tilt that has plagued most of Washington for decades: We know better than the market."

As for Bessent's criticism of quantitative easing, and the purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds to help keep down interest rates and bail out fiscally irresponsible governments: Is President Trump sure that this won't be what he wants his Fed to do within a year or two? Many financial gurus think this is the only rational endgame of the eyewatering U.S. budget deficit and the spiraling national debt.

Meanwhile, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh when Bessent complains that the Fed favors friendly journalists, "providing preferential access based on the tone and content of reporting," while "attempting to shield itself from good-faith oversight."

Has he watched a White House or Oval Office press briefing lately? The best reason to do so are the fawning, sycophantic questions from the North Korean wing of the MAGA "new media" complex. Meanwhile, the Associated Press got barred for insisting on referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico, contrary to the regime's new diktat.

The conventional wisdom is that Bessent wrote this article to butter up his boss in the hopes of being named the new chairman of the Fed. But I'm not so sure. You have to wonder if President Trump had read this. Or what he'll make of it if he does.

-Brett Arends

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September 08, 2025 15:40 ET (19:40 GMT)

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