On Monday night, Donald Trump exercised a presidential power he does not appear to have when he said that he had fired Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook. Two days later, JD Vance, playing his usual vice presidential role, celebrated Trump’s move during an interview with USA Today.

“The question is: Do we want a person who makes a mistake like that to be a person who sits on the Federal Reserve Board, which makes important monetary policy for the entire country?” Vance said, brushing past the point that the “mistake” in question involves unproven mortgage fraud allegations that haven’t led to any charges.

But as part of the same interview, the Ohio Republican went a little further in explaining the White House’s perspective:

Isn’t it a little preposterous to say that the president of the United States — the elected president of the United States, working of course in concert with Congress — doesn’t have the ability to make these determinations? I don’t think that we allow bureaucrats to sit from on high and make decisions about monetary policy and interest rates without any input from the people that were elected to serve the American people.

He added that he believes Trump is “much better” equipped “to make these determinations” about U.S. monetary policy, despite the president’s lengthy record of confusion about the basics of economic and monetary policy.

In case this isn’t obvious, it’s worth emphasizing why the Federal Reserve is an independent agency that makes its own decisions about interest rates: It’s because politicians are really bad at it.

The whole point of removing partisan, electoral and political considerations from the process is because, in some instances, it’s necessary to deliberately slow economic growth in order to address broader concerns about problems such as inflation. But because elected officials, who fear a backlash from voters, are always going to be reluctant to make the economy worse on purpose, our system puts these decisions in the hands of Senate-confirmed professionals at the Fed.

Sometimes — such as now, for example — presidents and their teams want to accelerate economic growth, without regard for the broader implications. It’s why Trump has spent the year condemning Fed Chair Jerome Powell in hysterical terms, and it likely helps explain why the Republican White House has been so vigorous in attacking Cook: The president wants to either bully them into submission or replace them with knee-jerk loyalists.

Recommended

Latest

Vacationing JD Vance confronts baby-faced meme and protests in the United Kingdom

Erum Salam

Maddowblog

JD Vance flunks the basics on World War II as the White House targets history museums

Steve Benen

But that’s what makes Vance’s latest comments so notable: The vice president suggested that the White House isn’t just angry with the Fed’s recent policy decisions; it’s also angry about the Fed’s existence.

Look at the quote again: As far as Vance is concerned, it’s elected officials, and not “bureaucrats,” who should “make decisions about monetary policy and interest rates.”

Or as The Atlantic’s Jon Chait explained in a column last month about the president’s campaign against the Fed chair: “Trump doesn’t think Powell is bad at his job. He objects to the job itself.”

If the White House were to control the Fed and its decisions about interest rates, the results would almost certainly be calamitous. Evidently, the president and vice president want the power anyway.