First off, let’s get some things straight.

The chances that Trump would investigate Federal Reserve officials like Chairman Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook if they were acquiescing to his demands instead of resisting them are zero — zilch, nada, none. Potentially negative, thus shattering the laws of mathematics. Everybody knows this.

A second undeniable fact is that Trump is trying to dominate the Fed — to break it to his will. That he doesn’t control the Fed already infuriates him. He would seek to subjugate it even if he sought no changes in the monetary policy it sets.

But, oh, does he seek changes to policy. Destroying the central bank’s independence would be terrible enough in itself. As my predecessor Dominic Pino has documented, it extinguishes confidence in the currency and unmoors the money supply from empirical concerns in favor of political expediency. What Trump wants from the Fed in particular, however, makes his gambit all the more destructive. And obscenely stupid.

Put simply, the president wants a policy of exceedingly easy money. He wants the Fed to set interest rates at 1 percent yesterday. He wants it to make large-scale asset purchases that inject new money into the financial system, also known as quantitative easing. And he wants this ultra-cheap money when the United States isn’t at war, isn’t in a recession, is gaining jobs, and yearly inflation remains about 50 percent above the Fed’s stated target of 2 percent.

The man most clearly in his way is Jerome Powell, who Trump himself nominated as Fed chairman in 2018 and Biden reappointed in 2022. Powell and his fellow officers on the Fed’s board of governors have refused to drop interest rates as rapidly and greatly as the president has ordered. Now that he’s under criminal investigation on blatantly pretextual grounds, Powell is pushing back.

Frankly, I cannot believe that I have to defend Jerome Powell as Fed chairman in the year of our Lord 2026. I think that his term in office has been a total disaster. During the pandemic, he presided over a 40 percent increase in the money supply over just two years — an astonishing expansion not seen since World War II. His Fed accomplished this by throttling every one of its three monetary policy levers to the max: interest rates set to the lowest possible level shy of zero, banks’ reserve requirements effectively abolished, and open-ended asset purchases that totaled nearly $5 trillion — more than the previous three rounds of quantitative easing combined. Powell then declined to tighten monetary policy as the pandemic dissipated, keeping the cheap money gushing while employment rebounded. The inevitable result was the highest inflation in 40 years, the effects of which are very much still felt. Remember, Powell called the inflation “transitory” time and again, until he could no longer do so with a straight face.

Even before the pandemic and today, I thought that Powell has kept monetary policy too loose for too long. But it’s much better than it was during Covid, and, as a result, inflation has declined from 8 percent in 2022 to 3 percent. Points for improvement, I suppose.

That is why Trump’s fury with Powell is incomprehensible. It boggles the mind. It impresses me, honestly. He wants the Federal Reserve to, in essence, return to the catastrophic monetary policy that Powell and his fellow governors inflicted on the country during the pandemic — unleashing the inflationary wave that pulverized Trump’s predecessor, swept him into office on voters’ anger, and whose lingering effects now haunt his party. And he truly believes that this will help him.

Trump must understand that his fortunes are tied to the American economy. He knows it. For the next three years, he is locked inside this house. And he is deliberately setting it on fire anyway.

The MAGA movement had better pray that Jerome Powell wins this fight over the Fed. They had better pray that Senate Republicans find a spine real quick and that they make sure Trump doesn’t appoint a lunatic or a lackey as Powell’s successor who will slash rates to the bone and blow out the Fed’s balance sheet. They had better pray the president does not get his way on this.

Because if he does, MAGA will go down in flames the same way Biden and his accessories did. And the rest of us will burn with them, because we unfortunately all share the house called the U.S. economy. We all have an interest in making sure the dollars in our pockets don’t become toilet paper.

As for Trump, he’ll go down, too, of course. This is why we tell our toddlers not to play with matches.