I had hoped that 2026 would prove calmer than 2025, a hope that was quickly disabused. We’re bombing Venezuela! Shooting women in the streets! Using AI as a novel mode of sexual harassment! Eating enormous amounts of red meat??
Yet oddly, considering my general interests, the thing that has stuck in my mind the most so far is the latest business with the Justice Department and the Federal Reserve. Specifically, the Fed’s response — a video.
Brief context: It was announced over the weekend that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into the actions of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — specifically, whether he had misled the Congress about the scope and costs of the renovation of the Fed headquarters in DC, which is definitely America’s #1 most pressing concern at this moment in time.
No, obviously, the renovation is a pretext — President Donald Trump has been furious at Powell for not agreeing to lower interest rates in order to juice the economy, and is weaponizing the Justice Department to pressure him to do, even though the central bank is meant to operate independently of the government.
On Sunday evening, in response, the Fed released a two-minute video message starring Powell:
Said Powell:
[…] this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure.
This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. It is not about Congress’s oversight role […] Those are pretexts. The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.
The contents of the video are alarming, with Powell directly accusing the administration of using “political pressure [and] intimidation” to coerce the bank into giving into the president’s demands. More weaponizing of the Justice Department — obviously bad. And it’s troubling to think that the Fed, after presumably serious discussion, felt that the best course of action was to attempt to intimidate the president back in as public a way possible; that it seemed not even worth bothering to settle the issue by normal, restrained means.
But what makes it feel worse, somehow, is that Jerome Powell, 16th chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, a sober, sedate man in his 70s, was compelled to make a video for the purposes of keeping the country (and presumably the president) abreast.
Yes, yes, presidents have always made speeches, special broadcasts, spoken on the radio, etcetera. The Department of Homeland Security is pushing out sneering propaganda tapes that look like something from a made-for-Tubi movie about totalitarian dystopias1. But the Federal Reserve? It’s a public institution, but I had hoped that we had at least a few serious ones left. Jerome H. Powell didn’t sign up to be an influencer or content creator, churning out direct-to-camera reels for Instagram and TikTok. I don’t want a GRWM from the Fed, I just want my bank not to fail. And yet, here we are.
The debate around America as a post-literate society began some months ago, with the attendant worries about loss of nuance, lessened attention spans, a citizenry that lives for spectacle and takes nothing seriously. Maybe I’m just a luddite, but this latest episode feels like more confirmation: We never should have pivoted to video.
(Speaking of movies about dystopia, there’s always a clip of the slack-jawed populace staring up at a great screen —how the future comes apace!)