President Donald Trump denied on the 20th that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that Treasury Secretary Scott Besant discouraged him from firing Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell as “a classic lie.”
On the same day, President Trump wrote on his social media platform TruthSocial, “The WSJ continued its classic lie by reporting that Besant explained to me that firing Powell, the worst Fed chairman in history, when it was ‘too little too late,’ would not be good for the markets.”
The WSJ reported on the previous day that “when President Trump considered firing Chairman Powell for not responding to his demands for a rate cut, Besant tried to dissuade him, citing the negative impact it would have on the markets and the economy.”
President Trump added, “Nobody needs to explain that to me. I know better than anyone what’s good for the market,” and “Without me, the market would not have reached its current record highs and would probably have crashed.” He emphasized, “People don’t explain to me. I will explain it to them.”
President Trump’s remarks are interpreted as an attempt to highlight that he decides and implements what he thinks is right rather than the advice of those around him in all policy areas. It seems to be a repeated expression of his dissatisfaction with the WSJ, a conservative economic media outlet. On the 18th, President Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the WSJ for reporting that he drew a letter with an obscene drawing on it to Jeffrey Epstein (who died in 2019), a billionaire and sex offender of minors, about 20 years ago.
President Trump named as defendants two WSJ reporters, WSJ publisher Dow Jones, its parent company News Corporation, and its founder, “media tycoon” Rupert Murdoch. Recently, the “Epstein suspicion” has become a hot topic in American politics. This suspicion is intertwined with rumors that President Trump was included in the “sex service client list” created by Epstein, a billionaire hedge fund manager who died while incarcerated in 2019, and a conspiracy theory that Epstein’s cause of death was “murder,” and is even causing division within President Trump’s supporters. Meanwhile, President Trump demanded on this day at TruthSocial that the Washington Commanders, a professional American football team based in Washington, D.C., be restored to its original name, the Washington Redskins, and the Cleveland Guardians, a professional baseball team in the Major League Baseball, be restored to its former name, the Cleveland Indians.
These teams changed their names in 2020 and 2021, respectively, after Native American groups criticized their original names as being racist and derogatory to skin color. In response, President Trump said on this day, “Our great Indian people want this. Things are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a country with passion and common sense. Owners, do this.”