The Supreme Court appeared likely to reject President Donald Trump’s bid to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook during oral arguments on Wednesday, finally marking an outer limit of what the court’s conservative members would stomach from Trump’s authoritarian second term.

There did not appear to be five votes among the justices to embrace Trump’s radical assertion of executive power over the nation’s central bank. The Fed’s political independence has been a cornerstone of American economic stability and foreign confidence in U.S. markets over the past century.

Even conservative justices who are normally inclined to side with Trump on presidential power appeared reluctant to do so on Wednesday. In an exchange with Solicitor General D. John Sauer, Justice Brett Kavanaugh warned that the Trump administration’s position could set a precedent for bad-faith efforts to purge the Fed.

“It incentivizes a president to come up with what, as the Federal Reserve former governors say, [are] trivial or inconsequential or old allegations that are very difficult to disprove,” he told Sauer, referring to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by past Federal Reserve chairs. “It incentivizes kind of the search and destroy [to] find something and just put that on a piece of paper—no judicial review, no process, nothing, you’re done.”

Though he did not frame it as such, Kavanaugh’s description is apt because it describes exactly what is happening right now. The case, Trump v. Cook, arose entirely out of the president’s frustration with the central bank and its independence—and has had destructive effects beyond a simple policy dispute.

Since his first term, Trump has frequently pushed the Fed to adopt a looser monetary policy with lower interest rates. At one point in 2019, Trump publicly suggested that Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Fed whom Trump had appointed two years earlier, might be a greater enemy of the United States than Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Trump’s hostility to Powell cooled in 2020 when the Fed slashed rates in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the president’s attention turned elsewhere. Once Trump returned to power in 2024, however, he began to seek ways to exert greater control over the Federal Reserve. The president’s approach was likely emboldened by his ability to dismiss and influence other structurally independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.

The Supreme Court, for its part, helped Trump seize control of those agencies through its embrace of the unitary executive theory, which generally holds that the........

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