President Trump’s on-again, off-again interest in firing Jerome Powell, whom he appointed in 2018, isn’t so much a policy decision as it is a necessary feature of post-truth populism. It comes from the impulse to blur legal boundaries in pursuit of immediate political gratification, regardless of long-term consequences.

Trump wants Powell to lower interest rates to offset the economic damage caused by the his own populist tariffs. Powell’s formal recognition that tariffs can fuel inflation, just as lower rates can, is taken by Trump not as economic reasoning, but as a gesture of personal disloyalty.

There is historical precedent for this sort of meddling, and it is instructive. In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon

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