In the grand, rotting theater of American governance, we have reached the act where the puppets begin to eat the strings. The Trump administration, a collection of individuals whose collective understanding of monetary policy could be comfortably inscribed on the back of a cocktail napkin, has decided that the Federal Reserve is no longer just a collection of boring men in gray suits. No, they are now potential 'criminals.' The 'criminal cudgel'—a term so delightfully medieval it suggests the administration is trading in its legal pads for iron-bound clubs—is being waved in the general direction of Jerome Powell and his coven of interest-rate alchemists. It is a spectacle of pure, unadulterated stupidity, and I, for one, hope they all manage to knock each other unconscious. On one side, we have the Federal Reserve, an institution that clings to the myth of 'independence' like a drowning man clings to a lead weight. These are the technocratic high priests who believe they can solve the existential dread of a collapsing middle class by twitching a decimal point on an overnight lending rate. They speak a language of 'quantitative easing' and 'inflationary targets,' which is really just a sophisticated way of saying they are making it up as they go along while ensuring their friends on Wall Street don't have to sell their third yachts. They represent the Smug Elite, the people who think a PhD in Economics is a shield against the reality that they have spent decades inflating a bubble that is now the only thing keeping the global economy from looking like a scene out of a Mad Max deleted scene. On the other side of this pathetic trench, we have the administration, a group of populist arsonists who view any institution they cannot personally control as a deep-state conspiracy. Their latest maneuver—threatening the Fed with criminal investigations—is the political equivalent of a toddler screaming at the gravity because he dropped his ice cream. The president, in a display of his signature tactical amnesia, denies all knowledge of the plan. It’s the classic 'I don’t know her' defense, applied to the destruction of the global financial order. It is a performance so transparently cynical it’s almost impressive. By feigning ignorance while his subordinates sharpen the knives, he maintains a thin veneer of deniability while the base cheers for the execution of the 'globalist bankers.' Let’s be clear: nobody in this fight is the hero. The Fed is a collection of vampires who have spent a century devaluing the currency to the point where a loaf of bread costs more than a 19th-century mortgage. They aren’t 'independent'; they are just insulated from the consequences of their own incompetence. But the administration’s response—to treat the central bank like a mob-run protection racket—is the final nail in the coffin of the idea that America is a serious country governed by adults. We are witnessing the ultimate collision of two equally repulsive forces: the arrogance of the unelected expert versus the narcissism of the elected demagogue. The administration wants a Fed that acts as a personal piggy bank to fund whatever fever-dream project is trending on social media that morning. They want the printing presses to run until the paper they’re printed on is more valuable as thermal insulation than as currency. And they are willing to use the threat of the jailhouse to get it. It’s a 'nasty' fight, we are told. Good. Let it be nasty. Let them expose the entire fraudulent architecture of the modern state. The Fed will retreat into its shell of legal jargon and 'institutional norms,' pretending that their spreadsheets are holy relics. The administration will continue to tweet threats and leak memos about 'criminal' negligence, pretending they are the champions of the little guy while they burn down the house the little guy is currently trapped inside. This is the natural endpoint of a society that has abandoned even the pretense of objective truth or functional cooperation. When the numbers don't say what you want them to say, you don't change your behavior; you arrest the person holding the calculator. It is the logic of the purge, applied to the bond market. It would be hilarious if it weren't so profoundly exhausting. We are expected to take sides in this? To choose between the people who gave us the 2008 crash and the people who think 'law and order' means 'do what I say or I’ll find a statute to bury you'? No thank you. I’ll be over here, watching the gold leaf peel off the temple of the dollar, waiting for the inevitable moment when the cudgel finally hits the ledger and we all find out that both sides were bankrupt the whole time.