In the latest episode of ‘America: The Most Expensive Reality Show in History,’ we are being treated to the narrative of Jerome H. Powell as the unlikely foil to Donald Trump. It is a spectacle so profoundly depressing that it could only be conceived in the sterile, air-filtered corridors of the Federal Reserve or the spray-tan-saturated depths of Mar-a-Lago. The media is currently salivating over the ‘groundswell of support’ for Powell, casting him as some sort of technocratic Gandalf standing on a bridge of spreadsheets, shouting ‘You shall not pass’ to the Balrog of protectionist tantrums. Let us be clear: this is not a battle for the soul of the nation; it is an internecine squabble between two different brands of elite incompetence.

Jerome Powell, a man who possesses the charisma of a damp piece of drywall and the wardrobe of a funeral director in a mid-sized Midwestern town, is an ‘unlikely’ hero only because no one in their right mind would ever look at a central banker and think ‘savior.’ Powell represents the Fed’s ‘independence,’ a concept so fetishized by the donor class that you’d think it was the last scrap of the Magna Carta. In reality, the Fed’s independence is the polite fiction that allows the technocratic elite to tinker with the gears of the economy without the pesky interference of things like ‘voters’ or ‘accountability.’ When Powell stands up to Trump, he isn’t defending democracy; he is defending the right of the clerical class to keep the rest of us in a state of perpetual, low-level financial anxiety through the wizardry of interest rate hikes.

On the other side of this aesthetic nightmare, we have Donald Trump, a man who treats macroeconomics with the same intellectual rigor a toddler applies to a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos. Trump’s desire to bring the Fed under his direct control is born of a singular, narcissistic delusion: that he can simply demand a lower interest rate like a discount on a batch of sub-par hotel linens. His ‘economic policy’ is less a strategy and more a collection of loud noises and gold-leafed grievances. He views the Fed not as a stabilizing institution, but as a personal piggy bank that is being unfairly guarded by a man he appointed but now views as a traitor to the cause of ‘Number Go Up.’

What makes this ‘foil’ narrative so deliciously cynical is the ‘groundswell’ of support Powell is supposedly enjoying. Who exactly comprises this groundswell? It isn’t the family trying to decide which kidney to sell to afford a carton of eggs. It is the coalition of the comfortable: the Wall Street ghouls who fear that Trump’s erratic meddling might actually force the market to reflect reality for five minutes, and the bipartisan political establishment that finds comfort in the Fed’s opacity. They love Powell because he speaks in ‘Fedspeak,’ a language specifically designed to say absolutely nothing while sounding incredibly important. It is the linguistic equivalent of a beige noise machine meant to lull the public into a coma while their purchasing power is slowly eroded.

Trump’s attacks on Powell are, predictably, moronic. He doesn’t understand that the Fed is the only thing keeping the house of cards from collapsing under the weight of the national debt he helped balloon. But Powell’s defense—this sudden posture of a principled warrior for institutional integrity—is equally fraudulent. The Fed’s policies have spent decades widening the wealth gap, subsidizing the reckless bets of ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks, and ensuring that the only thing more certain than death and taxes is that the working class will bear the brunt of every ‘correction.’ To see Powell hailed as a champion of the people because he refuses to let Trump play with the interest rate dial is like watching two arsonists fight over who gets to hold the matches, while the crowd cheers for the one who promises to burn the house down more slowly.

This is the ultimate trap of modern discourse: we are forced to pick a side in a fight where both participants despise us. We are told to choose between the chaotic, populist idiocy of Trump, which would turn the dollar into Monopoly money for the sake of a campaign rally applause line, and the cold, calculated technocracy of Powell, which manages our slow decline with the precision of a guillotine. The ‘independence’ of the Fed is merely the independence of the steering wheel from the passengers’ desires. Whether the car is driven into a wall by a screaming madman or steered gently into a swamp by a man in a perfectly tailored suit, the result is the same for those in the backseat. We are witnessing a battle of egos between a man who thinks he is the State and a man who thinks he is the Math. Neither of them cares about the humans caught in the middle. So, by all means, let us celebrate Powell’s ‘brave’ stand. It’s the closest thing to a victory the establishment will ever give us: the right to be ignored by a more professional class of grifter.