Trump uses 'flood the zone' tactic to ramp up pressure on Fed's Powell

Trump escalates pressure on the Fed with a high-profile visit, signals retreat from firing Powell while pushing for rate cuts, using his trademark 'flood-the-zone' strategy

By Nancy Cook

 

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is smack in the middle of one of President Donald Trump’s preferred attack strategies — flooding the zone.

 

When Trump goes on the attack, it’s rarely linear. He seeks multiple angles at one target, undermining the person’s ability to focus on answering one critique.

 

That’s exactly where Powell finds himself as Trump pushes the Fed to hew more closely to his agenda. Instead of just focusing on their disagreement over the timing of interest-rate cuts, Trump has also personally attacked Powell, questioned spending on the renovation of the Fed’s Washington headquarters, discussed the job with at least one possible replacement and appointed three political officials to a planning commission that is reviewing the Fed’s project. 

 

On Thursday, Trump ramped up the pressure even further when he visited the Fed headquarters to see its renovations in-person, turning it into a televised political event. “I just want to see one thing happen, very simple: Interest rates have to come down,” the president said before a gaggle of reporters and photographers, with Senator Tim Scott standing beside him.

 

At the central bank, however, Trump signaled he’d moved off the idea of firing Powell, saying, “I think he’s going to do the right thing. Everybody knows what the right thing is.”

 

Trump has used a similar flood-the-zone playbook to slash staff at federal agencies, undermine the judicial system and take on the policies of elite universities like Harvard and Columbia. 

 

Six months into his second term, he’s now testing this blueprint on the Fed, a staid — and nominally independent — institution in charge of tempering inflation and sustaining the labor market. Never before has Trump so aggressively gone after this many facets of the Fed, despite his long-standing frustration with Powell, whom he nominated to the top job in 2017.

 

Former Trump official Marc Short called the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on the Fed a no-lose proposition, politically. The multi-pronged attacks will do one of three things ultimately, Short said: It will allow the White House to claim victory when Powell does eventually lower interest rates; it lets Powell’s successor understand the expectations for the job under Trump; and it sets up a scapegoat if the economy eventually falters due to Trump’s tariffs.

 

Bannon tactic 

Former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon coined this phrase “flood the zone” as a way to “overwhelm the opposition” through rafts of executive orders and executive actions, so critics can’t keep up or even mount a defense. 

 

Several top Trump officials, including the Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, have been urging Trump to fire Powell before his chairmanship ends in May 2026, leaving Powell with very few allies within the White House or Treasury Department. 

 

But White House lawyers have urged caution on firing him outright. Under the law governing the Fed, Trump would require cause — typically interpreted by the courts as serious misconduct. So Trump has been told he’s not on solid legal ground yet in claiming cause, according to people briefed on the White House discussions.

 

Without clear cause, Trump had seized on the building renovations as a means of putting Powell and the central bank on the defensive. Though on Thursday, he seemed more understanding of the project’s cost overruns.

 

In the meantime, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been meeting with candidates to replace Powell. Trump has met privately with Kevin Hassett a handful of times to interview him. Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, has emerged as the leading contender. 

 

Part of the flood-the-zone playbook is testing various actions, determining which of them is legal or captures the attention of the MAGA base and then pursuing it. The result is usually that the target, be it a person or an institution, is weakened.

 

Major changes 

The pressure campaign on the Fed could open the door to major changes at the institution. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 chapter on the Fed suggests narrowing the central bank’s focus to inflation and the stability of the dollar, winding down the bank’s balance sheet and ceasing the policy of paying interest on bank reserves parked at the Fed. The combination would drastically change the mission and activity of the central bank. 

 

But the end goal of Trump’s attacks may be far simpler, say Trump allies. He wants the Fed to obey his desire for lower interest rates, an idea Trump kept harping on during his visit to the renovation project on Thursday.

 

“He brought it up to me last time I spoke to him,” said Jason Miller, who has served as a top official on all of Trump’s presidential campaigns. “He is very hyper focused on making sure we turn the economy around. He believes it is a crucial part of the strategy.”

 

Democrats have yet to find a strong way to attack Trump’s handling of the Fed — and that too is part of this Trumpian playbook. It’s been tough for economically-oriented Democratic lawmakers to generate attention by highlighting Trump’s broadsides against the central bank and their potential to hurt the US economy. He’s already decimated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, passed a tax and spending bill with major cuts to Medicaid and the food stamp program and fired thousands of federal government employees.

 

One bit of protection for Powell might be that Republican senators are not blindly following Trump’s lead on the Fed, which traditionally is insulated from any White House’s policy whims. On Wednesday, Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said Powell had performed well.

 

“We had inflation. Powell did not cause it. Powell got us down from 9% inflation to 3%,” Kennedy said. “Powell didn’t say a word, he just did it without us going into a recession and without us having 8% unemployment. That impresses me.”

 

Lawsuit 

Trump’s MAGA supporters, however, piled onto the Fed Thursday when James Fishback, an ally of Vivek Ramaswamy and the CEO and founder of Azoria Capital, filed a lawsuit against the central bank, alleging it violated federal transparency laws by keeping details of monetary policy meetings private. 

 

“Azoria is deeply concerned that the FOMC, under Chair Jerome Powell, is maintaining high interest rates to undermine President Donald J. Trump and his economic agenda, to the detriment of American citizens and the American economy,” the firm said in its suit.

 

The Fed has not buckled under the pressure campaign yet, nor has Powell given any indication he will step down early. Bessent has even tried to publicly reassure Wall Street that Powell will finish out his tenure and leave on his own terms.

 

“There’s nothing that tells me that he should step down right now,” Bessent said on Fox Business. “His term ends in May. If he wants to see that through, I think he should. If he wants to leave early, I think he should.”