Trump blasts interest rate uptick and claims ‘hostile’ Federal Reserve board made decision ‘only for political reasons’

Read Time:23 Minute, 28 Second

Trump claims he told Fed chair Kevin Warsh to vote with the rest of the board for rate hike

Speaking to reporters on his way to give a rally speech in North Carolina, Donald Trump denied that his hand-picked Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, had not defied him by voting to raise interest rates, claiming that he had advised Warsh to vote as he did.

Asked if he still has confidence in Warsh, despite the rate hike Trump deplored, the president said:

“I do. I mean, I’m relying on Kevin, but he’s got a very tough board. He’s got a board that was put there by a lot of other people. And the interest rates are too high. They’re not appropriate,” Trump replied. “I told Kevin, I said, ‘You might as well vote with the board because it’s just not going to matter.’ The board is very hostile. They’re very political. They’re doing the wrong thing. They’re a bunch of politicians. They are people put on by politicians.”

“We should be paying the lowest interest rate anywhere in the world because we have the strongest credit,” he added. “If we wanted to get rid of deficits, which we could do with the swipe of the pen with every country, we’d make a trillion and a half dollars a year. We’d pay off our debt. We’d do all sorts of things. But we haven’t chosen to do that. But at some point, we will. Interest rates are too high.”

Later, asked again about Warsh, Trump said: “It doesn’t matter because he doesn’t have the votes… No matter how good a job, he’s got a hostile board… They’re raising that only for political reasons, and that’s a raise against Trump.”

Closing summary

This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close, but just for the day. We will be back on Thursday with more. Here are the latest developments:

Speaking in North Carolina, Trump explicitly compared his effort to blame Democrat Roy Cooper, the former governor and Senate candidate, for the brutal killing of a young Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, last year, by using false information, on the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.

Donald Trump responded to the Federal Reserve’s unanimous decision on Wednesday to raise its benchmark interest rate by a quarter-percentage point, to a range of 3.75% to 4%, by demanding a massive cut in rates.

The US Congress has passed a sweeping bill allowing Trump to raise tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy and issue other punishing sanctions against the Kremlin following a pitched battle between lawmakers backing Ukraine and sceptics worried the bill gives the president too much power.

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, a Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee, has filed a motion for an emergency hearing on the performing arts venue’s apparent closure.

Asked why it is so important to him to have his name inscribed on the Kennedy Center, a memorial to another president, Trump said he deserves “recognition” for saving the venue. If not, Trump said, “It’ll end up being ripped down.

Mitch McConnell, the former Republican Senate majority leader who returned to work this week after a months‑long absence, had to be prompted by colleagues as to how to vote near the start of a televised meeting of the Senate agriculture committee on Wednesday.

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, cancelled votes currently scheduled for Thursday, meaning that lower chamber lawmakers will now head back to their districts for the midterm recess a day early. The change to schedule means that the House will avoid voting on Republican congressman Thomas Massie’s resolution to impeach the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.

Speaking in North Carolina, Trump explicitly compared his effort to blame Democrat Roy Cooper, the former governor and Senate candidate, for the brutal killing of a young Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, last year, by using false information, on the infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.

As Trump blames Zelenskyy’s hatred of Putin for driving up diesel prices, Republicans celebrate Russia sanctions and tariffs bill

Speaking in North Carolina on Wednesday, Donald Trump repeated his false claim that it is the war in Ukraine he’s failed to stop, not the one in Iran he started, that has caused a spike in diesel prices in the United States.

After repeating his false claim to have ended eight wars, Trump said, “we’re working very hard to get Russia-Ukraine” settled. “The one that’s the toughest is Russia-Ukraine. They hate each other. The two leaders hate each other so much,” he continued, falsely suggesting, as he has before, that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to blame for hating Vladimir Putin, the dictator who ordered the bloody invasion of his country.

“You know, hatred is very interesting. War is very interesting, but it’s too bad,” Trump went on. “And that’s what’s driving actually, that’s the war that’s driving up the diesel prices.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, Republican senators who are more clear on who is to blame for the war in Ukraine celebrated the passage of a bill that will give the president the power to impose sanctions on Russia, and tariffs on other countries that buy its oil, even though doing so would likely drive fuel prices even higher.

“I applaud the House’s passage of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act—it’s long past time we cut off the funding for Russia’s war machine at its source,” senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, posted. “This legislation will tighten the screws on Putin and impose real costs on those financing his war.”

“We are now one step closer to arming President Trump with the tools he needs to deplete Russia of the little economic power it has left and bring much-needed peace to the region,” senator Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican, wrote.

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Congressman writes to NHL commissioner over Russian hockey star Alex Ovechkin appearing in campaign ad for Putin’s party

Congressman Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, has written a letter to the National Hockey League’s commissioner to protest the appearance of Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin in a campaign ad for Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia.

In the letter, posted on social media by the congressman on Wednesday, Wilson expressed “serious concern” over Ovechkin lending his celebrity to support “the dictatorial political party of Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, who actively works to oppress the people of Russia by outlawing freedom of speech and fair elections.”

Wilson notes that, as the Guardian reported on Monday, images from the ad campaign published by a leading Russian newspaper showed that Ovechkin appeared alongside a series of key figures in Putin’s government:

Mr. Ovechkin shamefully appeared in a campaign video alongside senior figures of the Putin regime, including Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Kremlin propaganda outlet RT. The advertisement comes ahead of Russia’s September parliamentary “elections” and represents an alarming instance of one of the National Hockey League’s most prominent players lending his image and international celebrity to a political organization that has enabled Putin’s brutal rule and his ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. Even more disturbing, this United Russia campaign includes Maria Lvova-Belova, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for her role in the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territory.

“An NHL superstar appearing in campaign propaganda for Putin’s political party cannot simply be dismissed as an activity wholly disconnected from the League,” Wilson added.

“I therefore respectfully request that the NHL review this matter and clarify what policies, if any, govern the participation of active players in political advertisements or propaganda on behalf of dictatorial political parties and foreign political regimes,” the congressman wrote. “I further request that the League and the Capitals organization clarify any endorsement of Putin’s party is not a official position of the NHL or the Washington Capitals.”

The letter was also sent to Ted Leonsis, the owner of the Washington Capitals.

Beneath his signature, in blue marker, Wilson added an impassioned, if imprecise, handwritten note: “Putin is a convicted war criminal!”

Putin, the Russian president, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court, along with Maria Lvova-Belova, for the forceable transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, but neither has yet been tried or convicted.

Wilson, a strong supporter of Ukraine, is perhaps best known for disrupting then president Barack Obama’s address to Congress in 2009, by shouting “You lie!” in what was then considered “an extraordinary breach of congressional decorum”.

After running through many of his familiar talking points, including a gratuitous attack on his predecessor Joe Biden, Donald Trump wrapped up his speech in North Carolina and departed to the even more familiar strains of YMCA.

Trump tries to run Willie Horton playbook against former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper

In his address to supporters in Gastonia, North Carolina, now in progress, Donald Trump tried to blame the state’s former governor, Roy Cooper, who is now the Democratic nominee for the Senate, for the brutal killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian woman who was killed on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina last year.

Trump began by describing Cooper as a “murderer protector” before repeatedly making the false claim that DeCarlos Brown Jr, the man arrested and charged with killing Zarutska, had been released from prison by Cooper.

“He was released by Cooper,” Trump said, incorrectly, after describing in gruesome detail the video of the killing.

While Republicans have tried to blame the fact that Brown was not in jail in 2025 on a 2021 COVID-era prison settlement as he result of a lawsuit over prison conditions during Cooper’s term as governor, in fact Brown had been released from prison on 20 September 2020 after completing a sentence for a previous crime.

Despite that fact, Michael Whatley, the Republican Senate candidate Trump is in North Carolina to campaign for, claimed in a social media post in September, which featured video of the killing of Zarutska: “Cooper bears direct responsibility for this heinous act and must answer to the public about why he prioritizes criminals over public safety.”

Earlier on Wednesday, Whatly repeated the false claim in another post, writing: “Iryna Zarutska would still be alive today if Roy Cooper’s soft on crime policies didn’t put her killer Decarlos Brown Jr back on the streets of Charlotte.”

“This is a lie,” a Cooper campaign spokesperson told Fox News in February. “Decarlos Brown was not released from prison as a result of a court-ordered settlement but in fact served his full sentence and was not released early.”

During his speech, Trump paused to show the crowd 80 mug shots on a giant video screen. The fact that nearly all the faces of the suspects were Black revealed the lack of subtly in the president’s appeal to his mainly white audience.

During his State of the Union address in February, Trump introduced Iryna Zarutska’s mother in the gallery and made a different false claim about her alleged killer, wringly claiming that the man who stabbed Zarutska was an undocumented immigrant, calling him, “a hardened criminal set free to kill in America came in through open borders”.

Trump’s attempt to frame Cooper, by falsely claiming that he had let the Black man who killed Zarutska free, echoed the 1988 attack ad run against the Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, which blamed the former Massachusetts governor for crimes committed by Willie Horton, a Black prisoner released on a furlough program, who raped a white Maryland woman and bound and stabbed her boyfriend.

“By the time we’re finished,” Lee Atwater, the campaign strategist for Dukakis’s Republican opponent, George HW Bush, said at the time, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.”

The Willie Horton ad was produced and distributed by a former employee of Bush’s media adviser, Roger Ailes, who went on to create Fox News.

As he so often does, Trump spoke the subtext out loud, telling the audience that his attack on Cooper was inspired by the Willie Horton ad.

“Years ago in Massachusetts, there was a governor named Dukakis, Michael Dukakis, you remember, who had a very substantial lead for president,” Trump said. “He was going to win easily, but he allowed a man named Willie Horton out of jail. Willie Horton was a bad guy, really bad guy. Same thing as this. Same as- same exact thing.”

Trump went on to exaggerate the scope of Horton’s brutal crimes, falsely claiming that “he raped and murdered, raped and murdered again and again. And he ended up killing three women.”

“Overnight, Dukakis took a rousing lead of 15 points and lost the election in a landslide. Because of that one advertisement,” Trump said. “They put it on just like we’re putting this on, because we have to make sure that Michael Whatley gets into office”.

Trump says Kennedy Center will ‘end up being ripped down’ if he doesn’t get his name on it

Asked by a reporter in North Carolina why it is so important to him to have his name inscribed on the Kennedy Center, a memorial to another president, Donald Trump said he deserves “recognition” for saving the center no one else seemed to think was in dire condition until he took office.

“It’s a mess,” Trump said. “The Kennedy Center for many years has lost tens of millions of dollars, even hundreds of millions of dollars … For me to go and fix it – I’m quite capable of fixing it – and then have to subsidize it for years to come, because you will lose with the Kennedy Center – they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars and sometimes hundreds of billions – this is before I got involved. So, for the Trump administration, for me, to get involved and to take that on long term and to carry it or to raise money to carry it, I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition because, frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close.

“It’ll end up being ripped down. It’s in very, very bad shape, very dangerous shape. You see steel falling down. You see plaster falling off ceilings. You see a lot of dangers. It’s been very badly maintained for 25 years,” he continued.

“I’d like to be able to save it, but it’s going to take a lot of subsidy into the future. And for us as an administration to want to do that, I think the Trump administration should be recognized.”

Trump scoffs at idea of Canada joining European Union in response to his trade war

Speaking to reporters at the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday, Donald Trump scoffed at the idea of Canada being driven to join the European Union as a result of the trade war he launched against the North American country.

“I think it’s laughable,” Trump said in remarks clipped and posted on social media by the White House. “The whole thing with Canada, Canada’s been a terrible trade partner. No, I don’t see that. If they do that, if I think it’s at all a hostile act, I will put very serious tariffs or stop trading with Europe on many things. So, if they do that, if Europe does that, with a bad intention – if it’s a good intention, that’s fine – if it’s bad intention we’ll put very heavy tariffs on Europe, which is a possibility.”

Trump claims he told Fed chair Kevin Warsh to vote with the rest of the board for rate hike

Asked if he still has confidence in Warsh, despite the rate hike Trump deplored, the president said:

As fans of Donald Trump wait for the start of his remarks in North Carolina, a live feed showed they were just treated to Sinéad O’Connor’s rendition of Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U.

It was not clear what the Republicans in attendance made of the tune, given that the late Irish singer was for a time a hate figure for American conservatives, after she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II during an appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1992, and said: “Fight the real enemy.”

The US Congress has passed a sweeping bill allowing Donald Trump to raise tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy and issue other punishing sanctions against the Kremlin following a pitched battle between lawmakers backing Ukraine and sceptics worried the bill gives the president too much power.

The Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 passed in a 262-159 vote on the last day before Congress goes on recess ahead of the midterm elections. Graham, who died earlier this year, co-authored and submitted the bill more than a year and a half ago.

The long delay in the vote was widely considered to be scepticism from the Trump administration, which had opposed additional sanctions and then recently changed its stance to support submitting the bill as efforts to negotiate with the Kremlin to end the war have yielded few results.

However the bill faced last-minute hurdles in Congress as members of the Republican party’s isolationist wing were joined by Democrats who warned that Trump could use the bill’s new tariffs authority against allies instead.

The bill would mandate new sanctions on Russian political and military officials, and foreign networks helping to supply Russia’s war machine and evade existing sanctions. It would also target Russia’s so-called fleet of “shadow tankers”, which have allowed the country to continue to ship crude around the world despite sanctions on its energy exports.

It would also allow Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top purchasers of Russian energy, including China, as well as other countries helping the Kremlin evade sanctions.

Senior Democrats voiced opposition to the bill during a heated floor debate. “Why in the world would this Congress give this president additional authority to visit that kind of economic harm on the American people?” said Hakeem Jeffries, the leading Democrat in the House, during a speech on Wednesday, adding he would vote against the bill.

Pentagon chief technology officer downplays concerns over AI safety and calls to nationalize AI firms

The US Department of Defense’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, dismissed safety concerns raised by the leaders of artificial intelligence companies in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday.

Michael, a former Uber executive, previously led the Pentagon’s efforts to press Anthropic to allow the defense department to use its Claude AI model for fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic mass surveillance.

Michael repeatedly said he opposes increased government regulatory oversight of AI companies and claimed that the alarms raised by leading AI firms were part of a “coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit” those firms.

He also suggested, as he had in a Fox News interview on Monday, that “the fear-mongering” is driven by an ideology called effective altruism.

“The amount of dollars being spent in DC now, directly and indirectly by this effective altruist movement,” Michael said, “I don’t think the country has ever seen.

“I think in the next few years, you’re going to see more dollars poured into this sort of industry from a lobbying standpoint, and to specific congresspeople and senators, than we’ve ever seen before,” he added. “And the promoters of some of these extinction death-cult-like philosophies are part of that effort.”

When Michael was asked if he favored the Trump administration seeking to nationalize or take partial government stakes in AI firms, he replied: “I hope not.”

He pointed out that the AI giants could become some of the biggest companies “in the history of the world. In America, that’s a good thing. We want others to come up alongside them. We don’t want government to get in the middle. That doesn’t really go well, in terms of nationalization.”

Kennedy Center closes, and looks set for construction, in apparent violation of court order

In apparent violation of a federal court order, the Kennedy Center was closed to the public on Wednesday and fencing was installed as construction looked set to begin, according to the testimony of a legal assistant working for the firm that represents the congresswoman Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and Kennedy Center trustee who sued to stop Donald Trump from closing the performing arts venue and adding his name to its facade.

The sworn statement was submitted to the District of Columbia court overseeing the lawsuit by Bridget Kennedy-Bailey of the Washington Litigation Group, in support of Beatty’s motion for an emergency hearing on the performing arts venue’s apparent closure.

Judge Christopher Cooper, who is overseeing Beatty’s suit, had ordered that the institution could not close to the public without his approval.

According to Kennedy-Bailey, when she visited the venue on Wednesday morning, she found the doors locked and was told by Kennedy Center employees that the facility was closed.

She also saw crews installing black metal gates outside the center, blocking all access, and white and orange barriers that “looked like those used on construction sites”.

Just before noon, someone who works in security for the center told the legal assistant “that the gates are for ‘public safety’ because they are doing construction inside the building”.

Kennedy-Bailey also testified that someone who said he works in public relations for the Kennedy Center told her that the building is closed for “repairs, and that staff are not allowed in without a hard hat”.

“I asked him if the construction was occurring today,” Kennedy-Bailey said, “and he stated that he was not sure but that it ‘seems like it’”

At the end of her sworn statement, Kennedy-Bailey said: “I saw a forklift carrying what appeared to be a more permanent form of fencing drive over to the north side of the building. I saw the forklift run into and hit the pillars on the building several times.”

Trump reacts to interest rate hike by demanding massive cut instead

Writing on his social media platform, the president also offered a bizarre argument that the United States economy would benefit “if we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them”.

Here is the president’s complete statement on the interest rate hike, taken to combat inflation driven at least in part by the rise in oil prices caused by the war on Iran he started and has not been able to end.

Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World – BY FAR. Our Country is BOOMING with new Investment! If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year. The word ‘Deficit’ is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are ‘carrying’ almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer. LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!

The central bank’s move is the first time the Fed has raised rates since July 2023 and clearly set Kevin Warsh, Trump’s pick to be the new Fed chair, on a collision course with the president.

“The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long,” Warsh said on Wednesday. “This summer’s inflation readings do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved.”

Reprinted from The Guardian