Kevin Warsh
I’ve been on the road, so I didn’t have time to post yesterday. But I did want to quickly comment on a news item I saw. On Tuesday, Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee asked Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee for Fed chair: “Who won the 2020 presidential election?”
Several commentators referred to this as a political question. Sorry, but there is nothing political about this question. It is a simple factual question, like adding together 2+2.
There is no ambiguity about who won the 2020 election. Biden won by more than seven million votes, a landslide in Trumpian terminology. (Trump routinely calls his 2024 victory a “landslide.” Biden’s margin was more than three times as large.)
Trump may be unable to acknowledge his loss, but his whining does not change reality. The simple fact is that Biden won in 2020, by a lot, and everyone knows this. There is no set of facts about the vote totals in dispute.
Trump’s yelling about some unidentifiable “fraud” changes nothing. He has had more than five years to produce evidence in court to prove that the numbers were not counted accurately or that there were millions of fraudulent votes. He has produced nothing. No serious person can question the 2020 results based on the Trump complaints.
The question for Warsh was simply whether he could say something that he knows to be true, when it will cause Trump to get angry. That is a perfect test of his ability to be an independent Fed chair.
Warsh gave a clear answer. He will do what Trump wants him to do, even when that means making a fool of himself in front of the whole country. This is not someone who should be Fed chair.
Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Dean Baker.
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