The sudden flight of Adriana Kugler from the Federal Reserve Board, I gather, is being heralded as a rare stroke of luck for President Trump. The man, perpetually in want of more power, now finds the door ajar to install yet another loyalist at the very summit of American monetary policy. With a pliant Senate to rubber-stamp his choice, and a Federal Open Market Committee increasingly riven with discord, Trump seems poised to bend the Fed further to his inexhaustible will—if, indeed, he ever found the notion of central bank independence tolerable in the first place.

Of course, the method to his bluster is plain as ever. Trump, ever the merchant, is flogging the tired wares of cheap borrowing and borrowed time, pressuring the dignified Jerome Powell to slash interest rates until all that remains is froth and panic. He preens and fulminates against Powell in public, like some nouveau riche landowner barking at a butler, feeling entitled to total obedience simply by virtue of his seat at the table. Now, with economic clouds gathering and his own expensive tax follies casting ominous shadows over the deficit, Trump’s calls for a return to easy money have become even shriller—never mind that he jeopardizes, with each brash utterance, the very foundations of central bank credibility.

One can scarcely suppress a smile at the pantomime. I suppose it is inevitable, in a country determined to elevate mediocrity, that the loudest voice in the room becomes the arbiter of serious affairs. Imagine—tampering with the Federal Reserve as though it were a family trust fund to be pillaged on a whim, ignoring all prudence, all tradition, in pursuit of short-term gain. The prospect of a Fed board reconstituted to serve at the pleasure of the White House, populated by sycophants and hand-picked flatterers, must delight those who believe the world exists merely for their enrichment.

And yet, how droll that Trump and his supporters—so enamored with their notion of “greatness”—fail to see the splendid isolation of high finance from the grasping hands of government was designed not merely for aesthetics, but for the protection of future generations. The rabble may cheer for lower rates and easy prosperity, blind to the inflationary fire Trump is so desperate to set alight, but the wise know that such populist meddling always, in the end, leads to the bill coming due. It has ever been thus when people of inferior breeding and intellect attempt to play at statesmanship.

So let the parade continue. Let President Trump stuff the Fed with lackeys and bray about the urgency of profligate lending. It is ever the way of those with nothing to lose and everything to prove: to gamble the patrimony of the nation for the transient thrill of being in command. For my own part, I shall observe with the detachment befitting my station, well-insulated from the inevitable storms to come. One cannot help but pity those condemned to weather them—victims, as ever, of their own credulity and the unchecked ambition of their betters.