This’ll be a long week for Jerome Powell.

The Fed convenes Tuesday and Wednesday, and Donald Trump badly wants a rate cut. Spoiler alert: He’s not going to get one. There’s no chance — none — of a move at the May FOMC meeting.

I don’t want to debate a counterfactual, but it’s not crazy to suggest the Fed would be at least considering additional rate cuts currently were it not for the tariffs, and if Trump had the discipline to keep his mouth shut about monetary policy in public.

Although the US labor market’s holding up nicely as evidenced by a solid April jobs report, it’s plainly cooling or anyway nowhere near overheating. Annual wage growth’s more or less consistent with 2% consumer price growth now, and the unemployment rate, while still very low by historical standards, is one uptick away from printing a full percentage above the cycle low.

When considered with inflation which, while still above target, was benign in March, it’s reasonable to assess that a Fed left to its own devices — i.e., a Fed unburdened by an executive determined to keep monetary policy in the news as a way of setting up Powell to be the fall guy in the event of a recession — might be prepared to telegraph an inclination to dial back policy restriction further, perhaps at a quarterly cadence beginning in June.

Alas, because Trump’s gripe with Powell makes headlines every few days, the Fed’s constrained in its capacity to lean dovish, lest they should be viewed by markets as having succumbed to Trump’s pressure campaign.

The perception that the Fed’s acquiescing to an aspiring strongman wasn’t especially dangerous in 2019 — when Powell engineered an excuse to embark on so-called “insurance cuts” after a year of Trump’s badgering — because the domestic political environment bore no resemblance to what’s unfolding in 2025.

Today, Trump’s systematically dismantling American’s system of governance in an unprecedented bid to consolidate power in the executive. In the process, he’s using the levers of government to extract concessions and de facto featly pledges from law firms, universities and corporate executives. “It’s happening here,” to employ the political science allusion to autocratic metamorphosis, and the Fed’s the next domino to fall.

The only apparent check on Trump’s acquisitive impulses vis-à-vis US monetary policy are markets, which shudder at the prospect of a Fed literally beholden the White House, which is to say beholden in a manner reminiscent of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s influence at Turkey’s central bank.

I want to emphasize: You can ignore anyone penning market commentary who scoffs at that comparison — the comparison between Trump and Erdogan. If anything’s abundantly clear now, it’s that Trump’s deadly serious about removing Powell, or any other Fed official not on board with cutting rates when asked. Whether he goes down that road’s another matter, but this isn’t an overblown concern. All the people — i.e., analysts, strategists, pundits and so forth — who downplayed Trump’s threats were wrong.

For what it’s worth, markets are currently fully pricing three cuts for 2025 with slim odds of a fourth.

In some cases, interpreting market pricing demands nuance. Here, I think it’s relatively straightforward: Quarterly cuts might make sense assuming the tariffs aren’t implemented in such a way that the inflation outlook deteriorates dramatically.

“It will be useful to have context for how the Fed is framing the negative Q1 real-GDP print and if monetary policymakers will be as comfortable dismissing the decline as a one-off, idiosyncratic move that’s unlikely to represent a true shift in the trajectory of the US economy,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen and Vail Hartman said. “While that’s our take on Q1’s slowdown, it is difficult to imagine the Fed will completely dismiss the report as meaningless, particularly with the backdrop of the mounting headwinds to global growth that have become evident in recent weeks.”

Again, expect Trump to weigh in on social media and also in remarks to the press. He’ll almost surely lambast Powell and co. for keeping rates on hold this week, thereby making the optics around a June cut more challenging for the Fed. Trump doesn’t understand that paradoxical feedback loop, and even if did, he wouldn’t care.