Nobody has to “explain” anything to Donald Trump. Not you, not me and certainly not Scott Bessent.

Besides, you can’t believe everything you read in the papers. The “lamestream” media’s a den of snakes who’ll say anything to ruin a man’s reputation. No outlet’s more iniquitous in that regard than The Wall Street Journal.

Just last week, they published a salacious story about birthday letters to Jeffrey Epstein, and to let the Journal tell it, one of those letters was “hand-drawn with a heavy marker” and signed “Donald.” If that’s not a lie, I don’t know what is.

An outfit that’d print something like that surely can’t be trusted to accurately report behind-the-scenes discussions about a scheme to oust the Fed Chair, which is why you shouldn’t believe the Journal‘s contention that Bessent talked Trump out of moving against Jerome Powell in part by “explain[ing] to him that firing Powell would be bad for the market.”

“Nobody had to explain that to me,” an irritable Trump said, deriding the Journal‘s reporting. “If it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED!”

That’s pretty rich coming from the “very large brain” that brought us “Liberation Day” and the ensuing market chaos, including a harrowing downdraft for the S&P 500, which fell an average of 1% for every hour of cash trading over the subsequent two and a half trading days.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the Journal‘s reporting — about Bessent cautioning Trump against firing Powell — is probably true, where “probably” means almost surely. We were very (very) close to seeing a Fed Chair unilaterally removed last week, and an incredulous Wall Street’s now awake to the reality of the threat. As one CIO put it, in remarks quoted by Bloomberg, “We would have always assumed there is no basis for firing a Fed chair [but] there is a clear sense that this is now changing.”

I wish there were a nicer way to put this, but these people are hopeless. When it comes to Trump — and I used to lament the same dynamic with EM strategists and PMs vis-à-vis Erdogan in Turkey — Wall Street habitually assumes the very thing that’s in question.

Up until the last few days, the argument was essentially this: Trump won’t fire Powell because he can’t. Well, guess what? Trump can do whatever he wants if America’s not a democracy anymore, and I hate to be the bearer of the same bad news that sundry democracy indicators have been trying to convey for quite some time, but it’s not.

The Powell ordeal’s just a microcosm of America’s transition to authoritarian rule. The fact that virtually no one on Wall Street would concede that — or at least not when it’s couched in those terms — isn’t especially surprising. They don’t study political structures, so they have no frame of reference, nor any context whatever, for their inherently uninformed musings about the supposed “limits” of an executive marking an autocratic transition.

Consider also that when we’re talking about Wall Street we’re by and large talking about rich white guys who go for Republicans on Election Day. Those are the last people who’ll lose their civil liberties in an autocratic transition under Trump. They don’t see it because for them it’s still remote.

Or maybe not. Maybe it isn’t so remote now, and maybe that’s why they’re starting to pay attention. In Powell, Trump’s going after a rich white guy who made a fortune in private equity and who, at least until recently, voted Republican on Election Day. “First they came for the Communists…”

The maddening part of this is that by the time democratic backsliding in America becomes impossible to ignore because it’s encroaching regularly on all of our daily lives, ignoring it will be a professional imperative on Wall Street in a very literal sense. To say anything that could be construed as even remotely critical of the administration will be to risk one’s livelihood if not, hopefully, one’s life (you can speak ill of Viktor Orban in Hungary and be generally secure in your physical well-being at least).

We’re in a kind of twilight right now where it’s still possible for affluent, well-connected people to call this what it is without incurring adverse consequences. But it’s not clear how long that’s going to last. Assuming things keep going the way they’re going, it won’t be worth it to speak any sort of truth about power, let alone to power, by this time next year.

That’s how systems like the one Trump’s building work: They raise the cost of criticism not so high that you have to martyr yourself to speak out à la Alexei Navalny, but high enough that anyone who has anything to lose won’t bother.

Eventually, society becomes numb to it, accepts that resistance is futile and implicitly acquiesces to a new social contract wherein Fidesz, AKP, BJP and, now, the GOP, leaves you to go about your life untroubled in exchange for passive compliance.

For Wall Street, that’ll mean strategists and analysts are compelled to ignore the elephant in the room and tread very carefully during adverse market events triggered by the administration.

In a lot of cases, they’re already doing that anyway, and the good news is, there won’t be any such events. Because as Trump reminded everyone on Sunday, “I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market.”

Don’t agree? Well, you need to “Get your information CORRECT,” as Trump put it. “People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!”