“This is literally the government of Japan giving Donald Trump and the America people $550 billion,” Howard Lutnick chuckled, feigning incredulity at his boss’s dealmaking prowess.

Lutnick was regaling Sean Hannity on Wednesday evening. It was telling that Lutnick instinctually mentioned Trump before the American public while discussing the so-called “Japan Investment America Initiative.”

“The Japanese understood — they wanted to get down to 15% — and Donald Trump drove — really, when we were negotiating –” Lutnick stopped. “We were negotiating,” he scoffed, lampooning his own temerity, before correcting himself. “Donald Trump was negotiating and I was watching!” he exclaimed, with a smarmy laugh.

Lutnick’s obsequiousness is already the stuff of legend and we’re only six months in. I say this sincerely: I’ve never seen the type of servile fawning Lutnick regularly displays towards Trump outside of outright, cartoon dictatorships. His groveling isn’t the stuff of autocracies, it’s the stuff of Pyongyang.

Demeanor aside, Lutnick was lying. As discussed here at some length on Wednesday, the investment fund Japan agreed to isn’t “Japan giving Donald Trump” half a trillion dollars. Not even figuratively, let alone “literally.” For one thing, the $550 billion figure is a cap. An upper-limit. Not a commitment. And the funding is, in part anyway, comprised of loan guarantees. And for now, it’s purely hypothetical. There are no plans for any actual projects and there’s no timeline.

In the same Hannity interview, Lutnick flat out called for Jerome Powell to be removed, by hook or by crook. Prompted by Hannity — who falsely suggested that lowering Fed funds would have an immediate impact on the US housing market — Lutnick said,

This guy’s gotta go. He should either resign or be replaced. And we gotta have rates lower so that Americans can buy single-family homes and have affordable mortgages. Come on, we gotta help Americans get in the door of their first home. And finally, we need interest rates lower.

So, if it were up to Howard, Powell would be gone already. He’d be given a chance to resign and failing that, he’d be fired. Or “replaced.” Presumably by Kevin Hassett. Or Samuel Alito. Or Larry Kudlow. Or, hell, Sean Hannity.

An hour or two after Lutnick’s latest Fox cameo — he’s on state television every day it seems — the White House published Trump’s daily schedule. Guess what? He’ll be visiting the Fed on Thursday afternoon.

No details were given about the visit, but whatever Trump does — and whoever he talks to — the point of the trip, quite plainly, is to intimidate. To show up, in person, with his security detail, and go about casting a long, rotund shadow.

I want to be absolutely clear to everyone who frequents these pages and works in the finance industry in any capacity: If you support the administration’s pressure campaign against the Fed, I have no respect for you whatsoever and consider you to be ignorant or else a pitiable, cowardly sycophant like Lutnick. If that’s you, pull it together. Reclaim your sanity and, just as importantly, your personal sovereignty and dignity before it’s too late. You’ll thank me later.

What’s going on here is unimaginably dangerous, and now Trump’s taking it up a notch by darkening Powell’s doorstep in person. This has to stop. But of course it won’t. As noted here, the Fed’s lost to us, just like The Supreme Court. If you think we can just throw all of this away — give it all to Trump — without material adverse societal consequences, you’re sorely mistaken. Don’t say you weren’t warned.