Donald Trump’s already pressuring Kevin Warsh to cut rates.

Before losing his patience and storming out of an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker, who he derided as “dirty,” “crooked” and “stupid,” Trump said the Fed, under Warsh’s leadership, “should actually lower interest rates” in the face of robust economic data.

“After this month’s jobs report, economists say it’s possible the Fed may have to raise rates,” Welker told Trump, enunciating. “Do you think that’s possible, and what would your reaction be, sir?”

The “correct” answer, of course, is simply that it’s not up to The White House, and that Warsh and the FOMC have his full support to act in accordance with what they believe’s best for the American people, consistent with their congressional mandate.

Trump offered a more “nuanced” take. “So, I’m of a different–” he began, before interrupting himself to offer a muttered preamble: “Kevin’s fantastic. I want him to do whatever he wants. I don’t want to have a big influence on him.”

Having delivered the obligatory (and wholly disingenuous) nod to the Fed’s institutional independence, Trump got to the point. “We’re doing great and it’s unfair that when you do great they want to raise interest rates,” he told Welker. “It should be the opposite way.”

To state the obvious: That’s a mischaracterization of monetary policy. No one’s saying, nor has anyone ever said, “All this good data’s too much, I can’t take it, we gotta put a stop to it by raising rates.” This isn’t a case of Fed officials being “tired of winning.”

Rather, the idea’s to balance two-sided risks around the dual mandate. And currently, headline inflation’s on the brink of eclipsing the jobless rate.

There’s the chart. I used it in the latest Weekly too, but this time I left out the 2s10s curve to avoid overloading readers with information.

A 4.3% UNR — it’s actually lower unrounded — is at or near NAIRU. Whether you believe NAIRU’s useful for policymaking, it has some utility as a concept. There’s something at least vaguely intuitive about the notion that past a certain (low) point for joblessness, employers experiencing robust demand will be forced to compete for workers. That contest will manifest as wage competition. If that becomes escalatory, it can be inflationary.

The latest JOLTS report suggested demand for workers (job vacancies) outstripped supply (job-searching unemployed Americans) in April for the first time since last summer. Then came the blockbuster May jobs report which, when you factor in the accompanying revisions, showed job creation running at the fastest three-month pace in two years.

This wouldn’t be so urgent if inflation weren’t about to register a four-handle. And if the 2021/2022 inflation weren’t so fresh in Americans’ minds. There’s a meaningful (if still negligible) chance that expectations become unmoored as a result of back-to-back price level shocks.

If that happens — if consumers begin to suspect prices are likely to keep rising at an uncomfortable rate in perpetuity — they could begin to demand even higher wages and pull forward consumption, activating the most feared of all self-feeding macro dynamics. That’s when things get dicey for policymakers. That’s the point of no return.

It’s not that Trump doesn’t understand that. Rather, it’s that like nearly all populists, he’d rather chance the inflationary doom loop than see growth curbed by technocrats. That’s particularly true given that hyperinflation risks are sharply attenuated by the dollar’s reserve status. (Never say never, but America can’t experience hyperinflation in the absence of an all-out civil war or some manner of literal apocalypse.)

In the simplest terms: Warsh is screwed. Already. He hasn’t even presided over one FOMC meeting yet and Trump’s already on national television calling for lower rates.

During the same interview, Trump complained about the June 5 stock selloff. “If you go back 15 or 20 years, when you had good [jobs] reports, the market went up,” he said. “Nowadays when you have good reports the market goes down because they think you’re gonna raise interest rates.”

In case Warsh was somehow unclear about The White House’s expectations, Trump drove it home. “There’s no reason to raise interest rates,” he said. “What they do when they raise interest rates is they try to kill success.”