Wednesday brought a disappointing decision for the Trump administration, as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter percentage point, the first hike since 2023. The decision came with inflation still above the Fed’s 2 percent target and a labor market strong enough to raise fears that lower rates could reignite price growth.
But President Trump revealed after the decision that he told Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh to vote for the increase, not because he supported it, but because the board was going to do so anyway. Trump continues to argue that interest rates are too high and that lower rates would help heat up the economy, reduce borrowing costs, and make it easier to run deficits while paying down the national debt.
🔥🚨 JUST IN — President Trump just said he told Kevin Warsh to vote for the hike because the rest of the board was going to do it anyway.
— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) September 16, 2026
“I told the chairman, and I said, ‘You might as well vote to support it; it’s not going to matter.’”
“The board is very hostile. They’re… pic.twitter.com/lF3aKneCMw
"Do you still have confidence in Fed Chair Kevin Warsh?" a reporter asked.
"I do. I mean, I'm relying on Kevin, but he's got, you know, a very tough board. He's got a board that was put there by a lot of other people, and the interest rates are too high for that to be appropriate, and I told, I talked to Kevin, and I said, you might as well vote with the board because it's not going to matter," the president said. "The board is very hostile, they're very political, they're doing the wrong thing, they're putting their politicians, or people put on by politicians. It's a shame because it's too high an interest rate."
"Despite that, the country barrels through everything because we're doing so well, but the interest rates are too high. We should be paying the lowest interest rates anywhere in the world because we have the strongest credit," Trump added. "If we want to generate deficits, which we could do with the swipe of a pen with every country, we'd make a trillion and a half dollars a year. We'd pay off our debt, we'd do all sorts of things, but we haven't chosen to do that, but at some point we will. Interest rates are too high."
The comments came just hours after President Trump posted a scathing critique of the Fed’s rate hike on Truth Social. It also arrived only months after former Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s tenure ended, an era marked by persistent friction with Trump, largely because Powell resisted cutting interest rates amid many of the same economic conditions Warsh now faces.
"Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World — BY FAR. Our Country is BOOMING with new Investment! If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year," the president wrote on Truth Social. "The word 'Deficit' is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are 'carrying' almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer. LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST! President DONALD J. TRUMP."
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.
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