Anger is mounting among Republicans after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell revealed on Sunday that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into him, marking an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s public efforts to coerce Powell into lowering interest rates. “If there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), a member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a scathing statement on Sunday. “It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.”  Tillis then vowed to oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed until the legal matter is “fully resolved.” This includes the upcoming Chair vacancy as Powell is due to step down as Chair in May, though he may continue to serve on the board afterward.  Calling the investigation “nothing more than an attempt at coercion,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) appeared to go a step further, suggesting that it is the Justice Department that should be investigated—not Powell. “If the Department of Justice believes an investigation into Chair Powell is warranted based on project cost overruns—which are not unusual—then Congress needs to investigate the Department of Justice,” she added.  According to Powell, the Justice Department’s investigation relates to testimony he gave before the Senate Banking Committee last June about renovations of the Federal Reserve’s office headquarters in Washington. The costly renovations have prompted the president and his allies to baselessly suggest that fraud may have been committed. As Powell said in his video statement on Sunday, such assertions are widely viewed as a cover for Trump’s campaign to pressure Powell to cut interest rates and lower the cost of federal debt. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation,” Powell said in a rare video message.  Powell, a Republican who was first nominated as a member of the Federal Reserve board by Barack Obama and later promoted to Chair by Trump during his first term, vowed to continue his duty of public service, which “sometimes requires standing firm in the face of threats.”   News of the criminal investigation comes as the Fed’s rate-setting meeting is scheduled to take place later this month, where it is expected to halt its recent rate cuts. Shortly after Powell’s announcement, Trump claimed in an interview with NBC News on Sunday that he did not have any knowledge of the DOJ’s investigation into the Federal Reserve. The president also denied that the subpoenas had anything to do with pressuring Powell on interest rates. “What should pressure him is the fact that rates are far too high,” Trump said. “That’s the only pressure he’s got.” But Trump’s own words leading up to the subpoenas appear to contradict his denials. In fact, it was as recently as December 29 when Trump publicly suggested that he may pursue legal action against Powell about the Federal Reserve building renovations.   “It’s going to end up causing more than $4 billion—$4 billion!” Trump said in a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, insisting it was the “highest price of construction per square foot in the history of the world.”  “He’s just a very incompetent man, but we’re going to probably bring a lawsuit against him,” Trump added. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, told Politico that “the independence of the Federal Reserve is paramount and I oppose any effort to pressure them into action.” The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Powell’s statement or criticism from Republican lawmakers. The dollar has since dropped, with the price of gold jumping to a record price after news of the DOJ’s investigation broke. Trump’s attacks on the Federal Reserve go well beyond Powell. In August, the president attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the board, based on unproven allegations of mortgage fraud, as part of the same campaign to pressure the Fed into lowering rates. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked Trump’s move, and it is scheduled to hear arguments next week. The case will decide whether the president has the power to fire a board member of the Federal Reserve for any reason. 

This Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, at thousands of sites around the country, are expected to draw huge numbers of demonstrators fed up with the constitutional overreach and autocratic drift of President Donald Trump’s administration. But according to some of the most powerful Republicans in Washington, something more nefarious is at work. “This is part of antifa, paid protesters,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told Fox News. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called it the “Hate America Rally” and claimed that it would feature “pro-Hamas” and “antifa people.” It was a “small but very violent and vocal group,” said Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota. Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall warned that “Soros-paid…professional protestors” would be taking to the streets. “Hopefully it will be peaceful—I doubt it.” No Kings organizers and participants I spoke with this week, from leaders of major national organizations to retired volunteers at small local groups, have responded to the intensifying rhetoric from the right-wing with a mix of incredulity and resolve.  “The initial reaction was visceral laughter, when I first saw it, and the second reaction was, gosh Mike, thanks for the free publicity,” said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, a lead organizer of the weekend event, of Johnson’s comments. “It’s funny that he knows that the phrase ‘No Kings’ is so unobjectionable that if you watch him talk now he just twists himself into knots to not say that.” But Levin’s third reaction, he said, was more serious. This was, after all, a ruling political party attempting to undercut the freedom of assembly because it feared the imagery such peaceful assemblies might produce. At the last No Kings rally in June, Levin noted, he and his wife—Indivisible’s co-founder, Leah Greenberg—led a crowd of 100,000 in Philadelphia in the Pledge of Allegiance. “Any authoritarian regime is scared of one thing more than anything else, which is peaceful mass people power,” he said, because it challenges the idea “that they are entirely in control and hold the cards.” For Republican officials, it’s easier to assert that the resistance they’re facing is coming from a shadowy fifth column, than to grapple with the fact that millions of ordinary people are so fed up. But it’s still a deeply strange assertion to anyone with a passing familiarity with Indivisible, an organization that began after the 2016 election as a simple Google Doc on how Trump opponents could pressure their elected representatives. (A 2020 Atlantic story on one group of suburban activists who had made use of Indivisible’s guide was titled “Revenge of the Wine Moms.”) But of course Levin was going to say this wasn’t all part of a plot to burn down American cities. So I called up some other organizers. Demonstrators participate in the nationwide ”No Kings Good Trouble” protest against Donald Trump, his policies, and continued ICE raids in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 17, 2025, at Veterans Park. Jason Whitman/NurPhoto “We have 1.8 million members in the AFT—I’m sure somebody’s gonna say to me that someone of the 1.8 million members subscribes to that philosophy but there is no organizing within the AFT on behalf of anything that’s called ‘Antifa’ that I’ve ever seen,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers—which, not to belabor the point, is a union consisting of teachers. A volunteer for another partner organization, Mennonite Action—“a movement of Mennonites, Christians, and friends”—said in an email that the group was holding 40 training sessions around the country this month on subjects such as “Nonviolent Action 101,” and “faith based non-cooperation in the authoritarian moment.”  “I suppose if that makes us anti-fascist, the label applies,” the volunteer said. It might—but if your definition of a violent mob includes well-organized Mennonites, that says more about you. Other partner organizations include the Center for Biological Diversity, which is currently running a petition to save sea turtles, and National Nurses United, a union representing, you guessed it, nurses. “You are clearly seeing people resisting what’s happening and how it’s affecting them in their everyday lives,” said Cathy Kennedy, NNU’s president.  When I spoke with Greg Broyles, a member of an Indivisible group in Roanoke, Virginia, which is listed as one of more than 200 partners for No Kings, he seemed mystified by the way Republicans were characterizing protestors.  “To compare Indivisible to antifa is going to make antifa just laugh their bellies off,” he said. “We have people in our group who don’t want to use offensive wording on our signage.”  Broyles is a 63-year-old former Marine and a semi-retired real-estate investor. And a disproportionate number of his group’s members are older residents like him. “To say that there’s some sort of conspiracy of left-wing groups is absurd—it just means you haven’t operated in a left-wing space,” he said Just like people say, well, academics all conspire together. You obviously never sat in a room with a room full of professors! It’s just a ridiculous aspersion that’s being cast by the right on the left. All we are are people who want to raise our families and also enjoy the welfare state that we agreed to participate in.” Thousands of demonstrators take part in the “No Kings, Free DC” protest calling for statehood and voting rights for residents of the District of Columbia in Washington, DC.Robyn Stevens Brody/Sipa USA/AP Other local leaders who are partnering on the protests said their groups skewed older too. “We have time, we can meet—that’s kind of how it is with a lot of things in this town,” said Lisa Swanson, who retired from the US Postal Service and now volunteers with Morgan County Indivisible in the West Virginia panhandle town of Berkeley Springs. Mary Beth Furman, who retired to Scottsdale four years ago after a career in marketing and who now writes the newsletter for her group Stand Indivisible Arizona, said that “If you come to any of our protests, it’s a bunch of old grandmas and grandpas and dogs.” Furman’s group describes itself as non-partisan and engages in a lot of activities that aren’t political at all. They hold food drives and collect shoes. One of the group’s next events is a letter-writing campaign. “We’re gonna write thank-you notes to the institutions that are doing a good job, that we support, that are doing good things—we want them to know we recognize you, keep it up” she said. (She wasn’t sure yet who would fit the bill—naturally, another committee was planning the meetup.) But these are the sorts of people the Speaker of the House and other prominent Washington Republicans are accusing of being affiliated with “antifa”—which the White House, in turn, has accused of domestic terrorism. For Indivisible groups and other organizations participating in big protests, de-escalation is the name of the game, as they push to pro-actively avoid anything that would even give a passing resemblance to disorder. Hunter Dunn, a national spokesperson for another No Kings partner, 50501, said organizers have been “training tens of thousands of volunteers in de-escalation and community care,” both through online and in-person sessions. Levin noted that all No Kings events are required to have a safety plan in place.  Furman, whose group has held de-escalation trainings and promoted similar events from the ACLU (another No Kings partner which is, again, not antifa), preaches a zen-like mantra to her fellow group members when a driver of truck flips them off: “If nobody sees the finger does the finger really exist?” Still, organizers view the rhetoric as a clear act of intimidation, from a movement helmed by a man who once sicced a mob against Congress itself. They’re on guard for right-wing agitators attempting to create a scene, and are conscious of the fact that some of the cities they’ll be marching in—including Chicago and Portland—are currently crawling with federal agents. “They want to take us off our message, and they want to take us off what the point is, which is that there are millions of people in America that do not like what’s going on right now,” Weingarten said. “They may have really different policies, differences from me or my union or other educators or other people in the labor movement, but where we come together is that we should all have a right to govern ourselves through a democracy—not through this push to disappear people, to militarize our streets, to hate someone’s opponents to the point that they would abuse the power of the government to go against people who they disagree with.” To organizers, these accusations of violence and sinister conspiracies are cause for caution and planning, but they’re also sort of the point. It’s not called the No Mild-Mannered Republicans protest, after all. If they weren’t so concerned about lawlessness and intimidation and extra-constitutional methods, they wouldn’t be marching at all.

When New York Attorney General Letitia James accused Donald Trump of committing fraud by lying to banks and insurance companies about the value of his properties, he never really denied it. Everyone does things like this, his lawyers argued, and no bank ever lost money—so what’s the big deal? > All three Trump cabinet members denied any wrongdoing. But now that he’s in back office, Trump seems to have decided that telling banks things that aren’t true while seeking loans is a very big deal after all. His administration has launched investigations into James herself and Lisa Cook, a Biden-appointee on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, alleging both women improperly told banks that two different properties each owned were both their primary residences. He’s previously made similar accusations against one of his main Democratic antagonists in Congress, California Sen. Adam Schiff. The investigations were launched with the help of Bill Pulte, the Trump appointee leading the Federal Housing Finance Agency. On Friday, Reuters reported that relatives of Pulte appear to have done the very thing Trump and Pulte are targeting James and Cook over. Reuters says that Pulte’s father and stepmother had simultaneously requested “homestead exemptions”—a discount on property taxes for a primary residence—on two different properties, one in Michigan and one in Florida. It’s not clear if it is illegal to do so, and in some cases, tax experts told Reuters, it is permissible—for example if a married couple live separately. But after being asked about the Pultes’ situation, local tax officials promptly revoked the exemption on the Michigan house, Reuters reported. The news about Pulte’s relatives comes after a Thursday report from ProPublica revealed that three different members of Trump’s cabinet appear to have simultaneously claimed multiple properties as their primary residence. ProPublica found records showing Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin all claimed two different homes as primary residences. Chavez-DeRemer made the claims about her two homes (one in the Oregon Congressional district she previously represented, and one in Arizona, where she is known to vacation) within two months of each other. All three cabinet members denied any wrongdoing and accused ProPublica of liberal bias. According to ProPublica, it is not necessarily illegal to claim multiple homes as your primary residence at the same time—and in some cases, it may be encouraged by bank employees—but it is generally frowned upon. Banks typically offer reduced mortgage rates for primary residences, and higher rates for second homes; the practice stems from a belief that people are more likely to diligently repay the mortgage on a property if they live in it full-time.

It’s 7 p.m. on Thursday and Elli, a 19-year-old transplant from Chattanooga, Tennessee, just took an Adderall. The DC resident, who goes by they/them pronouns and asked Mother Jones not to publish their last name, needed the boost of energy. They’re drained from spending the last several nights roving the city on foot to surveil the FBI and ICE agents who are—under the orders of President Donald Trump—surveilling the people of DC. “Wherever there are people watching, law enforcement gets intimidated,” the lanky teenager explained of their efforts as we walked past tactical military vehicles in Navy Yard. > There is plenty of backlash—it’s just a grittier and less organized form of > it, carried out by Washingtonians with cellphone cameras and some spare time. Elli wouldn’t make it back to their apartment until 2 a.m. on Friday, after visiting six DC neighborhoods and uploading 10 social media posts alerting followers to various forms of law enforcement activity. In all, Elli’s iPhone shows they’ve walked upwards of 20,000 steps a day while documenting the federal takeover.  And Elli was just one of more than a dozen of self-appointed watchdogs I observed participating in what amounted to an after-dark patrol squad on Thursday night. The scene contrasted with what a columnist described as a “weirdly quiet” local response in a Politico piece titled, “Why Washington Residents Aren’t Flooding the Streets to Protest Trump,” published earlier that day. While it’s accurate to say there hasn’t been anything close to a modern-day March on Washington since Trump brought in the National Guard to address DC’s purported crime problem, the DC locals who are wrestling with the increased presence of law enforcement say that’s for good reason. Megaphones and mass demonstrations are unlikely to mollify the hazards of a heightened police state—and these tactics may even exacerbate what Trump-opposing locals fear most: bigger dispatches of law enforcement, which could target more immigrants and other vulnerable populations. “Being a middle-aged white man, I can be outside and keep an eye on what’s happening,” says Andrew Hall, a DC resident of 19 years who lingered around the corner of 14th and U St NW around 9:30 p.m., after a concert protesting the National Guard presence ended. “It’s not safe for others to be out in public, or even go to the grocery store right now.” But what’s clear from merely existing in my city this week is that the “lack of street-level backlash” the Politico columnist lamented isn’t the full picture of DC’s response to the federal agents donning tactical vests near our landmarks. There is plenty of backlash—it’s just a grittier and less organized form of it, carried out by Washingtonians with cellphone cameras and some spare time. The DC resistance isn’t manifesting this week as recognizable members of Congress marching up and down Pennsylvania Avenue with CNN cameras in tow, but as an array of ordinary DC residents documenting what’s happening in their neighborhoods and mobilizing pop-up actions based on the information being shared. In the densely populated Northwest DC neighborhood of Columbia Heights on Tuesday, for example, locals noticed about a dozen Homeland Security personnel outside a metro station. “ICE go home!” some 150-plus people chanted at the agents, several of whom had their faces covered with masks. The growing crowd and their pinpointed cameras were apparently enough to deter the ICE agents from the area, which has a high population of Black and Hispanic residents.  In Mount Pleasant, an even smaller display of opposition took place recently when a local woman approached what appeared to be a handful of off-the-clock federal agents sitting outside a restaurant. She repeatedly asked them if they were locals, where they lived, and what agency they worked for while filming them. Declining to answer her questions, the three or four individuals eventually walked to a black Hyundai Sonata with an out-of-state license plate. “Nobody likes you,” she yelled in a video shared by the news outlet Migrant Insider on Thursday. “Get the fuck out of my neighborhood!” On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller took a field trip to visit the National Guard troops patrolling outside Union Station. While there, the politicians got some Shake Shack—plus a stupendous amount of heckling. The opposition included professional protestors who have shown up daily at the train station since May, as well as many residents who happened to be there for their daily commute.  In the days since, more and more DC locals have been trying to gather information what to do should they encounter the federal agents, or the politicians who ordered them here. On a Zoom call organized by the DC-statehood group Free DC Friday morning, more than 250 showed up and asked questions about best practices for fighting back. In break-out rooms, attendees discussed walking around their neighborhoods with signs alerting people to the presence of ICE, as well as joining ward-based Signal chats to organize response efforts among neighbors. In the Zoom chat, one attendee asked how they could warn others that ICE was in their area at that very moment. DC residents are routinely reporting such sightings on ICEblock, an iPhone app tailor-made for locals to pinpoint ICE agents in real time. There’s also an emergency hotline (202-335-1183), which then shares the reports with the immigrant community. Beyond these dedicated spaces, I’m also seeing neighbors post sightings of law enforcement and police checkpoints on Nextdoor, which historically has been known as a watering hole for nosy neighbors and humdrum bigots, but in DC—at least recently—has turned into a space where people are trying to help strangers. “On The Corner Of 4th And Rhode Island Ave RIGHT NOW,” one Nextdoor user posted alongside an image of an ICE-labeled vehicle on Thursday. “ICE is back in Mount Pleasant at Bancroft & Park Pleasant Apartments,” shared someone else.  “You don’t need to do what I’m doing to be helpful,” Elli says of the various ways DC residents can warn their neighbors. “All you need is a phone.”