President Donald Trump reacted to a rate hike by the Federal Reserve by framing it as a personal attack on him.
The Federal Reserve announced the rate hike on Wednesday, but Trump previously attacked former Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell for not decreasing interest rates. The rate hike came under Kevin Warsh's leadership, the chairman Trump elevated to the job in May after months of attacking Powell.
Trump addressed the rate hike while speaking with reporters before a political rally in North Carolina, and it marked his first comments on the rate hike following a Truth Social meltdown. Trump told reporters that before the rate hike, the United States had the "lowest interest rate anywhere in the world because we're the best." He then began to speak in the third person to explain the Federal Reserve's decision to increase interest rates.
"They're raising the rates to make Trump do as bad as they can possibly do," Trump said. "The problem they have is that we have the greatest economy in history. We have over $21 trillion being invested in this country, which is five times more than we've ever had before."
Trump's $21 trillion investment figure has been repeatedly fact-checked as false. A CBS News review found no documentation showing total investments approaching $21 trillion, an amount roughly two-thirds of annual GDP, and independent tallies of the White House's own investment lists have come in trillions of dollars lower.
"So they're raising that only for political reasons," Trump said. "And that's a raise against Trump."
The Federal Reserve's policymakers unanimously voted to raise the benchmark rate by a quarter point, to a range of 3.75 percent to 4 percent, which is its first increase since 2023, and signaled another hike could come before year's end.
Warsh cast the move as a response to stubborn inflation, which picked up again last month as the war with Iran drove up prices. "The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long," Warsh said, according to reporting by NBC News.