Now that Donald Trump has secured a historic victory, returning to the White House for another term in January, assorted pundits are pontificating that the president-elect will give away the store to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, especially when it comes to resolving the almost three-year Russia-Ukraine conflict.

I’m here to tell you that President-elect Trump is a gift to Ukraine and a nightmare for Putin. 

Trump is the first U.S. president who has been able to outsmart the Russian dictator after the latter had fooled four U.S. presidents. Yes, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and, of course, President Biden. All fell for the ‘former’ KGB operative’s chicanery, having gullibly trusted Putin that Russia could be America’s friend.

George W. Bush famously proclaimed that he ‘looked the man [Putin] in the eye.’ Bush described Putin, the ‘former’ KGB operative, as ‘consistent, transparent, honest, and an easy man to discuss our opportunities and problems with,’ according to the White House archives.

Friendship? Common values? Seriously? The FBI had just arrested its own agent, Robert Hanssen, a 20-year spy for the KGB, in February 2001. The most damaging spy in modern history, Hanssen sold some of the most sensitive U.S. secrets to the Russians, including our nuclear secrets, the existence of a secret American-built tunnel under the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the identities of Soviets who spied for America.

Evidently, Bush and his advisers weren’t deterred by the fact that Putin’s first Foreign Policy Concept pronounced America’s ‘economic and power dominance’ as a threat to Russia’s national interests and his first military doctrine alluded to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) being a top threat to Russia’s security. Both were approved by Putin in 2000.

Even the terrifying revelation made by the House Armed Services Committee in October 1999 about Russia’s ‘sabotage plans’ against the United States failed to prevent the spell that Putin projected on Bush. Transcripts of congressional testimonies reveal that the committee had in its possession ‘dramatic evidence’ of the KGB’s positioning on NATO territory and possibly United States territory caches of high explosives and arms intended for sabotage operations in the event of war.

Bush wasn’t the first U.S. president played by Putin. Vlad began his charm offensive targeting U.S. presidents for manipulation with Bill Clinton. Clinton called Putin on Mar 27, 2000, the day after the Russian elections, to congratulate him on his victory. Declassified White House records reveal a very chummy phone call in which the leaders of former Cold War archenemies called each other by their first names, Vladimir and Bill.

Clinton expressed eagerness to build relations with his Russian counterpart and ‘the relationship between the U.S. and Russia.’

‘We can accomplish a lot together,’ he told Putin. And Vladimir responded in kind, assuring Bill that his trust wasn’t misplaced.

‘It is clear to the whole world that I am a person you can work with,’ Putin said, and he thanked Clinton for his comments about the Russian dictator’s ‘modest personality.’

‘The statement that you made about my modest personality was not unacknowledged here … this statement by the U.S. president was not unnoticed by people in Russia and throughout the world.’ 

Declassified transcripts of 500 pages of telephone conversations between Britain’s Tony Blair and former President Clinton that occurred between 1997 and December 2000 reveal that ‘Slick Willie’ was also under Vlad’s spell. Clinton considered Putin ‘smart and thoughtful,’ someone with ‘enormous potential.’

‘I think [Putin] is a guy with a lot of ability and ambitions for the Russians. His intentions are generally very honorable and straightforward, but he just hasn’t made up his mind yet,’ Clinton told Blair.

Barack Obama was next. He famously promised Putin’s proxy, then-President Dmitry Medvedev, ‘more flexibility’ in American policy toward Russia, unaware that his conversation was captured by a microphone. In 2013, Putin dissuaded Obama from following through on his earlier warning that Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, crossed the ‘red line’ when he targeted his own citizens with a chemical strike. Another of Putin’s proxies, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, convinced his counterpart, John Kerry, that there was no need for a punishing strike because Russia would remove the chemical weapons arsenal from Syria. Putin’s maneuver allowed Obama to save face while claiming a diplomatic victory.

Four years later, however, Assad was still gassing his people. That is until on April 7, 2017, when President Trump enforced Obama’s 2012 ‘red line.’ Authorized by Trump, the U.S. military launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Shayrat Airbase in Homs, the source of a sarin gas attack that killed more than 80 Syrians on April 4, 2017.

When he characterized his relationship with Obama as ‘working and personal’ marked by ‘growing trust,’ what Putin really meant was that he had outsmarted yet another U.S. leader and that his KGB tactics were working well, for Russia that is. After all, it was on Obama’s watch that Russia invaded Crimea and made it part of Russia in 2014. And it was on Biden’s watch that Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 after Biden green-lighted this action with his ‘minor incursion’ comment.

Putin managed to trick four presidents to begin their terms with the pursuit of a naive Russia ‘reset’ policy doomed to failure from the very start.

How does the Russian master manipulator do it?

Putin prides himself on his ability to ‘work and communicate with people’ and to ‘work with information.’ Working with information means learning everything about your target. Working with people means communicating with your target in a way that appeals to his vanity. Pushing your target’s buttons and exploiting his vulnerabilities is classic intelligence tradecraft. Putin honed these skills as a KGB operative, recruiting spies in Eastern Germany who were willing to betray their country in service to Russia.

When his close friend asked him what his job as a KGB officer entailed, Putin responded that he was a ‘specialist in communicating with people,’ which can also be translated as ‘a specialist in human relations.’ During a press conference in 2001, Putin explained that working with people entails the ability to communicate with a wide range of individuals, from journalists and scientists to politicians and rank-and-file citizens: ‘It is important to establish a dialogue and activate the best in your partner. You want to achieve results; you must respect your partner, acknowledge that he is better than you in some way. You must make him your ally … make him feel that there is something that unites you, that you have a common cause.’

Even the American media was so beguiled by the KGB operative in the Kremlin that Putin was chosen as ‘Person of the Year’ by Time magazine in 2007 and four times in a row from 2013 to 2016 by Forbes magazine as the ‘World’s Most Powerful Individual.’

Putin’s trickery didn’t work with former President Trump, however. 

You see, Trump invented the game. He loves talking with people and understands the value of communicating, even with foreign dictators. Last month, Trump angered the commentariat when he told Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait that talking with Putin is a ‘smart thing.’

Replying to Micklethwait’s question about whether he had continued contact with Putin after leaving the White House in 2021, Trump said, ‘But I will tell you that, if I did it, it’s a smart thing. If I’m friendly with people, if I have a relationship with people, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.’

A talented businessman with an authentic communication style and natural ability to connect with people, Trump is well-positioned to outfox Putin. Out-negotiating and outsmarting his counterpart comes with the territory for a successful entrepreneur. To negotiate a better deal, you have to be super attuned to your interlocutor’s personality, allowing you to accurately assess his strengths and weaknesses. Trump has this innate ability to size up people and learn quickly what makes them tick. Even former Democrat lawmaker Claire McCaskill admitted on Wednesday that President-elect Trump knows our country ‘better than we do.’

This talent has served Trump well in dealing with Putin. Realizing that the Russian strongman responds well to respect, Trump doesn’t disparage Putin, unlike Biden, Harris and other Western politicians. And what is the point? Putin is not afraid of words. He is afraid of actions. So, Trump gave the Russian spymaster action.

Having understood Putin’s anti-U.S. strategy, Trump has taken several specific steps to counter Russia’s war-fighting doctrine and weaken its combat potential. Realizing that energy is the main source of Russia’s defense economics fueling Putin’s war machine, Trump sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in December 2019, angering Putin.

The same month, Trump founded America’s first entirely new armed service since 1947, the U.S. Space Force. This action sought to mitigate Russia’s space warfare doctrine. This doctrine called for Russia’s space troops, which Putin stood up in 2001, to attack U.S. satellites on which we depend for every aspect of war-fighting and in our civilian life.

In 2018, as part of the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Trump ordered the development of a low-yield, nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile. This was a direct counter to Putin’s ‘escalate-to-de-escalate’ atomic strategy, which seeks to detonate a low-yield tactical nuclear warhead in the theater of combat operations, such as in Ukraine, to deter the U.S. from intervening. 

Foolishly, the Biden-Harris administration canceled Trump’s program. Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline in 2021 helped fuel Putin’s war machine by boosting Russia’s oil revenues as energy supply fell after the U.S. oil production capacity dropped by more than 800,000 barrels. In fact, the United States was importing nearly 600,000 barrels of oil a day from Russia, a gap that Keystone could have made up for.

There’s a reason why Putin didn’t invade anyone on Trump’s watch and is now terrified of the next Trump presidency. Vlad knows that ‘Teflon Don’ is onto him and can beat him at his own game.

Godspeed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. ‘The Department of Government Efficiency’ (‘DOGE’) has no statutory authority — yet. But it will have the ear of the president-elect and President Donald Trump will have the ears of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader-elect John Thune. 
 
Every year that the House and Senate can agree on a budget, they can then deploy the statutory ‘reconciliation’ process to pass laws that impact the implementation of that agreed-upon budget with a simple majority of the Senate. Such bills are not subject to the Senate’s filibuster rules. 
 
It is widely expected that the first budget-reconciliation cycle will be used to extend and revise (and I hope make permanent) the Trump tax cuts from 47’s term as 45. Those tax cuts expire at the end of next year and the engine of economic growth for the decades ahead in the United States lies in that extension. There will be revisions to the tax code as well — to exempt tips from taxable income and perhaps to raise the state and local tax deduction from its very low limits. But the tax package has got to move through the first of the two budget-reconciliation cycles. 

 
Other measures can be added to this ’51-votes-in-the-Senate-is-enough’ bucket of bills. I think the budget could, for example, authorize rapid permitting and construction of ‘Small Modular Reactors’ (advanced nuclear reactors) across the U.S. provided that a very small tax was put on their very large, indeed vast combined output of kilowatt-hours of energy that our AI, national security and high-tech sector generally need in the years ahead. 

I think the federal spending on education that goes to the states can be conditioned on the states that want the aid to provide robust school choice programs and keep boys out of girls sports. (Some deep blue states simply will refuse, and money will be saved for the budget as a result.)  

Certainly spending on National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting can be zeroed out, and federal government-wide ‘reductions in force’ can be authorized ‘notwithstanding any law,’ as can ‘regularization’ of the Dreamers and any other group of migrants already in the country that president-elect wants to regularize upon registration and payment of a fee.  

The process could authorize the completion of ‘the Wall’ and expansion of the Border Patrol as well. The budget can also authorize the immediate and necessary turbocharging of our shipyard capacity and Navy shipbuilding plan. That’s the best-term package for the first quarter of 2025. 
 
But the DOGE doesn’t have a plan yet and won’t for some months. Whatever plan Musk and Ramaswamy and their colleagues come up with will rely on statutory changes to make deep and lasting impacts to the behemoth of the federal government. If their proposals don’t make it into statute, there’s a limit to what they can do. If they are in law, only the Constitution constrains them (as it should and surely will.) 

If, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency is merged with the Department of the Interior and, at the same time, the EPA is stripped of its authority to ‘elevate’ Section 404 permits and Section 7 consultations conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the United States Fish & Wildlife Service respectively, those changes would be put into 2026’s budget and reconciliation package.  (There’s a lot of jargon there but believe me this sentence contains worlds of reform and a massive amount of productivity would be unleashed thereby.)  

Want to dis-establish the Department of Education and re-house its remnants in Health and Human Services where it resided until President Jimmy Carter unleashed it on American education in 1979? Use the 2026 budget and reconciliation cycle. It is the ‘magic bullet’ legislative vehicle for DOGE.

Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

Upon taking office in January, President Donald Trump should fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Trump should do so not because he has any policy dispute with the chairman, but to make clear that the Constitution makes all executive branch officials responsible to the president.  

Indeed, to preserve the constitutional legitimacy of the Federal Reserve, Powell and his fellow members of the board of governors should resign. Then, to quiet the inevitable critics, Trump should appoint an outstanding academic economist or experienced banker to continue the campaign against inflation. 

Trump and Powell have long been on a collision course. Trump has already signaled that he might want to fire the Fed chair. In a 2020 news conference, he stated bluntly, ‘I have the right to remove’ him. For his part, Powell has been equally categorical. Asked at a recent news conference whether Trump could fire him, Powell said that that was ‘not permitted under the law.’  

Powell says Trump couldn’t fire him even if he tried. If Trump were to remove the Fed chair, perhaps the most politically insulated official in the federal bureaucracy, he would display his seriousness in uprooting an unelected bureaucracy that, in the name of public health and safety, has stifled the economy and seized political power. 

We will not challenge the prevailing wisdom that control of the money supply is best kept out of the hands of elected politicians. Politicians have a short-term interest in lowering interest rates to spur economic growth, even though they might spark inflation that will inflict more severe long-term harm.  

But on similar reasoning, the benefits of policymaking by insulated experts could extend to all the federal bureaucracies – why should bankers remain independent, when generals in charge of the nuclear arsenal are not? For better or worse, however, the Constitution commits to the president the final say in such decisions.  

Even though Trump himself appointed Powell as Fed chair in 2017, their quarrel has simmered for years. It arises out of the Fed’s power over national monetary policy, which includes the effective authority to set interest rates. Although the Fed cannot completely dictate rates, especially for long-term borrowing, it does set short-term rates through its buying and selling of government securities and its lending facilities. 

The Fed’s decisions impact inflation, employment and economic growth, and even determine how much interest the government itself must pay on the national debt. And because the amount of the national debt now is so extraordinarily high – the cost of servicing it, now at $882 billion annually, exceeds national defense spending – an incoming president might well be expected to lean on the Fed to help keep the government’s debt servicing costs down. The Fed is already bringing down short-term interest rates after a period of raising Treasury bill rates sharply, from almost zero in early 2022 to 5.34% in late 2023, to squelch Biden-era inflation.  

In his first term, Trump regularly called for lower rates to stimulate economic growth, and once even suggested negative interest rates. During this year’s election campaign, Trump outlined ambitious plans for government spending on new programs (on some estimates, costing as much as $15.5 trillion over 10 years), even while promising a variety of tax cuts that might increase the deficit further.  

Although the tariffs Trump is proposing might offset those revenue losses to some extent, and substantial savings in governmental efficiency might possibly be achieved as Elon Musk takes a knife to the bureaucracy, Trump’s proposals would likely require large amounts of government borrowing. That borrowing in turn might create serious inflationary pressures while exacerbating government’s debt costs. 

Trump would likely demand that the Fed drop rates further – the success of his entire economic program seems to depend on it. But Powell and his Fed colleagues might resist Trump’s demands for a more relaxed, growth-oriented monetary policy after their failure to stop the once-in-a-generation of the Biden presidency. And if Powell resists, then Trump may want to fire him. The legal question is whether he can.  

Powell is not only politically unwise to claim independence from presidential control, but he is also legally mistaken. Trump can fire Powell under the laws that created the Federal Reserve as well as under the Constitution. The legal question has two aspects, one statutory, the other constitutional. 

Powell is both the chairman of the Fed’s board of governors and a member of the board. Under the applicable statute, members of the board hold office for a term of 14 years ‘unless sooner removed for cause.’ The chairman is to be appointed by the president, with Senate advice and consent, from among the board members, for a term of four years.  

Significantly, the statute provides no express protection against removing Powell as chair – though under the statute, Trump would need ’cause’ to remove him from the board. While there may be an unwritten assumption and a longstanding custom that presidents may not remove Fed chairs from their position, nothing in the text of the statute prohibits them from doing so. Should Trump wish to demote Powell from Fed chairman to Board member, he can. 

But can Trump remove Powell (and his colleagues) from membership on the board, given the statute’s requirement that they can only be removed from those positions ‘for cause?’ Even if that restriction of the president’s removal power is assumed to be constitutional (we argue below that it is not), the term ’cause’ has to be construed in light of the authorities over the executive branch that the Constitution vests in the president.  

So construed, ’cause’ is an extremely broad and flexible term – so broad that it encompasses any valid reason of public policy. ‘Cause’ that is sufficient to meet the statutory standard could therefore be found in the event of major policy disagreements between the president and the board or its chair, or even in a reasonable expectation that such disagreements would arise. While there is no clear Supreme Court case on the meaning of for cause, we think it is not just limited to the commission of a crime or some kind of public malfeasance, but that it also must include refusal to carry out a valid presidential order. 

Powell’s claim that no president can fire him appears foolhardy in light of the Supreme Court’s recent cases curtailing the independence of other federal agencies. Powell is not the first government bureaucrat to claim autonomy from presidential removal – which is the only legal means available to the chief executive to compel subordinates to obey his policies.  

Earlier judicial precedent might have given Powell reason to hope. To be sure, in Myers v. United States (1926), Chief Justice Howard Taft held that the president must have the authority to remove all executive branch officials, even down to the lowest postmaster, in order to fulfill his constitutional duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed.  

But in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), a New Deal court at odds with President Franklin D. Roosevelt upheld limits on the president’s power to remove the members of the Federal Trade Commission. In Morrison v. Olson (1988), Chief Justice William Rehnquist relied on Humphrey’s Executor to uphold the removal protections of the Justice Department’s independent prosecutor – over Justice Antonin Scalia’s greatest dissent, which followed Taft’s Myers opinion to argue that all officials who execute federal law must remain responsible to presidential removal, and hence control. 

As on so many issues, Scalia’s dissent would have its day – with dire results for Powell. For the last two decades, the Roberts court has waged an unrelenting campaign against the independence and power of the administrative state. In 2024’s Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court overruled judicial deference to agency interpretations of the law (known as Chevron Deference).  

Powell is not only politically unwise to claim independence from presidential control, but he is also legally mistaken. Trump can fire Powell under the laws that created the Federal Reserve as well as under the Constitution. The legal question has two aspects, one statutory, the other constitutional. 

Two years before, in West Virginia v. EPA, the Court erected a new ‘major questions’ rule that forbids agencies from enforcing regulations that have a major economic, political or social impact without Congress’s explicit authorization. When constitutional historians look back at the Roberts court, they will write that its defining agenda was its assault on the federal bureaucracy. 

The heart of the Court’s effort to limit the agencies has been resurrecting the principle of Myers. In 2020, the head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau also claimed independence from the president because Congress forbade his removal except ‘for cause.’ In Seila Law v. CFPB, the court held the CFPB law unconstitutional and declared that the Constitution gave the president the power to remove the agency’s head. Chief Justice Roberts held that Article II must give the president control over any official who exercises such ‘significant executive power.’  

As Myers explained, the Constitution vests ‘the executive power’ of the federal government solely in the president and vests in him alone the responsibility to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’ The removal power, which itself is nowhere mentioned in the text, must reside in the president so he can ensure that all inferior officers carry out his vision for law enforcement. 

According to the Roberts Court, the Constitution provides only two exceptions to this principle. First, the president need not have removal power over employees who have only ‘limited duties and no policymaking or administrative authority.’ Trump cannot fire all the administrative assistants in the executive branch, for example.  

Second, the Court refused to overrule Humphrey’s Executor. In a classic example of Chief Justice Roberts’ sometimes unprincipled acrobatics, Seila Law held that the president’s removal power would not run to a multi-member board or commission that does not exercise executive authority. For now, the FTC remains constitutionally secure, because the 1935 Court claimed it did not wield executive authority – a view that today’s court will almost certainly reject in the future. 

Scholars have conducted a healthy, sometimes acrimonious, debate over whether the original understanding of the Constitution does indeed recognize this broad presidential power of removal. But regardless of the answer (though we believe that Chief Justice Taft and Justice Scalia got it right), it is clear and obvious that the Roberts court intends to enforce and even expand it.  

Powell might think he can escape the rule of Seila Law because the Federal Reserve operates as a board, rather than an agency with a single head. But he cannot claim that the Federal Reserve exercises no executive authority. It sets interest rates by buying and selling treasuries on behalf of the federal government; its goals of achieving ‘maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates’ is even set by congressional statute. 

Powell’s claim that no president can fire him appears foolhardy in light of the Supreme Court’s recent cases curtailing the independence of other federal agencies. Powell is not the first government bureaucrat to claim autonomy from presidential removal – which is the only legal means available to the chief executive to compel subordinates to obey his policies.  

Congress has also given the Fed the power to regulate the financial markets and the banking industry, and the important authority to supervise ‘systematically important financial institutions.’ These represent core executive functions of enforcing the law toward private individuals and institutions. 

The clear implication of the Supreme Court’s recent administrative law decisions for the Fed recommends a wholly different course for Powell. In his press conference, Powell abruptly dismissed any presidential power to remove him. His curt rejection may be the equivalent of waving a red flag in front of Trump.  

If Trump seeks to take Powell up on his provocation, he will win in court. That outcome will inflict more harm on the Fed’s credibility than even its failure to head off the destructive inflation of the Biden years. If Powell seeks to protect his institution, the better course would be to resign and allow Trump – at the head of a broad nationwide majority that wants a sharp change in economic policy — to replace him and his colleagues.