Over the past six months, a reporting team from FRONTLINE has been examining President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempts to assert control over the most powerful institution in the U.S. economy: the Federal Reserve.
What they found unfolds in The President vs. the Fed, a revelatory new documentary that’s available to stream now. It premiered just days before the end of Trump target Jerome Powell’s term as Fed chair and the expected confirmation of Trump’s pick to replace him, Kevin Warsh.
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From award-winning filmmakers James Jacoby and Anya Bourg (The Age of Easy Money, Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover, The Facebook Dilemma), The President vs. the Fed illuminates the roots and stakes of Trump’s battle with Powell over the decisions and independence of the country’s central bank as it steers the economy through a tumultuous period.
“When you look at Trump’s economic agenda, this fight is actually the most consequential of his presidency,” journalist Christopher Leonard says of Trump, who has repeatedly called on the Fed to cut interest rates and tried to influence the institution’s decisions. “I think he knows that his economic and political success is dependent on what the Fed does. And so this attack for him is almost existential.”
To trace how the battle has unfolded, The President vs. the Fed draws on interviews with former and current Fed officials, economists, titans of finance, legal experts, journalists, and critics of the president as well as some of his staunchest defenders. In the documentary, a sitting Fed official, Neel Kashkari, speaks out about the Trump administration’s threat to indict Powell in a Department of Justice investigation.
“I mean, in the 113-year history of the Fed, nothing like this has ever happened before,” Kashkari, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, tells FRONTLINE. “It just was clear that this was a pretext: ‘We don’t like your monetary policy decisions, so we’re going to change the people making the decisions.’”
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As the documentary reports, Congress designed the Fed to be insulated from political interference so it would be free to act in the long-term interest of the economy, including by making at-times unpopular monetary policy decisions. But Trump allies argue the Fed’s independence has shielded it from accountability for its mistakes, including on inflation during the COVID pandemic, and say that Trump was within his rights to try to force Powell out.
“I don’t see the Fed as the little guy here in a battle with the president. I see the Fed as inordinately powerful, and dangerously so,” Judy Shelton, a former Trump economic adviser, says in the documentary.
With clarity and precision, The President vs. the Fed examines where the battle stands now — and how, with inflation on the rise amid the effects of the Iran war and Trump tariff fallout, Kevin Warsh’s Fed will likely face not only a tricky political landscape but an economic one as well.
Watch the Documentary
The President vs. the Fed
FRONTLINE examines President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempts to assert control over the most powerful institution in the U.S. economy: the Federal Reserve
The President vs. the Fed premiered May 12, 2026, on PBS and online. Watch the documentary in full anytime at pbs.org/frontline, in the PBS App, on YouTube and on PBS Documentaries on Prime.