Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook has become the latest target of President Donald Trump’s ire as he looks to strong-arm the central banking system out from under Chair Jerome Powell’s control.
Yet according to Trump biographer Michael Wolff, his disdain for Cook, the first African American woman and first woman of color to sit on the Fed Board, are the tip of an iceberg of bias the MAGA figurehead has held against Black women.
“I spent the last two years, more than two years, deeply involved with Trump’s campaign,” Wolff told the Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head. “One of the motifs that was pervasive in the campaign was Trump’s attitude toward Black women.”
In Trump’s head—Wolff alleged—Cook, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Atlanta prosecutor Fannie Willis, and January 6 case presiding Judge Tanya Chutkin are all the same “fat Black women” out to get him.
“This had particular and special meaning: Black women were coming after him. And that shortly became, in his rendition of this, fat Black women,” said Wolff. “The personal animus here, the personal revulsion on Trump’s part, the personal fear… He continued to express… and this was essentially on a daily basis. People around him would call me up and say, up, another fat Black woman.”
Trump-appointed Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte alleged that Cook had “falsified bank documents and property records to acquire more favorable loan terms, potentially committing mortgage fraud,” in a criminal letter posted online to Attorney General Pam Bondi, NBC News reported.
Here is the Criminal Referral Letter on Lisa Cook, the current Fed Governor. pic.twitter.com/aG0LGnokei
— Pulte (@pulte) August 20, 2025
However, Cook, a Biden administration appointee, brushed off Pulte’s claims, writing in a Wednesday statement that she has “no intention of being bullied to step down from my position because of some questions raised in a tweet.”
Cook added that she takes “any questions about my financial history seriously as a member of the Federal Reserve and so I am gathering the accurate information to answer any legitimate questions and provide the facts.”
Yet Trump has already run with Pulte’s allegations, treating them as fact, and harnessing them to wage war against the Federal Reserve’s credibility.
“What she did was bad,” the president told reporters Friday after being asked about Cook. “So I’ll fire her if she doesn’t resign.”
Trump has similarly looked to tear down James’ credibility after she successfully brought a civil fraud lawsuit against him for inflating his finances for years to secure favorable loan terms. A New York judge ordered him to pay $500 million in penalties with interest, but an appeals court overturned that verdict Friday, Newsweek reported.
“While harm certainly occurred, it was not the cataclysmic harm that can justify a nearly half billion-dollar award” to the state, wrote Judges Dianne Renwick and Peter Moulton in ruling on the appeal.
Trump celebrated by attacking James in several morning Truth Social posts, calling James “a criminal who should be forced to resign!”
Trump added in a victory lap post, “Big win today against the totally corrupt and incompetent New York State Attorney General, Leticia [sic] James, and her equally incompetent, hand picked, New York State Judge. The 5 to 0 Verdict from the Appellate Division helps greatly to save the status and reputation of the New York Judicial System.”
In a similar fashion, Trump and all of MAGA celebrated when Willis was tossed from an election interference case brought after Trump lost the 2020 election. In a celebratory interview at the time, Trump told Fox News that the “whole case has been a disgrace to justice.”
He added, “There is no way such corrupt people can lead a case, and then it gets taken over by somebody else.”
Yet the guardrails appear to be completely off as Trump consolidates power in his second term, said Wolff. “Again, we’re in an entirely new world here,” he said. Of Trump’s attacks against Cook, Wolff called it “obviously racism.”
He added, “But this is obvious. I want to go beyond that and say this is an obvious pathology. It’s an obsession of his. It lives. One of his staffers said to me, ‘He must dream about fat Black women.’”
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung ripped Wolff’s claims as lies in his now customary statement to the Daily Beast.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s–t and has been proven to be a fraud,” Cheung said. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
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