Trump’s BATTLE with the Federal Reserve is REALLY about THIS

What this episode is about

The discussion centers on President Trump's conflict with the Federal Reserve, particularly regarding its financial practices and lack of transparency. The key points include Trump's intention to investigate the Federal Reserve's financial decisions, perceived monopolistic behavior among banks, and the argument that inflation is a deliberate outcome rather than an unforeseen problem, suggesting a need for market-driven interest rate determination.

Key takeaways

• When Trump goes after the Fed, it's like bringing a rubber knife to a gunfight—entertaining, but outcomes can be dramatic.
• Inflation isn’t accidental; it’s like a government-approved depreciation plan—your dollars are losing value, one penny at a time.
• The Federal Reserve: where 'federal' is just a clever branding strategy, disguising a powerful private entity of elite bankers.
• You lose $3 on every $10 since Obama? That’s not magic—it’s fiscal wizardry by the Fed, where knowledge is rarely shared.
• Why teach Fed history? Because understanding it might actually give power back to the people, and who wants that?

Who speaks in this episode?

• Glenn Beck (Guest) · 24 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Federal Reserve, Free Market, Monopoly, Jerome Powell
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Federal Reserve, G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jackal Island, Jackal Island
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Federal Reserve, Free Market
4. 15:00 – 20:00: Deep State, Progressivism, Woodro Wilson
5. 20:00 – 25:00: Federal Reserve, Jackal Island, Deep State, Woodro Wilson
6. 25:00 – 25:14: Federal Reserve

Notable quotes from "Trump’s BATTLE with the Federal Reserve is REALLY about THIS"

• Hissy fit last night because on Friday the DOJ said, Look who we're coming after. Now, in case you don't know, you don't go after the Federal Reserve.

  about Federal Reserve · at 0:04

• Now, I'm going to go a step further and say I think the free market should decide.

  about Free Market · at 1:36

• Well, he's not some crackpot. and I actually did an interview with him the last year at Fox. Some people say, see, Glenn Beck had G. Edward Griffin on, and that's why they fired him. They.

  about G. Edward Griffin · at 5:45

• What emerged from that island was not a government agency at least in the normal sense. It was a mechanism. It was a the reason why it's creature from Jackalena.

  about The Creature from Jackal Island · at 6:56

• Is that their role now? Now, we did that for a while. Then around the turn of the century, progressives came into the play. Progressives, like I said earlier, are just slow…

  about Progressivism · at 15:50

• Rid of the president being able to fire any of those people. So they are completely unelected and now approaching unfireable.

  about Deep State · at 20:14

• Move someplace else. And if Texas decides to do that, they'll do. Did you learn anything from France? This is what France did. All the billionaires moved.

  about France · at 23:33

• Make them smaller. They bailed them out and made them bigger. The corporations, they were Occupy Wall Street. All these corporations were under attack. Now notice, nobody's…

  about Occupy Wall Street · at 24:33

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• G. Edward Griffin — Person · Referenced author / recommended expert · 2 mentions · first at 5:32
  Cited as the author of the recommended book explaining the Fed's origins; framed as credible due to the speaker's 'homework' and prior interview.
• Woodro Wilson — Person · Historical figure in argument · 2 mentions · first at 16:32
  Presented as emblematic of progressive-era changes that expanded the administrative state and diminished the Declaration of Independence's role.
  Woodro Wilson hated [snorts] the Declaration of Independence. Ask any real progressive and they'll tell you that the Declaration of Independence plays no role in anything anymore. It's.
• Jerome Powell — Person · Current-events hook · 1 mention · first at 0:00
  Introduces the segment as reacting to Powell's alleged 'hissy fit' in response to DOJ actions; serves as the contemporary face of the Fed in the monologue.
  Let me talk to you a little bit about Jerome Powell. Jerome Powell had a hissy fit last night because on Friday the DOJ said, Look who we're coming after. Now, in case you don't know, you.

Books & papers

• The Creature from Jackal Island — Book · Recommended source text · 2 mentions · first at 5:30
  Recommended as the key book to understand the Fed's origins and structure; its 'hybrid' framing is used to characterize the Fed as public-looking but privately controlled.

Concepts & topics

• Federal Reserve — Concept · Core topic · 14 mentions · first at 0:13
  Presented as a secretive, quasi-private central banking system that controls interest rates, inflation, and liquidity, and is framed as undermining democratic accountability and free markets.
• Progressivism — Concept · Ideological frame / historical explanation · 1 mention · first at 15:56
  Used to explain the rise of the administrative state and erosion of constitutional governance; portrayed as incremental collectivism enabling centralized control over money and society.
• Deep State — Concept · Governance critique · 3 mentions · first at 18:37
  Invoked to describe the unelected administrative state and compared to the Fed/CIA as unaccountable power centers insulated from voters and presidential control.
• Free Market — Concept · Normative alternative · 2 mentions · first at 1:38
  Proposed as the preferred mechanism for setting interest rates instead of the Federal Reserve, contrasting decentralized price discovery with centralized control.
• Monopoly — Concept · Accusation / characterization · 1 mention · first at 1:53
  Used to describe the consolidation of big banks into the Federal Reserve as collusion that controls interest rates, framed as anti-competitive and harmful.
  Big banks and you put them together and you call them the Federal Reserve, that's what I like to call a monopoly.

Places & events

• Jackal Island — Place · Origin-setting location in narrative · 3 mentions · first at 5:32
  Described as the secret retreat where bankers and senators designed the Federal Reserve system under assumed names, central to the episode's origin story.
  Financial architects. and they slipped out under assumed names and got onto a private cha train and went to a private retreat on a place called Jackal Island.
• Occupy Wall Street — Event · Historical reference point · 1 mention · first at 24:37
  Used to mark a period when corporations were 'under attack,' followed by a claimed shift where the left stopped attacking corporations due to an alleged deal.
• France — Place · Comparative example location · 1 mention · first at 23:35
  Cited as a cautionary example where taxing billionaires allegedly caused them to leave, reinforcing the argument against high-tax approaches.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Let me talk to you a little bit about Jerome Powell. Jerome Powell uh had a hissy fit last night because on Friday the DOJ said, "Look who we're coming after." Now, in case you don't know, you don't go after the Federal Reserve. Unless you're President Trump. Reagan tried to do it and uh it didn't go well. It didn't go well for President uh Reagan, but President Trump may be a a different animal entirely. He is going after uh the Federal Reserve with the DOJ and they uh filed against the Federal Reserve and said, "We're going to start looking into this palace that you're building." Now, let me give you an update on just the palace that they're building. They're like uh a billion dollars in overruns right now.

0:50 Now, let me ask you, if you got a loan and you were a billion dollars overrun, do you think the bank would have a problem with that? You can't check the books of the Federal Reserve. H really? Well, President Trump is going to check the books on the Federal Reserve. Now, I want you to know that that's not really what this is about. Yes, there are trillion or a billion dollars in cost overruns. Yes, they're out of control. Yes, you can't check their books. But that's not what this is about. What this is about is Donald Trump doesn't think the Federal Reserve, a private corporation with all this secrecy, should be the ones making the decisions on what your interest rate is.

1:36 Now, I'm going to go a step further and say I think the free market should decide. Yeah. You see, when you take all of the big banks and you put them together and you call them the Federal Reserve, that's what I like to call a monopoly. Not the game, but just as frustrating. The banks have a monopoly. The banks are the ones colluding to decide what are they going to charge you for interest. And by the way, um, inflation, that's not a bug. That's a feature. Inflation is planned. Now, let me ask you, if I said to you, hey, how much money should your dollar lose every year?

2:28 How many pennies on every dollar should you lose? Should you lose two, three, five, or eight pennies on every dollar every year, you have it in savings, you're spending it. How much would you like it to go down? Now, I'm a weirdo, so I say no pennies. It should not lose value. In fact, I'd like it to gain value. But that doesn't happen. Why? Because the Federal Reserve has decided that 2% inflation is the right number. So you should lose two cents. Wait, every year on every dollar? And we're losing much much much more than that. I was doing calculation the other day. I'm charging when we announce you know that the that the torch is up for, you know, subscription. I'm charging you $9.99 and for the first month that we offer it, it will be uh inflation proof for the rest of your life. Okay? As long as you hold your subscription, if you have if you were one of the founding people that came in, I will never raise

3:37 the price on you. Now, I was doing some calculations. $9.99, we're going to call it, no, this is crazy. We're just going to say it's 10 bucks because that's what $9.99 is. But anyway, you put 10 bucks in. That's what I charged when we first put the Blaze together. I said it's $9.99. Do you know how much $9.99 is worth today in 2011? This will show you how much money you how much money your money has lost. How much is $9.99 today if you had 2010 2011? That's actually like $6.70. Your dollar has lost over $3. I mean, your $10 bill is now worth about $7.

4:32 That's how much money you've lost since Obama was in. That's not a bug. That's a feature of the Federal Reserve. And most people don't even know what the Federal Reserve is because you're not taught about it. Not because it's secret. You know, books have been written, hearings have been held, transcripts have been preserved, but you don't you don't teach it to anybody because, well, I mean, it's inconvenient. It doesn't exactly flatter power. It actually, if you start looking at it and you realize what it really is, you're like, I don't think I like that at all. No, no, no. It's the Federal Reserve. They named it the Federal Reserve for dopes like us. So, we would always say, "Well, it's a Federal institution. It's part of the government." No, it's not. It's a private corporation.

5:25 If you had to read one book this year, I would suggest you read a book called The Creature from Jackal Island. It's by G. Edward Griffin. When I first read this, I didn't know who G. Ed uh uh G. Edward Griffin was. And so I started doing my homework on him because I'm like, I don't want to read this if he's some crackpot. Well, he's not some crackpot. Uh, and I actually did an interview with him the last year at Fox. Some people say, see, Glenn Beck had uh G. Edward Griffin on, and that's why they fired him. They didn't fire me, and it had nothing to do with it. Or did it? Um, but it is uncomfortable. Nobody wants to talk about this. But what he does in this book, he doesn't start with conspiracy.

6:08 He begins with history. The banks had been wanting a federal bank forever. They wanted to control the money supply. They wanted to be the ones to print the money and control the money. And I'll get into why here in a minute. But it was a small group of men. It was senators and bankers and financial architects. and they slipped out under assumed names and got onto a private cha train and went to a private retreat on a place called Jackal Island. There was no press, no public record. There were no voters. This was all entirely secret and they they were not drafting a bill to be debated. They were designing a system to be accepted. And what emerged from that island was not a government agency at least in the normal sense. It was a mechanism. It was a the reason why it's creature from Jackalena.

7:07 It's a hybrid. It's a hybrid creature. It's public in its appearance. It's private. Unbelievably private. Like illegally private in any other business and completely shielded from all accountability. Tell me another structure like that besides what? The CIA armed with power. Power that no free society should ever hand to [clears throat] any unelected body ever. And the creature is the Federal Reserve. And it's not a department like the US Department of Finance. It's not that. It's regional banks privately owned by member banks. Remember when they said, "Oh, you know what? The banks are too big to fail." What does that tell you we should do with the banks? This is what people said in 2008. They're just too big to fail. That would mean, okay, then maybe we don't let them fail. I mean, not in my opinion, but this is what the argument was. We don't let them fail this time. But then what do you do after

8:15 you save them? reason and logic would say I make them smaller so I'm never in this position again right they didn't they made them bigger and yes governors are appointed but once they are seated they have extraordinary independence and the president can't do anything about it you know the president when he selects a I'm going to select a new chairman of the Federal Reserve do you know where he gets the names from the Federal Reserve. He can't say, "You know what? I'm going to put in charge Rand Paul." He can't do that because they wouldn't allow Rand Paul to ever get near the Federal Reserve. I don't even know Federal I don't know if he's even been allowed to walk into the Federal Reserve. So, the president can only pick from the people that he wants. You know what that is?

9:09 That's the Soviet Union and the way they used to run elections. That's the way Putin runs elections today. That's the way they run elections in Iran. The people can choose just from these preapproved people. Okay? And the consequences are not abstract to you. They have the power, the only ones that have the power to create money out of nothing. They can just type it in with a keystroke and we're printing more money. It sets the interest rates which decide what you can do. Can you open a business? Can you afford a home? Uh are your savings, remember because of interest rates and because of inflation, are your savings rewarded or are you punished? If I've been saving money since 2010, look how much money I had $100,000 in.

10:07 It's now worth 600 and uh 67,000 because it's lost money. It's lost the value of it. It still says I have all that money, but it's actually only worth about $67,000. What are you doing? Why would we do this? Why would we allow this institution to do this to us? They are privately stealing from us and telling us it's for your own good and your own safety. It also decides liquidity, a word that nobody really pays attention to. What a liquidity means is do the banks have enough money? Do we need to print some more money so the banks have more money? Because the banks the banks if if liquidity dries up then you know you can't get a loan.

10:53 Uhhuh. So we got to print more money which will cost us more and then because that's a really really bad idea. usually printing money the way we've been doing it. It's going to cost me on top of it because then you're going to have to raise my interest rates to unbelievable levels to be able to suck all that money back in. Who is who is who thinks this is a good idea? By the way, this is not regulation. This is command. They have command and control. So, what is this really all about? What is the president really doing? And what is the Fed really doing? I want to try to explain just with this argument on the Fed. I'll explain what they're arguing about here in a second. And then I want to show you what the Fed really is and how this is a really brilliant master move, master stroke of genius if you are trying to control the world. The founders understood the danger of a a federal bank and a federal institution.

12:04 Because who is who benefits from a central bank when money is created? It's not you, the wage earner, because your purchasing power goes down. It's not you who saves money. You've been told, "Save money. Save money. Put money in." No. Because discipline is punished through inflation. The first people that benefit are the closest to the spigot. The spigot opens up and it's the large financial institutions, the big banks who are the Federal Reserve. Understand that the banks are the Federal Reserve. They're the ones who profit first, then any government that's borrowing money, and then the speculators who can move before prices rise. Why do you think there's not a big move for the Federal Reserve in Congress?

13:00 How much is Nancy Pelosi worth again? H how how did she make those How did she make all that money? Oh, her husband's just great. No, her husband makes Warren Buffett look Okay. And that's I mean, I'm sorry, but that's the hard truth. Anybody who knows to make moves and what moves to make before are actual beneficiaries of the system, but not you. There's no vote. There's no receipt. There's no debate. And the founders understood that. So I want to take you back to the founding era, then back to the progressive era, and then show you what it all means today. When we go to the chalkboard, let me show you what the founders idea was. Okay. The founders's idea, like it or not, was that God gives man rights. Before it was God gave certain people, kings, uh, etc., etc. God gave rights to those people and those people had rights over you to tell you exactly what to do, how to live your life, what land you could

14:05 own, you know, what you had to do with your money, what you had to do with your whole life. They could tell you everything about your life. The founders came along and said, "I don't think that's the way it should be. I think God gives the individual rights." So the individual is more powerful or as powerful as any king. And the people can decide what to do with their business, what they can do with their life, who they can marry, how they live, where they live, what house they could buy, what land they could own. Before those, all those decisions were made by the king. You couldn't own property. the king or the lord and the lady had to give you that land or you had to negotiate it. How is a popper going to do that? How is a how is somebody who's at the bottom of the barrel going to be able to buy land?

14:51 Couldn't. They couldn't. And everything including the banks were controlled by the king. Okay. Founders came along and said that's got to stop because people are their own sovereign. You're the sovereign over your own life. And governments says in the Declaration of Independence are instituted among men to protect those rights. So the first thing is all men are created equal endowed by their creator with certain inalable rights and governments are instituted among men to protect those rights. So the first thing that government comes into is the people saying I need somebody to be a guardian over my rights, over my property, over, you know, business. If I'm in business and somebody's being unfair, I need somebody to come in and go, "Hey, hey, hey, these are the rules. You're wrong. You're right, but these are the rules." And if you guys don't like the rules, you guys can change the rules. I'm just here as a

15:47 referee. Okay? That's the government's role. Is that their role now? Now, we did that for a while. Then around the turn of the century, progressives came into the play. Progressives, like I said earlier, are just slow communists. And I'm not that's not a cute turn of phrase. That is really what they are. They believed in uh a collective uh power. They believed in the elites. So it became fascism or communism, but progressives didn't want to have the bloodshed in the streets. And so they thought they could just build it piece by piece because they knew it would take a revolution to do it. and they had to separate you from the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence.

16:32 Woodro Wilson hated [snorts] the Declaration of Independence. Ask any real progressive and they'll tell you that the Declaration of Independence plays no role in anything anymore. It's an old dusty document for a different time. I'm here to tell you it's a do it's a document that is for this time, the future, and the past. It's who we are. It's our mission statement. So we developed when we said all men are created equal. Governments need to be instituted to protect those rights. We came up with a government that checked on itself. We had Congress, the president and the court system. And they all ran checks and balances. Even in Congress, the purse strings, the only one that can start spending your money is Congress. So your congressman, you have to vote them in every 2 years. Why doesn't that seem ridiculous? every two years you have to go vote for your congressman. No, the founders knew they

17:26 controlled the spending. And so if you didn't like what they were spending, if they were raising taxes and spending too much, you could vote them out every two years. So they didn't have this long control, they were given the keys to the purse, to the safe. They don't anymore. You know, we haven't had a budget since 2008. Progressives finally got rid of the whole budget process. So it doesn't matter who starts it because all they do is they just add on to what they've already had. We're going to expand this, going to scract this, and they can move the money. Okay? So you've lost that control over your money. Also, the the Senate was set up to be able to check be the check and the balance on the federal government versus the state government.

18:16 Remember, states are more important than the federal government. That's what they believed at the founding era. But we need the the federal government to settle arguments just to play a referee and to also if there's a war wage war. Okay. So our we were so afraid that the federal government would get out of control and there would be a big deep state that the the founder said all of the senators are voted on by the uh state houses. So you could send a senator but the state house would vote on that. They did that because they felt that the senator would be loyal to the state if it became an election than other states. Think of this. Why do you care about Chuck Schumer?

19:07 You care about Chuck Schumer because he affects you. Because his loyalty is no longer to New York. It's to the federal government. They work for all of us instead of their state. That's not the way it was set up. And that's part of the problem. Then the president the president didn't have enough control because they remember progressives wanted bean counters. They wanted somebody that could control everything that wasn't necessarily elected. They were just the best in their job. And so let's get these experts in to do an administrative state. And so they grew the administrative state, the deep state. They grew all of these um administrative arms, the department of this, the department of that, that you don't even know who runs those things.

19:52 Well, if you have to deal with one of those, go ahead. Deal with the Bureau of Land Management. Go ahead. Deal deal with the Department of Labor. Who do you vote out? You don't agree with what they're doing. Who do you vote out? You can't. They're not responsive to you at all. They're barely responsive to the president because they're trying to get rid of the president being able to fire any of those people. So they are completely unelected and now approaching unfireable. Then you have the courts and around 1920 the progressives again decided they need to make case law and not constitutional law. So stop looking at the constitution and reading it the way the founders wanted it. Read it case law. If we could get one case to say this, then it builds on that. And then suddenly the constitution doesn't matter anymore.

20:47 So they completely rotted all of the ideas that governments are instituted among men to protect those rights that you have. They rotted all of that. So you don't really have a constitutional government the way we and we haven't for a hundred years the way our founders envisioned it. Then between 1910 and 1920, all of those things happened. Congress changed, the the the Senate changed, the administrative state under Woodro Wilson, case law, all of it happened between 1910 and 1920. But they needed one other thing because if you can control two things, health and money, you control people completely.

21:33 So they took over your money. And this was voted on over and over and over again and and the American people kept saying no. And so they all got together, all these bankers and these senators got together and went to Jackal Island for a week and they put together this whole idea of the Federal Reserve and named it the Federal Reserve so people would think that it's part of the Federal Government. It passed. It [clears throat] became a constitutional amendment. And what does it do? It controls everything. It controls your inflation. It controls the boom and the bust period. It controls everything.

22:08 Basically, it controls you. It takes us from a country that says you can do anything to you can do anything if the federal government says it's okay. And if the bank says it's okay. Before you could do anything and the government just played referee. Now the banks and the federal government pick and choose winners. Well, no, you need a light. You can't just go out and do something. You need a license for that. Why do I need a license for that? I mean, some things I think I need a license for hair cutting people's hair. I mean, in the era of straight razors, maybe. Maybe that's not happening anymore. Why do I need that? I need a license for why why so the state can not just make their money but the state also has control.

23:03 They also tell you who you can you know how you spend your money, how much money you have, how much money is that worth, what will the bank allow. And so we see this and we see this corrupt system and we're like oh those rich people, you're targeting the wrong rich people. For instance, California is now targeting billionaires. Ah, the billionaires. We got to tax the billionaires. They're just going to move. That's all that's going to happen. They have enough money. They're going to move. They'll move their corporation. They'll move everything out of California. They'll move someplace else. And if Texas decides to do that, they'll do. Did you learn anything from France? This is what France did. All the billionaires moved.

23:43 Tax the billionaires. What does taxing the billionaires actually do? What do high taxes actually do? take it away from you and give the power to the state. Let me ask you this. Can you imagine running a business in America where you didn't where you could tell the IRS, you don't look at my books? Do you think anything bad might happen if no one could ever look at your corporation's books? We can't. They're completely opaque. We don't actually know who owns them. Um, we don't know who they are, their shareholders. Who are their shareholders? Who do they answer to?

24:21 They don't answer to the president. They don't answer to you. And they have total control. Back in 2008, the banks were too big to fail. So what do you do? You would bail them out and then you would make them smaller. They bailed them out and made them bigger. The corporations, they were Occupy Wall Street. All these corporations were under attack. Now notice, nobody's attacking, nobody from the left is attacking these big corporations. Why? Because they made a deal. And that's how you got BLM, the uh the uh World Economic Forum. It's all part of that same stew. This should not be part of our system. You want to fix it and make it fair, abolish the Federal Reserve.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Trump’s BATTLE with the Federal Reserve is REALLY about THIS"?

Glenn Beck (Guest).

What is "Trump’s BATTLE with the Federal Reserve is REALLY about THIS" about?

The discussion centers on President Trump's conflict with the Federal Reserve, particularly regarding its financial practices and lack of transparency. The key points include Trump's intention to investigate the Federal Reserve's financial decisions, perceived monopolistic behavior among banks, and the argument that inflation is a deliberate outcome rather than an unforeseen problem, suggesting…

What is mentioned in this Glenn Beck episode?

12 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Federal Reserve, The Creature from Jackal Island, G. Edward Griffin, Jackal Island, Progressivism, Deep State. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Trump’s BATTLE with the Federal Reserve is REALLY about THIS"?

The episode runs 25 min; the transcript is about 3,999 words in 29 timestamped sections.

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