President Donald Trump made his biggest step yet toward trying to seize control of the Federal Reserve on Monday, by ordering the firing of one of its seven governors: Lisa Cook.
The firing was legally dubious — Fed governors serve 14-year terms; Cook term expires in 2038, and she’s said she’ll contest her firing — but Trump relied on a pretext. Cook, he claimed, had committed mortgage fraud by declaring two separate residences as her primary residence.
The official who supplied that pretext — and who has been at the center of Trump’s efforts to wield mortgage fraud accusations to get his enemies prosecuted, as well as to get Fed chair Jerome Powell fired — is the 37-year-old director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Bill Pulte.
In addition to Cook, Pulte has used his position to scrutinize the mortgage records of two of Trump’s Democratic enemies: Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and New York Attorney General Letitia James. He recommended that the Department of Justice consider prosecuting both for mortgage fraud, and prosecutors have since convened grand juries to try and make that happen.
He’s also publicly pressured Powell on social media, he gave Trump a draft letter that would have ordered Powell’s firing, and he’s tried to establish a pretext Trump could use to fire Powell.
Some of his allies hope this is just the start, and that even bigger things lie in Pulte’s future. “Bill Pulte would be an exceptional pick to run the Federal Reserve,” venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya posted on X in July.
“Attack dog” is an unusual role for the director of the FHFA, who is charged with overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the government-backed companies crucial to the functioning of US mortgage markets.
But it’s a good fit for Pulte. The grandson of the founder of a major home-building company, Pulte has demonstrated a remarkable knack for getting attention and building his public profile. He has 3 million followers on X, and his posts there have started to move markets, according to Bloomberg.
Pulte has his enemies in the administration; the Wall Street Journal reported his anti-Powell campaign has “irritated” some senior officials.
One person is quite happy with him, though. After that Journal story was published, Trump posted that Pulte was doing an “outstanding job,” and added: “KEEP MOVING FORWARD, WILLIAM, DON’T LET THE RADICAL LEFT WEAKLINGS STOP YOU!”
Who is Bill Pulte, and how did he get millions of social media followers?
Housing is the Pulte family business. Pulte’s grandfather, also named Bill, founded what eventually became one of the largest home-building companies in the US, PulteGroup. The younger Bill was barely done with college when, in 2011, he founded a Michigan-based private equity fund focused on the housing industry. The board included such local luminaries such as Rick DeVos (son of future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos) and Scott Romney (brother of Mitt Romney).
Grandpa Pulte died in 2018. The following year, then-31-year-old Bill got his first taste of national fame by going viral for giving people money. Pulte gave or offered to give away sometimes hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands, and he posted on Twitter about it. He called this “Twitter Philanthropy.” (He insisted he was not giving away his inheritance money, but rather money he’d independently made.)
Some of the giveaways were for people posting stories about why they needed help, others were purely random — but the common thread was that, if you wanted a shot at the cash, you needed to follow or retweet him on Twitter. (Following him was necessary so he could send you a direct message if you won, he explained.) In July 2019, Pulte said he’d give $30,000 to “a veteran on Twitter” if President Trump retweeted him, and the president did so.
All this proved highly successful at increasing Pulte’s Twitter following, which rose from the low tens of thousands to 2 million in early 2020. But his relationship with the company his grandfather founded deteriorated. He lost his seat on PulteGroup’s board of directors, after the board unanimously voted not to renominate him.
The meme stock saga and online feuding
With the novelty of Twitter Philanthropy worn off, Pulte found a new focus for his self-promotion: the meme stock craze.
In 2021, an online community championed the cause of buying GameStop stock, foiling Wall Street short-sellers betting against the ailing company by instead sending its share price “to the moon.” Some of these retail buyers became devoted fans of Gamestop’s CEO, Ryan Cohen, and followed him on to other investments, like the big stake he took in the home goods company Bed Bath & Beyond. This did not go well; $BBBY’s share price tanked, the company went into bankruptcy, and many shareholders were wiped out.
As Rolling Stone has reported, Pulte became a supporting character in this saga. He tried to cultivate Cohen’s fans and brand himself as a cool, meme-friendly finance influencer, adopting “Only the Young” as a motivational catchphrase and his intro music. He appeared on Twitter Spaces and streaming shows, and even co-hosted an in-person event in Florida (at $500 a ticket).
Pulte particularly cultivated the beleaguered Bed Bath & Beyond investors, many of whom hoped this wealthy and successful philanthropist would somehow find a way to get them back the money they’d lost. In January 2024, Pulte released a statement saying the “Pulte family” would purchase Bed Bath & Beyond bonds so they could “demand answers” for wiped-out retail shareholders.
The Pulte Family Charitable Foundation, which he is not involved with, wanted to be excluded from this narrative, and released a statement distancing themselves from him. Pulte fired back with an X post calling his aunt, Nancy Pulte Rickard, who heads the foundation, “a fake representative of the Pulte Family.” He added that his aunt “is angry she wasn’t in my grandpa’s will when I, the namesake, was in the will.”
As it became clear that there would be no miraculous recovery for $BBBY shareholders, Pulte amassed his share of dedicated online haters, who mocked him as “Ploot” and chronicled what they saw as his strange behavior on subreddits like /r/GME_meltdown. These haters would soon watch agog as Pulte, who they viewed as a “fraud and weirdo,” suddenly scored a powerful position in the federal government. This, one Redditor wrote, was “an absolutely wild plot twist.”
Pulte and the Federal Housing Finance Agency
Through all this time, Pulte’s public persona hadn’t been particularly political. But he figured out a good way to gain entry into Trumpworld — by, again, giving people money. He gave $500,000 to a pro-Trump Super PAC in 2022. He’d also donated to Turning Point USA, the young conservatives’ group co-founded by Charlie Kirk. (Kirk is a close ally of Donald Trump Jr.)
After Trump won in November 2024, the New York Post floated Pulte as a potential Housing and Urban Development secretary, quoting a “source” calling him “probably overqualified” and stressing those past donations to vouch for his loyalty to Trumpworld.
Trump nominated him for FHFA director instead, and before his confirmation hearings, Pulte deleted tens of thousands of his old tweets, to Senate Democrats’ annoyance. Shortly after he was confirmed in March, Pulte posted on X: “You didn’t really think I’d stop tweeting did you”.
The FHFA job is a consequential one. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed under government conservatorship during the 2008 financial crisis, but the Trump team is now planning to reprivatize them. It is unclear how involved Pulte is in these discussions (one report claimed he’d been “largely cut out”).
Pulte has, however, been quite quick to use his position to go after Trump’s enemies — specifically, James, the New York attorney general, and Sen. Schiff, who have for years been leading figures in Democrat-led investigations of Trump.
In April, Pulte wrote a letter to the Justice Department referring James for prosecution, arguing she lied on mortgage documents. In May, Pulte did the same thing with Schiff — news that became public earlier this month, when Trump posted about it.
Pulte took public credit for the Schiff investigation, posting on X: “Fannie Mae’s Financial Crimes Division concluded that Mr. Schiff has engaged in a sustained pattern of possible Mortgage Fraud.” A confidential Fannie Mae memo alleging misconduct by Schiff — a memo addressed to Pulte — was provided to the Washington Post earlier this month.
Both Schiff and James have denied any wrongdoing and said they are being targeted politically, and it remains to be seen whether the DOJ will charge them. Federal prosecutors pursuing complex corruption cases against public officials have long found the mortgage fraud statute to be a useful tool — it’s relatively easy to prove, and it carries a steep, 30-year maximum sentence. (According to David Simon, federal prosecutors in Baltimore called it the “Head Shot.”) But it’s not yet clear whether they have enough to make and sustain either case.
With Powell having earned Trump’s ire for his reluctance to lower interest rates, Pulte started going after him, too. For the past three months, he’s been publicly criticizing the Fed chair and urging him to resign.
Since the law only permits Trump to fire Powell “for cause” — meaning “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” — Pulte has been laying the groundwork for that. He’s been arguing that the expensive renovation of the Fed’s headquarters is a “scandal” that merits Powell’s firing for misconduct.
Pulte has not succeeded in pushing Powell out, yet. But there’s another way Trump could wrest control of the Fed — by replacing some of its seven-member board of governors. Two governors are already his allies, and he’s set to appoint a third to a vacant seat soon. That means he’d need one more seat for a majority.
So, all of a sudden, Pulte began raising questions about Lisa Cook’s mortgages — hoping to establish a pretext to fire her “for cause,” and then give Trump the fourth appointee he needed. Now, Trump has ordered Cook’s firing — and the courts will have to decide whether they’ll let it happen.
Update, August 26, 10:10 am ET: This article was originally published on July 29 and has been updated with Pulte’s attacks on Lisa Cook.
