By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, Associated Press Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve is expected to leave its short-term interest rate unchanged on Wednesday for the fifth straight meeting, a move that will likely underscore the deep divide between how Chair Jerome Powell and his chief critic, President Donald Trump, see the economy.

The Fed itself, to be sure, is increasingly divided over its next steps, and many economists expect that two members of the Fed’s governing board — both appointed by Trump — could dissent on Wednesday in favor of cutting rates. If so, that would be the first time two governors vote against the chair since 1993.

President Donald Trump, left, reaches for a document of cost figures as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell watches during a visit to the Federal Reserve, Thursday, July 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

Even so, the gap between the views of the Fed’s interest-rate setting committee, chaired by Powell, and the White House is unusually large. In several areas, Trump’s views sharply contrast with that of the Fed’s leadership, setting up likely clashes for years to come, even after Powell’s term as chair ends in May 2026.

For example, Trump says that because the U.S. economy is doing well, the Fed should cut rates, as if the U.S. is a blue-chip company that should pay less to borrow than a risky start-up.

But Fed officials — and nearly all economists — see it the other way: A solid economy means rates should be relatively high, to prevent overheating and a burst of inflation.

“I’d argue that our interest rates are higher because our economy’s doing fairly well, not in spite of it,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, head of U.S. rates strategy at TD Securities.

Trump argues that the Fed in general and Powell in particular are costing U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments by not reducing borrowing costs. Yet Fed officials don’t think it’s their job to reduce rates the government pays on Treasury notes and bonds.

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Most economists worry that if they did, they would risk failing at one of the key jobs Congress gave them: fighting inflation.

“It’s using monetary policy to ease pressure on fiscal policymakers, and that way points to higher inflation and bigger problems down the road,” said William English, an economist at the Yale School of Management and former senior Fed staffer.

If financial markets see that the Fed is focused on keeping borrowing costs low to help the government — rather than focusing on its congressionally-mandated goals of stable prices and maximum employment — Wall Street investors, worried about future inflation, will likely demand higher interest rates to hold Treasury bonds, economists say, pushing up borrowing costs across the economy.

For his part, Trump says there is “no inflation” and so the Fed should reduce its short-term rate, currently at about 4.3%, which was ramped up in 2022 and 2023 to fight rising prices. The Fed’s rate often — but not always — influences longer-term borrowing costs for mortgages, car loans, and credit cards.

Inflation has fallen sharply and as a result Fed officials have signaled they will cut rates by as much as a half-percentage point this year. Yet it has picked up a bit in the last two months and many of those policymakers, including Powell, still want to make sure that tariffs aren’t going to lift inflation much higher before they make a move.

Inflation accelerated to 2.7% in June from 2.4% in May, the government said earlier this month, above the Fed’s 2% target. Core prices, which exclude the volatile food and energy categories, rose to 2.9% from 2.8%.

Last week, Trump and several White House officials ramped up their attacks on Powell over rates. They also criticized the ballooning costs of the Fed’s renovation of two of its buildings, raising questions over whether the president was looking to fire Powell for cause rather than policy differences.

Trump and Powell engaged in an extraordinary on-camera confrontation over the cost of the project during Trump’s visit to the building site last Thursday. On Monday, Trump was more restrained in his comments on the Fed during a joint appearance in London with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

“I’m not going to say anything bad,” Trump said. “We’re doing so well, even without the rate cut.”

But he added, “a smart person would cut.”

Some economists expect that the Fed will reduce its key rate by a quarter-point in September, rather than July, and say that the two-month delay will make little difference to the economy.

Yet beyond just the timing of the first cut, there is still a huge gulf between what Trump wants and what the Fed will even consider doing: Fed officials in June penciled in just two reductions this year and one in 2026. They forecast that their key rate will still be 3.6% at the end of next year. Trump is pushing them to cut it to just 1%.

“That’s not going to happen with anything like the current people on the committee,” English said.

Wall Street investors also expect relatively few cuts: Two this year and two in 2026, according to futures pricing tracked by CME’s Fedwatch.

According to the Fed’s projections, just two officials in June supported three cuts this year, likely Trump’s appointments from his first term: governors Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman.

Waller gave a speech earlier this month supporting a rate reduction in July, but for a very different reason than Trump: He is worried the economy is faltering.

“The economy is still growing, but its momentum has slowed significantly, and the risks” of rising unemployment “have increased,” Waller said.

Waller has also emphasized that tariffs will create just a one-time bump in prices but won’t lead to ongoing inflation.

Yet most Fed officials see the job market as relatively healthy — with unemployment at a low 4.1% — and that as a result, they can take time to make sure that’s how everything plays out.

“Continued overall solid economic conditions enable the Fed to take the time to carefully assess the wide range of incoming data,” said Susan Collins, president of the Boston Federal Reserve. “Thus, in my view, an ‘actively patient’ approach to monetary policy remains appropriate at this time.”

When you cover politics as I do, you find yourself around a lot of highly ambitious people. I don’t mind it. In fact, I like ambitious people. They’re energetic, trying to achieve big things, taking a big bite out of life. Their burning drive gives them the stamina they need to pursue their dreams year after year, and stamina is a vastly undervalued superpower if you want to contribute something to the world.

But, of course, ambition is both a blessing and a curse. Ambitious people are also more likely to be ruthless, manipulative, status-obsessed and so focused on worldly success that they become hollow inside. “Macbeth” is a play about a man who becomes a slave to ambition — that insatiable, destructive beast — which hardens, isolates and destroys him.

So the million-dollar questions are: How can you marshal ambition’s energies without being consumed by its insatiable demands? How do you live a driven life, seeking to achieve great things, without becoming a jerk?

Some sages say: Don’t even try. You can’t control ambition, so you should renounce it. Die to self. Abandon selfish desires and offer the world a pure and selfless love. This advice is not as unrealistic as it may seem. I’ve known many people who live utterly generous lives — serving the poor and the weak with great love without clamoring for applause. Their lives are wondrous to behold.

Unfortunately, many of us, and I include myself here, can’t seem to achieve that. Sad to say, my altruistic desires alone are not powerful enough to drive me through the hard labor required to do anything of note. If I’m going to get through the arduous work of, say, writing a book, I need to put my egotistic desires at the service of my loftier desires. I start the book hoping it will be helpful to people, but to propel me to work on it for years, I also need my name on the cover and the ego-pleasing possibility that readers might think I’m clever. In other words, if I’m going to be really driven, I need to harness both selfless and selfish motivations. I don’t scorn mixed motives; I live by them. I think a lot of us live this way.

Abraham Lincoln is the patron saint for those of us who hope to live well even in the grip of ambition. Lincoln’s law partner reported that “his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” And yet one of Lincoln’s major speeches, the Lyceum Address of 1838, was about the danger of overweening ambition, and you get the impression he was very much worrying about his own.

Lincoln rode to the White House on that drive, but at every step along the way, you see him wrestling with his ambition, as if he were wrestling with a dangerous dragon. He was trying to ride his ambition to great heights without being consumed and corrupted by it. This struggle with your own ambition is a perilous enterprise — like Jacob wrestling with the angel.

I find I can better understand this struggle with the dragon of ambition if I break it down into five constituent struggles:

— The struggle between craft and reward.

In his 1941 novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?” Budd Schulberg describes a belligerently self-centered and ambitious man who makes it big as a screenwriter in Hollywood. The crucial fact about the main character, Sammy Glick, is that he doesn’t care at all about the craft of screenwriting; he only cares about the fame and money it can bring. So he plagiarizes, steals other people’s ideas, takes shortcuts, is delighted by a script that makes money even if it’s mediocre.

That’s a crucial distinction: How much are you driven by the intrinsic desire to be good at what you do? How much are you driven by the desire for extrinsic rewards like money and fame that being good can bring you? And most crucially, what is the ratio between these two motivations? I’d say if your intrinsic commitment to the craft isn’t dominant, by say 70-30, you’re on morally perilous ground. If you’re just doing it for the money and fame, you’re going to cut corners. You will lack a sense of calling and a true commitment to the vocation, and your lack of intrinsic passion will show up in your work and life.

— The struggle between gift love and need love.

In his book “The Four Loves,” C.S. Lewis observes that some of our loves emerge from a fullness and some emerge from a void. If somebody poured great love into you as a child and you want to pour great love into your neighbors, colleagues and products, that is gift love. Lewis gives the example of a character called Mrs. Fidget as an example of need love. She seems to be devoted to caring for her family. But she’s always boasting of her own sacrifices. She’s manipulative and controlling. She’s trying to fill a hole in her own heart, so her love is self-centered, not other-centered.

Gift love is essentially delighted with the world; need love is voracious, insatiable and laced with a fear of failure. Gift love fosters human connection; need love bends a person in on himself, and leads to isolation. If you’re wrestling with your ambition, it seems important to ask: From where does my ambition flow, from a sense of abundance or a sense of hollowness? People whose ambition is fueled by resentment (Richard Nixon and Donald Trump) are fueled by need love.

— The struggle between excellence and superiority.

Some people’s longings are noncomparative. If they are good at something, that satisfaction is its own reward. Other people’s longings are primarily competitive. It’s not enough for them to be good; they need to be better than. They need to come out on top of someone else.

Since we’re such nice people we’re going to tell ourselves that our longings are noncomparative. But despite these noble assertions, I notice there’s an awful lot of competitive striving for superiority in the world.

Our entire meritocracy is built around the striving for superiority. It’s not that you’re good; what matters is you’re ranked higher, you got into a more exclusive school. The social media world is a world of vicious ranking and comparison. A survey of almost 200 sociologists found that about half expected to become one of the 10 most important sociologists of their time. Not just good, but better than.

The world of noncomparative striving can be a world of mutual respect. On the other hand, a desire for superiority is zero-sum, nasty and drenched in envy. As Yale theologian Miroslav Volf writes in “The Cost of Ambition,” “Frustrated striving for superiority often seeks relief in the form of aggressive self-deception in which the superior is cast as morally deficient, arrogant and oppressive.” It’s not enough that I be built up; others must be torn down.

— The struggle between high and low desires.

The quality of your ambition will be shaped by the goal you’re ambitious for. As philosophers down the ages have noticed, if you hunger for power you will always feel powerless and fear treachery; if you hunger for approval you will always have to be people pleasing; if you hunger for money you will never have enough; but if you hunger for understanding, your world will always be filled with wonders; and if you hunger for God, you will be hungering for perfect love itself and your hunger, I believe, will be purified by that love.

We all instinctively know that some desires are morally superior to others. The longing for true friendship is higher than the longing for popularity; the longing for community is higher than the longing for a Porsche. And yet there is a perversity in each human heart that sometimes turns us into idolaters — that induces us to worship the lesser substitutes our culture tells us to worship rather than some ultimate good itself.

We want to love and be loved, which is a noble ambition, but we think we can get them by looking good, being in the know, being popular with the in crowd. Idolatry is an ultimate longing for a finite thing. Like all addictions, this form of miswanting demands more and more of a person, while offering less and less.

Be careful what you love, St. Augustine warned, because you end up turning into what you love. Moral life, he continued, is about getting your loves in the right order and wanting what is higher.

— Finally, the struggle between ambition and aspiration.

Ambition is the desire to rise higher in the world. Aspiration is the desire to become a better person in the world. The former is about social mobility, and the latter is about inner transformation.

As you can tell, I applaud ambition, but aspiration sounds a lot more important. It takes courage to build the kind of relationships you’ve never experienced before, to cultivate the kind of virtues you’ve never possessed before. The world doesn’t applaud you as much when you devote yourself to the inner sanctification rather than to outer impressiveness.

Aspiration demands that you renounce the merit badge life. After a few wasted years in college, Walter Kirn was stripped down to a place where he was tired of trying to get ahead; all he wanted to do was learn. He writes in his book “Lost in the Meritocracy”: “Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.”

As I was finishing this column on the train I got a nervous text from my wife. She’s launching a big project, and she was about to send a mass email announcing it to the world. She mentioned that her ambitions for this project were clashing with her quietist desires to be a private person out of the spotlight. That sounds like exactly the kind of healthy internal struggle I was at that exact moment trying to describe. Professional success often comes from being wholehearted, from moving unreservedly after one goal. But the people we admire are often divided against themselves, burning hot with some ambition while trying to transcend the flames.

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.

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Today is Tuesday, July 29, the 210th day of 2025. There are 155 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On July 29, 1967, an accidental rocket launch on the deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal in the Gulf of Tonkin resulted in a fire and explosions that killed 134 service members.

Also on this date:

In 1836, the newly completed Arc de Triomphe was inaugurated in Paris.

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In 1858, the United States and Japan signed the Harris Treaty, formalizing diplomatic relations and trading rights between the two countries.

In 1890, artist Vincent van Gogh, 37, died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

In 1914, transcontinental telephone service in the U.S. became operational with the first test conversation between New York and San Francisco.

In 1921, Adolf Hitler became the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party.

In 1954, the first volume of JRR Tolkien’s novel “The Lord of the Rings” (“The Fellowship of the Ring”) was published.

In 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency was established.

In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA.

In 1981, Britain’s Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in a glittering ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. (They divorced in 1996.)

In 1986, a federal jury in New York found that the National Football League had committed an antitrust violation against the rival United States Football League, but the jury ordered the NFL to pay token damages of just three dollars.

In 1994, abortion opponent Paul Hill shot and killed Dr. John Bayard Britton and Britton’s escort, James H. Barrett, outside the Ladies Center clinic in Pensacola, Florida.

In 1999, a former day trader, apparently upset over stock losses, opened fire in two Atlanta brokerage offices, killing nine people and wounding 13 before shooting himself; authorities said Mark O. Barton had also killed his wife and two children.

In 2016, former suburban Chicago police officer Drew Peterson was given an additional 40 years in prison for trying to hire someone to kill the prosecutor who put him behind bars for killing his third wife.

In 2021, American Sunisa Lee won the gold medal in women’s all-around gymnastics at the Tokyo Games; she was the fifth straight American woman to claim the Olympic title in the event.

Today’s Birthdays:

Former Sen. Nancy Kassebaum-Baker is 93.
Former Sen. Elizabeth H. Dole is 89.
Artist Jenny Holzer is 75.
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is 72.
Style guru Tim Gunn is 72.
Rock singer-musician Geddy Lee (Rush) is 72.
Rock singer Patti Scialfa (Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band) is 72.
Actor Alexandra Paul is 62.
Country singer Martina McBride is 59.
Actor Wil Wheaton is 53.
R&B singer Wanya Morris (Boyz II Men) is 52.
Actor Stephen Dorff is 52.
Actor Josh Radnor is 51.
Hip-hop DJ/music producer Danger Mouse is 48.
NFL quarterback Dak Prescott is 32.

As he conducted his postgame media availability, Twins starter Simeon Woods Richardson referred back to a sheet of paper with many of his teammates’ names written on it. So many different players contributed to Tuesday night’s win, and the starting pitcher didn’t want to forget any of them.

“It took everybody today,” he said, listing nine names. “Even if we had a long-(expletive) rain delay. Excuse my French. It was a good win.”

That it was.

Hours after the Twins traded starting pitcher to Chris Paddack, the first move in what could be a busy week ahead of Thursday’s trade deadline, they stormed back in the ninth inning using a Brooks Lee two-run, walk-off single for a 5-4 win over the Boston Red Sox after waiting out an hour and a half rain delay in the middle of the ninth inning at Target Field.

“To be able to focus and play just a really good ballgame, to challenge guys in different spots and watch them come through, you have to want it,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “It’s a challenging day saying goodbye to a guy that you care about that’s done good work for us in Paddy, but watching guys step up on a day that’s kind of an emotional day is great.”

Lee’s single, which came after he fell behind 0-2 in the count, brought home Mickey Gasper and Willi Castro, who was hot on Gasper’s heels, to erase Boston’s advantage, one that it had gained in the top of the ninth. That was mere minutes before the wind started picking up, whipping trash on the field, and it started pouring with lightning bolts illuminating the sky over the ballpark.

The Twins (51-55) needed just a few minutes after the long delay to come back.

DaShawn Keirsey Jr. got them started with a single to lead off the inning. Gasper walked right after him, and then Castro was hit by a pitch, loading the bases for the third time in the game. Carlos Correa then hit a ground ball to third and Keirsey was thrown out at home, bringing Lee to the plate to play a starring role.

Down Byron Buxton, who was on the bench with cartilage irritation, and Ryan Jeffers, who is on paternity leave, the Twins still came through when it mattered most.

“We still knew we were going to play at some point (Monday night),” Lee said after collecting his third walk-off hit of the season. “Those are the times when you come together and figure it out, and we have baseball players to do that.”

The late-inning dramatics came after the Twins and Red Sox (57-51)  traded leads earlier in the game.

Keirsey broke open a scoreless game in the third inning with his second home run of the season, after which he noted he felt Paddack’s absence as he came back to the dugout and noticed the starting pitcher wasn’t waiting on the top step as usual to place the team’s celebratory helmet on his head.

The Twins were then unable to take advantage of a bases-loaded, no-out situation an inning earlier, allowing the Red Sox to hang around.

An Alex Bregman three-run home run off Woods Richardson, who had navigated out of trouble in three of the previous four innings, completed a big momentum swing and gave Boston its first lead of the night.

The Twins tied it up in the sixth, thanks in part to some wildness from reliever Jorge Alcala, and the score remained that way until the ninth.

“I think it just goes to show the guys we have in this locker room, rallying together,” Keirsey said.