President Donald Trump finally got a new Federal Reserve chair. His allies aren’t so sure he’ll get his interest rate cuts any time soon, though. The Senate confirmed Kevin Warsh as the central bank’s next chair in a 54-45 vote Wednesday, handing Trump a long-sought victory. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the only Democrat to support Warsh.

Ahead of the vote, Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon used his “War Room” podcast to prepare supporters for disappointment. The former Trump strategist said fresh inflation data made it “highly unlikely” that Warsh would have “the flexibility to cut rates in June,” when he will chair the central bank’s policy meeting for the first time.

“This makes it very difficult for Warsh,” Bannon said Tuesday, hours after the Labor Department reported that April inflation had jumped to 3.8 percent.

His guest, conservative commentator Eric Bolling, projected no rate cuts through the end of the year and ventured that the Warsh-led Fed may even need a modest rate hike to curb inflation.

The notable expectation setting for Trump’s base signaled that dramatic action on rates may not be coming, regardless of who runs the Fed.

Wednesday’s vote reflected the partisan divides that have increasingly defined Washington and now extend to the Fed, whose chairs have traditionally enjoyed wide margins of bipartisan support. A narrower confirmation margin could complicate Warsh’s ability to project independence from the White House — a perception central to the Fed’s credibility. By comparison, Powell received at least 80 votes both times he was confirmed.

The new Fed chair is a former Morgan Stanley banker who served as a Fed governor during the 2008 financial crisis, acting as a liaison between the central bank and Wall Street. He was passed over for the top job once before, when Trump chose Powell in 2017, a decision the president quickly came to regret.

Warsh’s confirmation wasn’t smooth. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) spent weeks blocking the nomination, demanding that the Justice Department drop a criminal investigation into Powell before he would allow the process to move forward. A bipartisan group of lawmakers and a federal judge characterized the probe as an abuse of power by the department.

Though the Justice Department set aside the matter, Warsh’s predecessor isn’t going far. Powell will remain on as a Fed governor when his term as chair expires on Friday — a move no outgoing chair has made in decades — depriving the White House of a crucial seat on the Fed’s powerful seven-member board.

That could present a challenge for Warsh. Even if Powell keeps his promise to maintain a low profile, his presence gives Fed officials skeptical of Warsh’s agenda a credible focal point to organize around.

Inflation has run above the Fed’s 2 percent target for more than five years and is now moving in the wrong direction, pushed higher by rising energy costs tied to the war in Iran. The Fed itself projects that inflation may not return to target for two more years — a stretch that risks eroding public confidence that longer-term prices will stay anchored.

That environment presents Warsh with a dilemma the Fed has no clean answer to. Raising interest rates to combat inflation risks deepening any economic slowdown caused by the war. Cutting them to cushion the economy risks pushing prices higher. And simply holding rates steady carries its own cost: with inflation running hot, unchanged rates mean looser policy in real terms, giving households and businesses less reason to pull back on spending and potentially adding fuel to the fire.

Looming over all of it is Trump, who has made no secret of what he expects: lower rates, and quickly. The president said he would be disappointed if his Fed pick doesn’t immediately cut rates.

At his confirmation hearing, Warsh pledged to operate independently. “The president never asked me to commit to interest rate cuts at any particular meeting over the period of my tenure at the Fed,” he told the Senate Banking Committee last month. “He didn’t ask for it, he didn’t demand it, he didn’t require it, and nor would I have ever done so.”

But Warsh declined to put much other distance between himself and the president. He would not say whether Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and sidestepped questions about whether tariffs had contributed to inflation.

The committee Warsh will chair is also notably divided. At last month’s interest rate meeting, four officials dissented from the policy statement — the most disagreement since the early 1990s. Three wanted to go further than the majority, pushing to drop any suggestion the Fed still leans toward cutting rates.

Warsh has signaled he wants to reshape the Fed well beyond its rate-setting function, arguing for dramatically shrinking the central bank’s $6.7 trillion balance sheet, which he contends amounts to fiscal policy in disguise — financing government spending in a way that should be left to Congress. Ask The Post AIDive deeper