President Trump spent months attacking the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates too high. On Wednesday, the central bank raised them, and Trump said he was standing by the chairman he picked.

The mild response was the clearest sign yet that Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has, for now, reset a relationship in which the White House treated the central bank as an adversary.

Rather than object, Trump cast himself as having waved the decision through to spare Warsh the indignity of being outflanked by his committee when he described a phone call he had with Warsh sometime before Wednesday's decision. "I said, 'You might as well vote with the board because it's not going to matter,'" he said. Warsh has "a very tough board" that is opposed to the White House, Trump said.

The call between Trump and Warsh was news to many of the president's close advisers, according to people familiar with the matter. Some senior administration officials first learned about the call when Trump told reporters about Wednesday in North Carolina.

The president reached out directly to Warsh in the days before the Fed board met, according to a senior White House official. The conversation started out as a friendly catch up, but later turned to the expected decision to raise interest rates, according to the official.

Some senior administration officials had been unsure how Trump would react to the Fed's rate increase. On Wednesday night at The Ned, a private Washington club frequented by administration officials, club members pulled out their phones to watch clips of Trump's comments about Warsh. Several administration officials at the club expressed relief that Trump didn't attack the Fed chairman, according to a person who was there.

The positive relationship between Trump, his White House and Warsh might not last. A senior administration official said that if the Fed decides to raise rates again in October-right before the midterm elections-Warsh could find himself the object of increased scrutiny by Trump and his advisers.

Trump's account could also leave investors wondering whether Warsh is leading the Fed or being carried along by it. Already, Warsh is getting blowback from some close to the president.

"I'm trying to figure out why Warsh would make a decision that's so ahistorical and so contrary to the underlying economics," Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said in an interview.

"The nuance here is you could do what the president suggested and sanctioned but you could do it in a better way," Navarro added. "You could signal in the remarks that you were more on the side of not raising rates but just going along."

Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, called Trump's account an attempt to save face. The suggestion that Warsh isn't leading his own committee strikes him as "both outrageous and false," he said.

Warsh declined at his news conference to discuss any conversations with Trump, and he described the rate increase as the product of the Fed's own deliberations. It was "a sober decision, serious decision, responsible decision, one that we have been preparing for and thinking about" since he arrived at the Fed in May, he said. Warsh has said he would be guided by economic conditions, not politics.

"President Trump has repeatedly affirmed his confidence in Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh, and maintains his First Amendment right as an American citizen and duty as commander in chief to voice his opinions about policymaking." White House spokesman Kush Desai said.

Warsh enjoys a closer relationship with Trump than his predecessor, Jerome Powell, whom Trump selected for the post during his first term. Trump also interviewed Warsh for the job in 2017. They "have a very close, long-term relationship...and they talk about the economy all the time," Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, said last month.

People who have spoken with Warsh describe a chairman confident he can do what he thinks the economy requires while managing the president in ways that avoid explosive confrontations. Warsh has approached the relationship differently than Powell. He avoids saying anything that draws the administration into the Fed's problems, and he has spoken about the Fed's independence as something to be practiced rather than proclaimed.

On Wednesday, Warsh said one reason for the increase was that the Fed's judgment about how conflicts abroad were likely to unfold had changed, which in turn had created new risks of higher energy and commodity prices. "There's no hiding from hot spots around the world," he said. But he never mentioned the war in Iran, instead using the word "geopolitics."

Powell had a honeymoon of about five months. After the Fed's first rate increases in 2018, Trump said he wasn't thrilled but said he was comfortable with rate increases because Powell was a good man. The attacks escalated through the fall, as modest rate rises and growing trade tensions led the stock market to wobble.

Powell avoided cultivating a relationship with Trump. He took the president's calls, which were few, and went to the White House three times when invited. But he made clear he didn't think the job included counseling the president on the economy. To Trump, it read as stonewalling by an appointee who wouldn't give him a hearing.

Trump has long thought he should have a say in rate decisions. And last December, as he weighed whom to name to the job, he said he wanted the Fed chairman to consult him. "I'm a smart voice and should be listened to," he told The Wall Street Journal.

Protecting the Fed's independence, or its ability to set interest rates without White House interference, might now require managing the president rather than standing apart from him, said Ellen Meade, a former Fed adviser and now a professor at Duke University. That responsibility could include alerting the White House about unfavorable news ahead of time so that Trump doesn't "fly off the handle immediately" after a policy announcement, she said.

There is a clear line, though, between informing and asking, she said. A heads-up that keeps the White House from being surprised at the Fed's 2 p.m. interest-rate announcement is one thing. It is quite another to seek the president's blessing for a policy decision, which would compromise the Fed's independence.

She isn't sure Powell's approach remains available to Warsh. "I don't see how Warsh gets away with doing the job the way Powell did it," she said. Even though she said Powell wasn't trying to provoke Trump and his approach seemed right at the time, "it almost, in retrospect, looks like you're picking a fight."

What Warsh might be attempting has been done before, under Chairman Alan Greenspan, who cultivated presidents and their advisers across four administrations. He famously sat next to then-first lady Hillary Clinton during President Bill Clinton's first address to a joint session of Congress in 1993.

But he also set policy as he thought necessary, triggering a rupture with President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Bush publicly said the Fed was too slow to lower interest rates that year and later blamed his re-election loss on Greenspan. "I reappointed him, and he disappointed me," Bush said in 1998.

Letting the White House think that Wednesday's increase, and any that follow, are being forced on Warsh could be a dangerous game, because it might invite the administration to step up efforts to remove other Fed officials, said Meade.

Trump last year attempted to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, and although the Supreme Court blocked the removal this summer, the White House has recently taken steps toward trying again. Trump cheered a criminal investigation of Powell earlier this year, which was dropped only after it threatened to hold up Warsh's confirmation.

Some at the Fed are also uneasy about a coming report on the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. It was ordered up by Michelle Bowman, whom Trump last year tapped as the Fed's vice chair of supervision, and they fear its findings will be used by the White House as grounds to fire her predecessor, Michael Barr, who remains on the board.