Partisan hack Stephen Moore, Donald Trump's pick to be the next U.S. Federal Reserve governor, is the latest in a string of massively unqualified nominees that are just there because they show unthinking loyalty to Trump. The difference with Moore is that he's upfront about his utter lack of qualifications, not that that's making him hesitate at all in accepting.
"I'm kind of new to this game, frankly, so I'm going to be on a steep learning curve myself about how the Fed operates, how the Federal Reserve makes its decisions," Moore said on Bloomberg Television right after Trump announced his nomination, which is already a problem. Serious people, legitimate nominees, refrain from going out and blabbing about their nominations on TV out of respect for the process. But Moore is a Trump nominee. "It's hard for me to say even what my role will be there, assuming I get confirmed," he admitted. Moore's only qualifications are having been an economic adviser on the Trump campaign and being at the Heritage Foundation and founding the Club for Growth. And telling the New York Times that the "one guy who gets" that the Fed is creating deflation "is Trump. […] He told me in a meeting last month that the Fed is preventing us from staying on a 3 to 4 percent growth path."
The assumption shouldn't be that he does get confirmed, however. Even fellow Republicans are panning the nomination and urging the Senate to block his appointment. For example: Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, who wrote an open memo to the Senate saying Moore "does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job. […] It is time for senators to do their job. Mr. Moore should not be confirmed."
Here's a preview of what Moore's confirmation hearing could look like, should he get that far. In it, economics expert and Washington Post and CNN columnist and commentator Catherine Rampell humiliates him on national television when he tries to spout off again about his deflation theory. Watch it in all its glory below.