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Kevin Hassett is toadying hard to win the president’s favor. But don’t count out Kevin Warsh or Scott Bessent just yet in this latest White

Timothy Noah at TNR:

Last week, I considered whether there was a limit to how extravagantly President Donald Trump could be flattered before he started to detect a note of contempt. My tentative finding was “no.” Contemporary society, I explained, is much more preoccupied with receiving adequate appreciation than with mistrusting those who give more than we deserve. And even within this age of underfed egos, Trump’s insatiable hunger for flattery lies so far outside the normal range as to merit its own entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Today let’s use this insight to handicap the race to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. I’m on record predicting that, even though the term of the current chairman, Jerome Powell, will end next May, and even though the Supreme Court has fired a warning shot that it might not countenance removing Powell without cause before then, Trump lacks the impulse control necessary to wait 10 months.

The latest is that Trump is building a transparently fake justification to fire Powell for cause. On Thursday Trump’s wily budget director, Russell “Project 2025” Vought, wrote Powell to say the president is “extremely troubled” about an “ostentatious overhaul” of the Fed’s D.C. headquarters, and on the following day Vought went on CNBC to say this move demonstrates “the fundamental mismanagement of the Fed under the chairman.” Vought went on to say that the National Capital Planning Commission, to which Trump last week appointed three close associates, plans to investigate the matter. “What they’re trying to manufacture,” Scott Alvarez, former general counsel for the Fed, explained to Bloomberg, “is some ‘cause’ not related to monetary policy disagreements.” Previously, the lead candidate to replace Powell was the former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, who was in the running for chair when Trump chose Powell eight years ago. But according to Brian Schwartz and Nick Timiraos of The Wall Street Journal, Warsh’s prospects have lately faded because he’s an inflation hawk. That’s provided an opening for another Kevin: Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council.

Hassett’s most distinguishing characteristic is an extreme eagerness to say what Trump wants to hear. Per Schwartz and Timiraos, Hassett learned “to adopt his positions to the president’s instincts.” The Washington Post’s Andrew Ackerman wrote Monday that Hassett is “one of the few advisers who have endeared themselves to the president while staying in his good graces,” a redundant construction (if you stay in someone’s good graces then quite obviously you’ve endeared yourself) that makes sense only if intended to communicate that Hassett is a shameless sycophant. “It’s honestly like Kevin Hassett and Howard Lutnick are battling it out for the title of America’s Most Embarrassing Sycophant,” observed the financial writer James Surowiecki this past weekend. (See my April post, “Everybody Hates Howard Lutnick.”)

Hassett is indeed shameless about changing his positions to toe the party line. “The Fed—independence is respected,” Hassett said in February. Two months later, when asked if Trump could fire Powell, Hassett said, “The President and his team will continue to study that matter.” They’re still studying it, Hassett said this past Sunday on ABC’s This Week (what a studious bunch!), “but certainly, if there’s cause, he does” have the power to fire Powell. Hassett suggested there was cause aplenty in the Fed’s cost overruns. A couple of weeks before the 2024 election. Hassett said that barring “a specific security concern or anti-dumping concern,” a reciprocal or universal tariff “has to be passed by Congress.” But after the United States Court of International Trade agreed with that statement and struck down many of Trump’s unilateral tariffs, Hassett pirouetted to griping that “activist judges are trying to slow down something right in the middle of really important negotiations.”

[...] Thus the state of play: Waller and Bowman are almost certainly out of the running, and Warsh and Bessent are down but not out. If the choice boils down to which candidate for Fed chair is most willing to debase himself, then Hassett will be hard to beat. And why shouldn’t Trump pay attention up front to a candidate’s capacity for self-debasement? Whoever succeeds Powell as Fed chair will be expected to furnish an unprecedented quantity of it going forward.

Should Tyrant 47 decide to issue a pink slip to Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, there are a few candidates that Trump will decide to pick for the job.

The current favorites are Scott Bessent and Kevin Hassett.

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