Imagine missing Donald Regan, President Reagan’s famously irascible Treasury secretary, on Christmas Eve. Imagine spending a morning normally devoted to preparing to mark the birth of a savior brushing up on the exact requirements of the 25th Amendment for removing a president of the United States from office.

But that’s what I did, as more of your retirement money and mine was flushed down the toilet, courtesy of current Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s utterly inexplicable decision this weekend to weigh in publicly on big U.S. banks’ ability to withstand a run that literally no one had said was happening, as part of a panicking administration’s unwillingness to tell President Donald Trump “no” about anything.

“I’ve got fuck-you money,” said Regan, reportedly. “Anytime I want, I’m gone.”

Which Mnuchin might have recalled when he tweeted about whether the president could, or would, fire the nominally independent Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell for raising interest rates faster than Trump would like. Or before he got the bright idea to call the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks to ask whether a perfectly routine stock-market correction would force them to cut off credit to a $20 trillion economy by this morning. And to tweet about that, too, in a move that will, one predicts, quickly be traced either to an edict from the boss or a misplaced desire to dance as fast as Mnuchin can to placate Trump.

After all, with an estimated $300 million net worth, Mnuchin’s about seven times richer than Regan was.

This was, precisely, the time for Mnuchin to stiffen his spine and tell the president that he was going to stay silent publicly and that Trump should, too. Both about the Fed and about the banks. It’s what Mnuchin’s money supposedly gives him the freedom, by Don Regan’s rule of thumb, to do.

Read:Trump tweets that Fed ‘is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch’

And it is certainly what anyone with two brain cells to rub together would do.

Instead, we get more panic, more bad leadership from an administration already presiding over a government shutdown motivated by Trump’s determination to wall off the Mexican border to stop a nonexistent wave of illegal immigration. An administration whose secretary of defense quit last week over Trump’s decision to hand over Syria to be, essentially, divvied up between Hafez Assad, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as outgoing Pentagon chief Jim Mattis’s resignation letter in effect told the president he didn’t understand literally anything about post–World War II history or even how to tell an ally from a thuggish dictator.

Read:Chris Edelson says Republicans in Congress fiddle while Trump burns

Put another way, Mattis considered the seven-figure portfolio he’s described in ethics disclosures as possessing to be sufficient eff-you money, while Mnuchin couldn’t get there with $300 million. But then, Mattis isn’t married to a former actress who’s been compared to Marie Antoinette.

Come Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.19% plunged, ending the shortened session down 2.9%, while the S&P 500 SPX, +0.29% slumped 2.7%, easily their worst Christmas Eve performance ever. Both are now on track for the ugliest monthly drop since October 2008, at the heart of the 2008-09 financial crisis.

And the crazier thing is that the government is going to get much worse, very soon.

We’ve seen that this always-erratic president has grown far more volatile since his party was whipped in the midterm elections. And we saw incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer eat Trump’s lunch in a public sparring session, instigated by the president, about the then-looming shutdown and the Mexican wall.

Over the next two weeks, a president who lacks any electoral pull to punish House Democrats will try to extract $5 billion from Congress to pay for his wall, which by all estimates will cost at least five times that, while Republicans still control a majority in the House and Senate. He will fail.

Then, on Jan. 3, Democrats will actually take over the House, and the real fun will begin. Subpoenas will fly about everything from Trump’s team conspiring with Russian intelligence to influence 2016’s election, to whether the Syria pullout was improperly related to Trump’s business dealings in Turkey.

And Pelosi will tell Trump where to put his wall, just before adjusting her sunglasses, ever-stylishly and with a small smile, as she did after demolishing Trump in public two weeks ago.

He’ll take it well, no doubt.

In a world that ran as civics books tell us, this would be when Trump’s cabinet might consider invoking the 25th Amendment to certify that the president is incapable of carrying out his office and strip him of power — a move that, according to the famous op-ed by an anonymous administration insider, at least some Trump appointees considered last year.

After all, the president isn’t functional in any ordinary working-world sense of the term: He’s coming to work late, making rash and emotional judgments, lashing out at co-workers, losing staff at an alarming rate and garnering such a reputation as a bad boss that he was only able to procure an acting chief of staff by snagging Office of Management and Budget chief Mick Mulvaney as Mulvaney came to the West Wing for an unrelated meeting. Even then, Mulvaney refused to quit his day job to take up the second most powerful job in Washington.

But, as you watch the stock market, think about the money Don Regan had, which he thought would let him say no, even to a president, if the situation demanded it.

And think about the money you don’t have, in part because no Republican in Washington has demanded anything of Trump, or ever dared to tell him no, for two years.

Now read:Caroline Baum tells the stock market to find its spine rather than have a hissy fit over the Federal Reserve