Like nearly everything he touches, Donald Trump is now in the process of thoroughly debasing the Federal Reserve, one of the few still-respected institutions left in Washington.

Trump’s assault on the Fed began last fall when he started jawboning Jerome Powell, his own pick for Fed chairman, into curtailing Powell’s well-articulated plan to raise short-term interest rates through 2019, after a decade when his two predecessors kept them artificially low. Powell’s words had spooked the debt and equity markets—taking some of the air out of those balloons, just as a Fed chairman should do—at the end of 2018, and Trump didn’t like it. (He views the financial markets as a daily referendum on his success as president.) Trump reportedly told his advisers that Powell was going to “turn me into Hoover,” a reference, of course, to Herbert Hoover, the president who presided over the country’s fall into the Great Depression. Now, Trump has doubled down on denigrating the Central Bank through his nomination of Stephen Moore, the former Wall Street Journal editorial board member, to the Fed’s board of governors.

Moore, like Larry Kudlow, Trump’s national economic adviser, is one of the architects—along with economist Arthur Laffer—of the infamous Reagan-era policies of so-called supply-side economics, or what George H. W. Bush called “voodoo” economics. The idea is that if you cut taxes on the rich, and put even more money in their pockets, it will “trickle down” to the poor saps stuck in the middle and lower classes. The idea didn’t work for Reagan, and it hasn’t worked for Trump, despite Trump’s claims that his 2018 tax law did just that.

But Moore is a true believer, and that’s what Trump seems to need around him these days. Moore once—seriously—suggested that Trump deserved the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics and, again seriously, said he thought Trump looked like “a football player, in incredible, great shape.” It’s so glaring, this tuchis-licking, that on Tuesday Moore tried a different tack. “I don’t think anybody can reasonably say I am a sycophant for Trump, because I’m not,” Moore told The New York Times.

Both Kudlow and Moore were economic advisers to Trump during the 2016 campaign. Kudlow got his reward when he was named to succeed Gary Cohn in the White House and Moore is eager to get his reward by serving on the board of the Fed. If his nomination goes through, he’ll partly have Kudlow to thank. On March 13, Moore co-authored a Wall Street Journal commentary piece that echoed Trump’s view that Powell’s interest-rate hikes were preventing the U.S. economy from growing at the annual rate of 3 percent to 4 percent that it is “positioned” to grow at, thanks to Trump’s economic policies of tax cuts, regulatory reform, and his tough stance on trade with China. “Skeptics in and out of the Fed still think sustained 3% to 4% growth is out of reach,” he wrote. “Nonsense.” Kudlow showed the column to Trump, who then offered Moore the Fed job, which requires Senate confirmation.

The condemnation was swift, even from G.O.P quarters. “He does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job,” Greg Mankiw, a Harvard professor who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, wrote in a blog post last Friday. “It is time for senators to do their job. Mr. Moore should not be confirmed.” Bruce Bartlett, another G.O.P. economist, tweeted that Moore knows “absolutely nothing about the Federal Reserve or monetary policy.” Washington Post economics columnist Charlotte Rampell started tweeting up a storm against his nomination. “I’ve been wondering if Wall Street would kick up a fuss about Moore,” she wrote on Wednesday, linking to a Politico story. “They might like dovish policy but perhaps not at the expense of destroying the Fed’s credibility on price stability for the rest of time.”