Herman Cain exemplifies Trump’s dysfunction

[BloombergOpinion]( [Early Returns]( [Jonathan Bernstein]( Let’s just pause for a moment to consider all the ways that President Donald Trump’s plan to nominate pizza magnate Herman Cain to the Federal Reserve Board is evidence that he has no idea how to do his job. To begin with: There are two open seats on the Fed board because Trump’s nominees during the last Congress, [Nellie Liang]( and [Marvin Goodfriend](, went nowhere. Trump apparently couldn’t come up with candidates who could both advance his preferences on monetary policy and regulation and also get confirmed by the Senate. So the spots remain vacant. Trump’s not the only president to leave Fed seats open way too long; Barack Obama made the same mistake repeatedly. But these are important positions, and leaving them unfilled substantially reduces the president’s policy influence. Next, Herman Cain is, to put it as nicely as possible, an unconventional choice. Cain ran a business, ran for office, and became a Republican talk-show host and general crank; he’s no economist. Although he was once chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, he has none of the qualifications that appointees to the position conventionally have. It probably doesn’t matter anyway, because Cain quit his presidential run in 2011 over accusations of sexual harassment. If that was enough to derail him then, it’s hard to believe that Republican senators will be eager to confirm him during the #MeToo era. For Trump to even consider him seems like a gaffe, especially given the president’s own history with the subject. But that’s not all! As it turns out, Cain has a record on monetary policy, and it’s the exact opposite of what Trump has lately been advocating. As Bloomberg’s Jennifer Jacobs [reports](, “He advocated for the U.S. to return to the gold standard during his presidential campaign and as recently as December 2017 defended higher interest rates.” Trump has recently been complaining that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell – his own nominee, remember – has been too quick to tighten monetary policy. Now, just when the Fed has stopped raising interest rates, he’s considering putting another voice on the board to advocate for what he doesn’t want. Why? Presumably because Cain has been a sufficiently loud Trump fan. That’s not a terrible reason to reward someone with a job, but presumably some careful thought should go into choosing which job is appropriate. Trump, though, still doesn’t seem to understand that personnel is policy. Which is really the amazing thing. Lots of presidents have had slow starts; Bill Clinton’s transition and first year were notoriously chaotic. But by this point in his presidency, Clinton had done a lot of learning on the job. Part of his problem was that he was wary of how things had been done in the past and suspicious of staffers who had worked for Jimmy Carter, a president he wanted to separate himself from. But over time, Clinton learned which standard White House procedures worked for him and what changes would actually be helpful. The problem with Trump is that, two years in, he seems to have learned practically nothing. He’s still making the fundamental mistakes he was making in January 2017. Thus the shutdown. And thus this latest farce with Herman Cain. And six weeks and counting without finding anyone to nominate for secretary of defense, let alone all the other openings in the administration. It’s really not getting any better, folks. 1. Dan Drezner on what he calls the “[China gap](.” 2. Tanu Kumar at the Monkey Cage on [solving the affordable-housing problem](. 3. Jonathan Portes on [Modern Monetary Theory](. 4. Jamelle Bouie on [third-party candidates](. 5. Paul Kane reports [on Mark Meadows]( and the waning influence of the House Freedom Caucus. 6. Kevin Drum on the [direction of the Democratic Party](. 7. Here at Bloomberg Opinion, Michele A. Flournoy and Josh Hochman on [tech, China and U.S. security](. 8. And my colleagues and I have all the [charts and numbers on Trump’s first two years](. Make sure you get down to the bottom where Elaine Ou has a statistic I hadn’t seen. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. Bloomberg L.P. ● 731 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10022 [Web]( ● [Facebook]( ● [Twitter]( [Feedback]( ● [Unsubscribe](