Trump’s Fed pick on critics: ‘They’re pulling a Kavanaugh against me’

Stephen Moore, President Trump’s planned pick for a Federal Reserve Board seat, said Tuesday that his critics are “pulling a Kavanaugh against me” after controversial writings of his from the 2000s were uncovered and thrust his nomination into tumult.

The conservative commentator has come under fire over recently unearthed comments that included derogatory remarks about women and references to Cincinnati and Cleveland as the “armpits of America.”

{mosads}“I was so honored when I got the call from Donald Trump. But all it’s been since then has been one personal assault after another and a kind of character assassination having nothing to do with economics,” Moore told “The Flag,” a conservative talk radio show in North Dakota. “They’re pulling a Kavanaugh against me.” 

“I’m taking a 60 percent pay cut to do this job,” he added. “So you know, I mean, it’s true public service.”

The Washington Post was the first to report on Moore’s latest remarks.

Moore was referring to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed by the Senate last year following a bitter confirmation battle that included the Trump nominee defending himself from multiple sexual misconduct allegations.

Trump and other Republicans claimed Democrats were behind the accusations as part of an effort to smear the then-nominee, who denied all wrongdoing throughout the confirmation process and was ultimately confirmed by the smallest Senate margin in 137 years.

The president first announced last month that he would tap Moore, a close political ally and former economic adviser to his presidential campaign, to a spot on the Federal Reserve’s seven-person board. However, Moore was quickly hit with questions over his objectivity and past remarks. 

Moore had called for raising interest rates under President Obama when the economy was struggling, but now says interest rates should be cut while the economy is doing well. 

CNN this week also resurfaced several columns from the 2000s in which Moore lamented the “feminization of basketball,” said women should not be allowed to referee men’s sports unless they are good-looking and claimed women athletes were seeking “equal pay for inferior work.”

Moore told The Post on Monday that he does not stand by any of those comments and that his past writings were a “spoof.”

CNBC also uncovered some other past comments in which Moore said that a doctor “might as well have told us that [the boy] has AIDS” when he told him his son had “low muscle tone.”

Moore also described his wife at the time, a stay-at-home-mom, as a “loss leader” who “doesn’t have a job.”

The New York Times unearthed even more comments Tuesday in which he called college a place “for men to lose their boyhood innocence” and “do stupid things.”

“[T]he women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights the showed up in droves in tight skirts to the keg parties?” Moore wrote in 2000.

Moore has also faced scrutiny for past criticisms of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

Larry Kudlow, director of the White House National Economic Council, said last week that Moore still has the White House’s support but that the administration is interviewing candidates that could potentially replace him at the Fed.