Excerpts: A "short" story

From Tom Cotton Admits Trump, Not Biden, Caused Inflation at Intelligencer, 2 December 2021:

Trump selected Powell in large part because he deemed his predecessor, Janet Yellen, too short to effectively handle monetary policy.

The part about Yellen links to The World’s Best Bureaucrat at Intelligencer, 27 October 2020:

Trump has the perspective of both a real-estate developer who likes to borrow money and a politician who knows low rates will juice the economy as he seeks reelection. So when he faced the choice about whom he should nominate to run the Fed, some of the names that might have been obvious choices for another Republican president — such as economist John Taylor and former Fed governor Kevin Warsh — were too out of step with Trump on monetary policy, because they were too likely to raise interest rates.

The president could have renominated Obama’s choice to run the Fed, Yellen, whose views on monetary policy are closer to Trump’s. There is precedent: Reagan, Clinton, and Obama all renominated Fed chairs who had originally been chosen by a predecessor of the rival party. But Yellen is a Democrat, and she was Obama’s pick, and Trump is notoriously suspicious of “Obama holdovers,” and also she is only five feet tall. I mention her height because in 2018, the Washington Post reported that Trump had repeatedly remarked to aides that Yellen seemed too short to run the central bank.

The part about the Washington Post links to Trump thought Yellen was too short to be Fed chair. That’s not how any of this works at The Washington Post, 3 December 2018:

Janet L. Yellen was the most qualified Federal Reserve chair we’ve ever had and maybe the most successful Federal Reserve chair we’ve ever had. But, in part because she was also the shortest Federal Reserve chair we’ve ever had, she wasn’t reappointed by President Trump.

That’s not a joke, or at least not a deliberate one. Trump, according to The Washington Post, seems to believe that the Fed is a lot like a roller coaster: You have to be so tall to go on it. In particular, he thought that the 5-foot-3-inch Yellen was too short to do the job that she’d been doing so well the previous four years. Which, along with wanting to make his own mark on the central bank, is why he broke with what had been a fairly long-standing bipartisan tradition of keeping on a Fed chair no matter which party had originally nominated them as long as they still wanted the job and seemed good at it.

Here, the part about the Washington Post links to Trump slams Fed chair, questions climate change and threatens to cancel Putin meeting in wide-ranging interview with The Post at The Washington Post, 27 November 2018:

Trump considered reappointing Yellen to the post, and she impressed him greatly during an interview, according to people briefed on their encounter. But advisers steered him away from renominating her, telling him that he should have his own person in the job.

The president also appeared hung up on Yellen’s height. He told aides on the National Economic Council on several occasions that the 5-foot-tall economist was not tall enough to lead the central bank, quizzing them on whether they agreed, current and former officials said.

Oh, yeah -- and this note, just below that last Washington Post article: 

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the height of former Federal Reserve Chair Janet L. Yellen. She is 5-foot-tall.

The End.