Stephen Moore in an exclusive interview with Hill.TV insisted he had President Trump’s full support until the moment he withdrew from consideration as a nominee to the Federal Reserve board on Thursday.
“The president was fully supportive,” Moore said, adding that “Donald Trump is not someone who backs down, he’s not a quitter. The thing I feel saddest about is that I sort of let the president down by not being able to get through this process.”
Trump announced that Moore had withdrawn from consideration on Thursday afternoon in a tweet — just hours after Moore had said he was “all in” on the process. Asked when he notified The White House about his decision to withdraw, Moore said he “does not remember.”
Moore’s nomination became imperiled in recent days after his past writings about women surfaced, including a 2002 column in National Review Online in which Moore proposed a rule change that there be “no women anything” in sports so that men could have one area in life that was a vacation from women. He said there could be an exception for the sports broadcaster Bonnie Bernstein, adding that she should “wear a halter top.”
Moore apologized for his writings and said the National Review column had been meant as humor, but faced skepticism from a number of Republican senators, including Joni Ernst (Iowa) and Susan Collins (Maine).
Ernst said it was “very unlikely” that she would back Moore, while Collins said she found his writings about women “troubling.”
Moore said he blames “a very well-orchestrated campaign of personal destruction” for taking him down, and not Ernst and Collins, who he suggested were put in a difficult spot.
“They said let’s go after these Republican women, there are a number of Republican women who are up for re-election…like Joni Ernst…so they said let’s make him out as a sexist, a misogynist, a chauvinist, and that campaign worked. It made things difficult for a Susan Collins or a Joni Ernst to defend me,” Moore said.
“I don’t blame them whatsoever and I never wanted them to have to take a tough vote for a Federal Reserve board member — this isn’t the Supreme Court we’re talking about,” he said.
Moore expressed disappointment throughout the interview that he was not able to fully see through the nomination process but said he was recommending some other people for the job.
“Here we are at the Heritage Foundation, we have some great economists — David Burton, Paul Winfree who would be excellent Fed members. The person I’m really pushing with The White House right now is a woman named Judy Shelton who was a Jack Kemp economist many years ago. Fantastic, I can’t think of anybody better than Judy,” he said.
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