Satire died an agonizing death during the Trump presidency.

At least it was quick. Caricature didn’t suffer. One morning we woke up to discover that yesterday’s Onion headlines were today’s New York Times feature stories. And that was that.

The Trump administration put every satirist in America out of work virtually overnight. If you’re still employed as a humorist, it’s charity on the part of your employer. You should thank them. Then start looking for another job. Because if the next recession doesn’t get you, the next Trump administration will.

That legacy of the Trump years (and much else besides) is still with us. Satire’s still dead. Witness this headline: “Former US president says if reelected, will tell Russia to invade NATO countries.” That’s not verbatim that I know of. But it could be. Trump said that. He said if he’s reelected, any NATO country which fails to spend enough domestically on defense will be on their own in the event of a Russian invasion.

On Monday, the financial pages included a few stories about preliminary discussions around who Trump might choose to replace Jerome Powell. Among the names on the very short shortlist: Kevin Hassett who, before joining the first Trump administration, was best known for the book “Dow 36,000,” published somewhat unfortunately in 1999. (To be fair to Kevin, the Dow did ultimately hit 36,000. In 2021.)

Hassett is, at least, an economist. A real one. With a PhD. From Penn. The sarcastic among you will suggest that’s actually disqualifying, and while I share the implied disdain for the economics profession on some (most) days, the point in mentioning his degree is to set him apart from Stephen Moore and also Judy Shelton. Trump, you’ll recall, tried to install Moore and Shelton on the Fed board to the horrified amusement of the economic community. Although the media (and in Shelton’s case, Wikipedia too) frequently refers to Moore and Shelton as economists, neither actually are. Shelton’s PhD is in business administration. Moore doesn’t have a PhD. (The Senate rejected Moore and Shelton.)

Hassett’s a regular Adam Smith compared to Moore and Shelton. The problem is, he’s Moore and Shelton compared to serious economists. That’s actually not an attempt to disparage Kevin. Like a lot of other people who served in the Trump administration, he was hapless mostly by association. Or at least during his first stint as a Trump official. During his second act in the administration (as an unpaid adviser during the pandemic), Hassett’s analytical shortcomings manifested in what some criticized as a dangerously misguided attempt at infectious disease modeling. Without going into the details, that episode ended in acrimony.

Hassett has a respectable CV. He taught at Columbia, he was a consultant at Treasury and worked in the research division at the Fed. But I think it’s fair to suggest he’s not a natural choice to succeed Powell as Fed Chair. The idea of Fed Chair Hassett isn’t quite an Onion headline, but it’s close, and it quickly becomes one when you have the context.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, where both Hassett and Moore have published scores of columns, the Hassett idea came up over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, where Moore and Trump were joined by Arthur Laffer who made his own modest recommendation for Powell’s replacement: Arthur Laffer.

Kevin Warsh came up too, and not for the first time. Warsh was also in the running in 2017 before Trump ultimately settled on Powell.

As Bloomberg dryly noted in their coverage, “the names Moore and Laffer are proposing are more overtly political than prior Fed chairs.” Dryly, because out of the three recommendations, one’s a former administration official and the other’s recommending himself. Recall that Trump gave Laffer the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2019. “Few people in history have revolutionized economic thought like Art Laffer,” Trump declared, during a ceremony that included Larry Kudlow.

Of course, none of this would matter if Trump’s odds of being reelected were as slim as they ought to be considering his rather onerous circumstances but, coming full circle, we live in a parody. Which helps explain why Joe Biden’s heading into an election as an underdog against a four times indicted former president who faced as many as 91 criminal charges, including several related to an alleged coup.

If you missed Monday’s laugher (get it?) of a Fed story, you’ll be forgiven. It was buried beneath a pile of even more surreal headlines, including this one: “Musk Says His Ketamine Prescription Is in Investors’ Best Interests.”

RIP satire.