Kevin Warsh is no one’s “sock puppet.”

That’s according to the man himself, who on Tuesday appeared before the Senate to reassure lawmakers that if confirmed to replace Jerome Powell at the helm of the world’s most important institution, he won’t let Donald Trump dictate monetary policy.

Warsh is a smart enough guy, which means he’s doubtlessly apprised of the high failure rate for serious people who thought they could work for, or alongside of, Trump and retain an air of respectability.

Only one person succeeded in pulling off that balancing act: Steve Mnuchin. I realize a lot of you would argue Mnuchin wasn’t respectable in the first place, but you know what I mean. He’s a mostly presentable, nominally serious, reasonably qualified individual who demonstrated the requisite obsequiousness to stay in Trump’s good graces, but did so without irrevocably debasing himself.

Mnuchin’s success in that regard isn’t replicable. It’s in part a function of — and I’ll be polite — Steve’s idiosyncrasies. If you’re a nominally serious person (to say nothing of an actually serious person like, say, a John Kelly or a Gary Cohn), you’ll find yourself at odds with Trump early and often. Eventually, you’ll quit or be fired.

During a series of de facto job interviews on business television last year, including a few with Fox News, Warsh demonstrated a willingness to play ball with Trump. But that ain’t gonna cut it, no policy pun intended. He needs to be all-in if he’s going to stay in the role without incurring Trump’s ire at some point.

This is quite simple, and I’d say Warsh understands it, but if he did — really did, I mean — he wouldn’t be poised to take the job: Trump wants rate cuts and Trump will get rate cuts, or someone (else) will get subpoenaed, charged (informally or otherwise) with some manner of crime, audited, bullied, fired or some combination of those things.

You can’t run a truly independent operation in Trump’s government. It’s impossible. More to the point: It’s anathema. This is an authoritarian system. The idea of an independent institution — any independent institution, let alone one responsible for setting the price of money — is definitionally discrepant.

When Warsh told the Senate on Tuesday that, “The President never asked me to predetermine, commit, fix [or] decide on any interest rate decision in any of our discussions,” he might’ve been telling the truth, but it’s just as irrelevant as it’d be if the CEO of a waste management company in New Jersey said the head of the local crime family “never asked me to commit” to a contract.

Trump doesn’t have to ask. That’s the whole point. It’s understood. The reason Trump has to beseech Powell is that Powell steadfastly refused to accept the autocratic reality staring him the face. For his trouble, he got years of merciless ridicule and, eventually, an indictment threat.

Warsh was adamant he won’t be a sycophant. That he’ll never commit to a decision on rates just because Trump demanded it. The reality’s more nuanced. Warsh is counting on always being able to justify — both to himself and to the American public — rate decisions consistent with Trump’s stereotypically populist inclinations to run the economy hot by pairing low rates with expansionary fiscal policy.

Maybe he (Warsh) can make it work for a while, but it’s just as likely as not that the day will come when Trump wants cuts that an independent Warsh wouldn’t be inclined to deliver. At that juncture, Warsh will have to choose: The institution or an escalatory smear campaign starting on TruthSocial and ending, in a worst case, before the Supreme Court.

During his Tuesday remarks, Warsh hinted around at changing the Fed’s approach to measuring inflation. “I think the data that’s being used is quite imperfect,” he said. “Economics is not physics. It’s not math. [W]e need to focus to the left of the decimal point, not to the right.” No arguments there, unless that’s a roundabout way of saying he can always find an excuse to cut rates.

Thom Tillis was overtly friendly to Warsh (he showered him with praise), but he’s still blocking the nomination pending a resolution to Jeanine Pirro’s crusade against Powell.

As he put it, referring to the potential prosecution of Powell in connection with cost overruns tied to renovations at the Eccles building, “If we put everybody in prison in federal government that had a budget go over, we’d have to reserve an area roughly the size of Texas for a penal colony.”