The WSJ: Influential economic advisers to Donald Trump presented the former president with a shortlist of potential candidates to lead the Federal Reserve during a meeting at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida last week, according to people familiar with the matter. In the Thursday meeting, Steve Moore and Arthur Laffer, who have long advised Trump on economic issues, recommended three candidates: Kevin Warsh, an economic-policy adviser to President George W. Bush who later served on the Fed’s board of governors; Kevin Hassett, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Trump administration, and Laffer himself. Laffer, an economic adviser to former President Ronald Reagan, is one of the founding theorists of supply-side economics and a champion of the 2017 tax cuts Trump signed into law. I’m not familiar with Warsh but he sounds like the most normal of the three. Hasset is a Trump loyalist and Laffer is a full-blown crank. I wrote about his so-called economic success for Salon a bit ago. Laffer and Moore are heavily involved in the conomic side of Project 2025. It’s not good: Trump’s determination to lower taxes for the rich is a given. Everything he does is first and foremost for himself and he won’t even try to rationalize it. It’s unlikely that the rest of the party can get away with that, so they’ll no doubt return to their perennial excuse — the federal budget deficit as a reason to lower taxes, even though that makes no sense. That tired old saw goes back to the Reagan administration which…