Donald Trump doesn’t seem to give his Cabinet appointments much thought, often skipping the drudgery of FBI background checks and more informal internal vetting procedures. Is Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset? Did Matt Gaetz have sex with a minor? Did Pete Hegseth commit sexual assault? If not, why did he pay off the alleged victim? And what about Hegseth’s white nationalist tattoo (Deus Vult)?

None of these questions weighs heavily on Trump’s mind because, as Steve Bannon explained to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times, “Donald Trump is a blunt-force instrument applying blunt-force trauma to the system.” Unsuitability is the point. But there’s one Cabinet appointment to which Trump, quite uncharacteristically, appears to be giving considerable, even agonizing, deliberation: Who will be his Treasury secretary?

Initially there were two candidates on Trump’s shortlist: Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive Howard Lutnick and Key Square Capital Management founder Scott Bessent. Rather than choose between them, Trump added two more: Apollo Global Management founder Marc Rowan and former Morgan Stanley financier and Fed governor Kevin Warsh. Then Trump reduced the pool to three by naming Lutnick (who reportedly was getting on Trump’s nerves) to run the Commerce Department instead.

None of these people is a blunt instrument. They are oligarchs in good standing, respectable members of the financial establishment. Yet still Trump can’t make up his mind. The novelty of Trump thinking carefully about, well, anything, is so striking that it warrants extended discussion.

Broadly speaking, Trump’s hesitation springs from the importance he gives to money. Apart from himself, money is the only thing that Trump ever thinks or cares about, and the Treasury Department is America’s Department of Money. Treasury’s powers extend well beyond control of the government’s own finances to the broader economy through the selling of government debt. As I’ve explained previously, debt is the United States’s most plentiful resource, generating $8.3 trillion annually. That’s four times the return on the country’s second-most plentiful resource, crude oil. Only the Federal Reserve wields comparable power over the economy, and Trump won’t likely........

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