Donald Trump unleashed fresh pandemonium recently when he briefly nominated pizza king, 2016 Republican presidential contender, and alleged sexual harasser Herman Cain for the Federal Reserve’s board of governors. Cain’s short-lived nomination was insult to injury after Trump’s earlier nomination of Stephen Moore, a former Trump campaign advisor who thinks the president should be nominated for the Nobel Prize in economics.

Objections to the men’s nominations stem in part from the fact that they are “dangerously goofy goofs,” as John Oliver put it. In a recent segment on Last Week Tonight Oliver worried that, in his previous life as a Daily Show correspondent, he’d been easily able to talk Cain (who chairs a political action committee to combat “disrespectful, dishonest, and destructive news” about the president) into pretending he had telepathy on national television.

The widespread fury at the president’s nominations, however, has deeper roots than Cain and Moore’s singular lack of qualifications. After all, the Trump administration boasts a broad selection of dangerously goofy goofs. Instead, observers see in the nominations an existential threat to the credibility of the Federal Reserve itself.