The best move for President Trump after today’s hearing for his nominees to the Federal Reserve would be to withdraw his nomination of Christopher Waller and stick with Judy Shelton. That’s our reaction to the calls for Mr. Trump to withdraw Ms. Shelton after a premeditated attack on her by the Democrats and one or two Republicans. It was a disgraceful performance.

No single feature of it was quite as disgraceful as the question Senator Sherrod Brown put to Mr. Waller and the answer Mr. Waller delivered. “Given Ms. Shelton’s answers on monetary policy and thirty years writing on the gold standard,” the oleaginous Ohioan asked Mr. Waller, “would you recommend we confirm her to the Fed?”

It should have been easy for Mr. Waller, who is research director of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, to say that he would be honored to serve with Ms. Shelton, given that they were both nominated by the same president to the same distinguished Fed board. “I’m confident in the President’s judgment with regard to who is right for the Fed,” Mr. Waller might have added.

Instead, the research director of the St. Louis Fed replied, “Senator, that’s your decision, not mine.”

Then he smirked.

Senator Brown said he figured that would be Mr. Waller’s answer. It’s unclear to us whether the two rehearsed the moment. Either way, the thing to mark is that this was a betrayal of Mr. Trump and the 2016 Republican agenda at a crucial moment in our national debate on monetary reform.

No doubt the Democrats will laugh at any suggestion that Mr. Trump has any high minded motives in respect of monetary policy. That is hard to square with the record of Mr. Trump’s statements on the stump, even if he has failed to redeem in his first three years in the White House all his promises in respect of monetary reform. He’s got the full employment and low inflation part of it in place.

Now is the perfect time for someone like Ms. Shelton. She did a splendid job at the hearing, highlighted by her answer to an invitation from Senator Rounds of the Mount Rushmore State to summarize her view of the gold standard and related issues. Said Ms. Shelton, speaking off the cuff:

“I keep going back to the fact that the power to regulate the value of U.S. money was granted by our Constitution to Congress. It’s in Article 1, Section 8. And in the very same sentence Congress is given the power to define the official weights and measures for our country, because money was meant to be a measure, to be a standard of value.

“I think that money has to work the same for everyone in the economy, and it’s important that it serve that purpose as a reliable measure, so that people can plan their lives.I don’t see how you can have a free market economy if people can’t rely on the most vital tool that makes markets work.

“It’s through money that we transmit market signals. And you need clarity of those signals or supply and demand can’t figure out what’s the optimal solution. So … at the Federal Reserve is a responsibility to remember that money has to work for everyone and that in a sense it’s a moral contract between the government and the citizens.”

It’s hard to imagine that a more admirable answer has ever been given to the Senate Banking Committee. Whether the nomination of Ms. Shelton can be saved at this juncture is unclear. Mr. Trump’s strategic position, though, would be helped by yanking Mr. Waller and sending word to the Senate that he will hold out for Ms. Shelton and that if she is defeated he will send up someone else with her moral compass.

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Correction: Banking is the Senate committee before which Ms. Shelton was testifying; the name of the committee was incorrectly given in an earlier edition of this editorial. Separately, this editorial has been lengthened from its first edition to include more of Ms. Shelton’s soliloquy in respect of the moral contract.