The bad news for the incoming Trump administration is that the nomination of Matt Gaetz to be the next attorney general was an ill-considered waste of time. The good news for the incoming administration is that because Hurricane Gaetz came and went so quickly, it wasted surprisingly little time. Eight days! Gaetz’s nomination didn’t even last one Anthony Scaramucci unit. This is an early indication that while Republican senators want to help Trump enact as much of his agenda as possible, they are not going to reflexively respond “how high?” when Trump says “jump.”
What Was That All About?
According to one report in Politico, the Gaetz pick was a consequence of Trump following the advice of a diehard loyalist adviser when the more levelheaded Susie Wiles wasn’t around to counter the argument:
As of Monday, Gaetz was not on the short list to be Trump’s choice for attorney general. But Trump wasn’t satisfied with those options, our Meridith McGraw tells Playbook.The Gaetz-for-AG plan came together yesterday, just hours before it was announced, Meridith tells us. It was hatched aboard Trump’s airplane en route to Washington, on which Gaetz was a passenger. A Trump official revealed more details to Playbook late last night: BORIS EPSHTEYN played a central role in the development, lobbying Trump to choose Gaetz while incoming White House chief of staff SUSIE WILES was in a different, adjacent room on the plane, apparently unaware.
(You’re free to doubt a report in a publication like Politico attributed to an unnamed “Trump official,” but this does fit what we know about all three players. Epshteyn wants a cabinet full of like-minded dyed-in-the-wool stalwarts; Trump is unpredictable; and Wiles is even-tempered, can foresee risks, and is one of the figures most likely to talk Trump out of a bad idea.)
The exceptionally high odds against Senate confirmation were not just predictable; once the nomination was announced, lots of figures, including GOP senators, warned Trump that confirmation was just about the tallest of orders, and would require the expenditure of enormous amounts of political capital.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis will not be naming Gaetz to the Senate seat that Marco Rubio will soon leave to become our next secretary of state. The top candidates for the role remain the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, Florida attorney general Ashley Moody, Florida lieutenant governor Jeanette Nuñez, and DeSantis’s chief of staff, James Uthmeier; DeSantis said he will announce the pick in early January. (The new Senate takes office January 3; the Senate can hold confirmation hearings before Inauguration Day but does not vote to confirm nominees until January 20.)
Within a few hours of Gaetz announcing he was withdrawing his own nomination, Trump announced the nomination of former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. While nothing is guaranteed, Bondi looks like the kind of nominee who should sail through the Senate confirmation process.
Last night, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said, “Pam Bondi is, without a question, qualified to be attorney general. She’s been a prosecutor for 20 years in Florida. For eight of those, she was the attorney general of the state. That’s a very big, very complicated job‚ and that level of experience is on par with, or better than most United States attorneys general that we’ve seen over the past 50 years or so.”
Bondi will get questions about her recent years as a lobbyist, in particular in 2019 when the firm she worked for, Ballard Partners, registered as a foreign agent lobbying on behalf of the embassy of Qatar, providing “advocacy services relative to US-Qatar bilateral relations, and will provide guidance and assistance in matters related to combating human trafficking.” Qatar’s record in fighting human trafficking is . . . not great, either for the period in question or now. (Among Bondi’s co-workers at Ballard Partners was . . . Susie Wiles.)
The Axios headline for today is “chaos reigns supreme.” I’d argue that what we’re seeing with the swap of Gaetz for Bondi is actually a restoration of regular order.
A Venn diagram of the policy preferences of Donald Trump and the typical Republican senator would show two circles overlapping quite a bit, but not one circle. The typical Republican senator wants Trump to succeed in his second term — and is smart enough to recognize that an obnoxious, widely hated walking scandal machine like Gaetz would not actually be much help to achieving that agenda. A figure like Gaetz doesn’t solve problems, he creates problems — for other people as much as for himself.
Look, if you don’t like the Trump agenda, the GOP Senate is going to disappoint you a lot. But we’ve heard a lot of doomsaying from Trump opponents insisting we’re witnessing the first step to his impending dictatorship, and that congressional Republicans are a bunch of spineless lickspittles who would gladly use the U.S. Constitution as kindling just to see the warm glow reflected in the eyes of Trump.
Eh, not so much, apparently. There are some lines Senate Republicans aren’t willing to cross.
Donald Trump is as erratic and impulsive as ever, and he’s still surrounded by an entourage of hangers-on who have terrible political instincts. But that doesn’t mean Trump can’t be an effective president. He just needs to be surrounded by a good team, and the Republican Senate majority may need to periodically save Trump from his own worst instincts.
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