By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, November
14, 2024
“It must be the worst nomination for a Cabinet position
in American history,” former Trump adviser John
Bolton said Wednesday of Matt Gaetz being chosen for
attorney general.
With apologies to The
Simpsons, I’d say it’s the worst nomination for a Cabinet position in
American history so far.
But I understand Bolton’s despair. The Gaetz pick is an
exquisite layer cake of populist corruption.
The first layer is inexperience. Not only has he never
been a prosecutor, he’s never been much of anything except a politician—a
perfect hypocrite for Trump’s party of the common man. He’s a rich kid who
spent a few undistinguished years in private legal practice before converting his
father’s notoriety into a seat in the Florida Legislature and then
converting that into a seat in Congress. He’s supremely unqualified to be AG,
which, by populist lights, makes him supremely qualified.
The second layer is personal sleaziness. Gaetz is “a
person of moral turpitude,” as Bolton delicately put it, just like the
convicted felon who nominated him. He’s been accused by a United States
senator of showing videos to House colleagues of women he slept with
and boasting about his ability to “go all night.” The House Ethics Committee
has spent many months investigating him for (among other things) “sexual
misconduct,” which may or may not involve
a 17-year-old girl.
The third layer is procedural irregularity. After Gaetz’s
nomination was announced, news broke that the committee was planning to vote as
soon as Friday on whether to release its findings. His selection by Trump
created a convenient nick-of-time excuse for him to resign
his House seat before that vote could happen, instantly depriving the
committee of its jurisdiction over him. (It’s unclear if its report will be
published.) If Senate Republicans prove unwilling to confirm him, the
procedures used to install Gaetz at the Justice Department might get
considerably more irregular still.
The fourth layer is aggressive politicization of law
enforcement. For all the right-wing complaints about the DOJ and FBI since
2017, putting a gutter demagogue like Gaetz in charge of federal prosecutors
would turn the department into an overt arm of abusive harassment against the
president’s enemies to a degree unseen in modern American history. “Gaetz is a
tough son of a b—h. He’s my son of a b—h,” an admiring Trump has reportedly
been heard to say. In years past, when his lawyers disappointed him by
prioritizing ethics over ruthlessness, he complained to them by wondering, “Where’s
my Roy Cohn?” At long last, he’s found him.
The fifth and last layer is the certainty that, as
grotesque as Gaetz is, there’s a bottomless supply of even more grotesque
toadies waiting to replace him if his nomination is defeated. Trump’s movement
appeals to corrupt public figures by offering them an alternate morality in
which the only sin is disloyalty to the leader, not unlike the way cults
function, and so his “bench” of lackey fanatics is deep to the point of being
inexhaustible. If the Senate rejects Gaetz, the next pick won’t be a by-the-book
conservative lawyer like Paul Clement. It’ll be Ken
Paxton. Or Rudy
Giuliani. Or Mike Lee.
Or someone else who’s just as weak and morally flawed as Gaetz, albeit in
different ways. Trump can always do worse, and will.
All told, the Gaetz pick may or may not be the worst
nomination for a Cabinet position of my lifetime (so far!) but it probably is
the most corrupt.
I sure hope he’s confirmed, though. We the People bought
this ticket last Tuesday. Let’s take the ride.
Fit for office?
The Gaetz announcement was the last in a drumbeat of terrible
Trump nominations that began on Tuesday with Pete Hegseth being chosen for
defense, continued on Wednesday when Tulsi Gabbard was tapped for director of
national intelligence, and culminated with the
missing third member of Siegfried & Roy named as the next attorney
general.
By far, the loudest outcry online over those selections
was aimed at Gaetz’s. Maybe that’s a matter of him being far more personally
repulsive (and well known) than the other two, or maybe it’s because his
position would allow him to harass American citizens in a way that the others’
wouldn’t. Whatever the reason, a consensus formed quickly that the Gaetz pick
was singularly offensive—so much so that theories began springing up to try to
explain it.
Perhaps Trump had made an “unforced error,” Marc Thiessen wondered.
Even Homer nods!
Perhaps Gaetz was being offered as a sacrificial lamb,
with Trump fully expecting his nomination to be rejected. Give Senate
Republicans a chance to demonstrate their, ahem, “independence” by borking a
lowlife, the theory goes, and they’ll be more amenable to confirming Hegseth,
Gabbard, and whichever creature replaces Gaetz as the choice for attorney
general.
Or perhaps this was tantamount to a warning shot being
fired by Trump at the DOJ to encourage “deep state” deputies there to start resigning.
Even if Gaetz gets rejected, the fact that the next president would even
contemplate putting him in charge of federal law enforcement should convince
career prosecutors that Trump intends to make their lives utterly miserable.
All of this strikes me as wrong.
It’s wrong, for starters, to believe that Gaetz is
clearly the worst of Trump’s three terrible picks. What makes him worse than
Hegseth, for instance? Both are bright, obnoxiously populist, have no
experience managing large organizations, and are known for … complicated
personal lives. As sleazy as Gaetz’s behavior is alleged to be, he—unlike
Trump—hasn’t
been charged with any crimes. And unlike Hegseth, he’s acquired some actual
government know-how from his years in Congress.
He also isn’t quite as prone to mouthing Russian
propaganda as
Gabbard is, which is a nice trait in an attorney general. The bar is as low
as it can be, but I surmise that he’s marginally less of a national-security
risk than she is.
I’d go so far as to say that Gaetz qualifies as a
meritocratic appointment by the standards of feral populism. In a party
crawling with demagogues, he’s easily top 10 in his rhetorical ability and may
be top 5 in his
tactical acumen. No matter what happens with this nomination, he’ll benefit
politically from it. Either he’ll be confirmed, making him a major national
figure, or he’ll successfully rally the MAGA base against Senate “RINOs” en
route to being rejected, teeing him up to run for governor of Florida in 2026
as the populist fighter in the field.
The belief that Trump is playing three-dimensional chess
somehow by nominating him is also wrong. In fact, according to Axios,
the decision to nominate Gaetz came together in less than a day and was cinched
by a single conversation between the candidate and his patron. Like I said in yesterday’s
newsletter: A strongman who dominates his party from top to bottom and
expects to dominate the federal government just as thoroughly isn’t playing
cutesy little strategic games with his picks. He’s nominating who he wants to
nominate and daring Senate Republicans to stop him.
“Those familiar with Trump’s thinking say he’s deadly
serious about getting Gaetz in at DOJ,” Marc
Caputo reported on Wednesday. “He has faith in Gaetz’s abilities to think
through legal and political problems strategically. And both men have hinted
that they will try and work around the Senate should confirmation there become
too big a hurdle.” One Trump adviser told Caputo that the other candidates for
attorney general “talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional
bulls–t. Gaetz was the only one who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll go over there and start
cuttin’ f—in’ heads.’”
Trump wants his Roy Cohn. If the Senate won’t give it to
him by passing
this loyalty test and confirming Gaetz, he’ll resort to procedural
chicanery like a recess appointment or “acting” Cabinet role to make it happen.
If worse comes to worst, he could and surely would put Gaetz in the West Wing
as his “retribution czar” or whatever and instruct his eventual AG to take
orders from him. There’s no downside to nominating him and sending him before
the Senate—except for Republicans in the chamber who now have to navigate this
politically, and Trump doesn’t care about them.
But don’t underestimate the chances that Gaetz does get
confirmed, especially once he starts weaponizing MAGA opinion against Senate
Republican holdouts. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are probably lost causes
but already reporters are hearing that certain “key”
members are willing to being persuaded. Remember that U.S. senator I
mentioned earlier who revealed Gaetz’s amateur porn-viewing on the House floor?
Even he sounds willing
to vote yes, insisting that he trusts the president-elect’s obviously
superb personnel judgment completely.
To believe that Gaetz is a dead duck, you need to believe
that the famously cowardly Republican leadership class will stand up to its
leader when he’s at the height of his powers and that Donald
Trump’s party is prepared to be sticklers about, of all things, a character
test for high office. Ridiculous.
Fifty-one votes is Gaetz’s realistic ceiling in the
Senate but it also might be his floor. As I said, I hope he makes it.
What America deserves.
It felt poetic that his nomination was announced on the
same day that Republicans clinched
a majority in the House. It was Matt Gaetz, after all, who was almost
singlehandedly responsible for the
most dysfunctional episode in a very dysfunctional two years of GOP
control.
Voters didn’t care. On Thursday the New
York Times marveled at how much they were willing to overlook on
Election Day to preserve GOP control: “A historically long and divisive fight
to choose one speaker. A near default on the federal debt, followed by a mutiny
on the House floor and multiple government shutdown scares. The ouster of the
speaker, followed by weeks of paralysis and another vicious fight over who
should lead next.”
Americans didn’t care that House Republicans can barely
govern, just like they didn’t care that Trump ended his first term by
attempting a coup and will now escape criminal penalties for it thanks to their
decision to reelect him. How much can the rest of us go on caring about how
well or poorly, ethically or unethically, America is run when most of the
electorate doesn’t?
I don’t want to rehash last week’s day-after
column, which delved into this subject at length. But if you believe in
democracy, you necessarily believe that the people should get what they voted
for—and, as importantly, get what they deserve.
The two aren’t always the same. One could argue that
Americans didn’t deserve the ugliest consequences of Trumpist populism in his
first term, when they voted for him lacking a sense of how he’d govern. But
having lived through January 6 and then through his 2024 campaign, most of his
voters surely knew they were electing a president who’s vindictive,
contemptuous of traditional governing norms, and willing to abuse state power
to get his way. Many of them preferred him because of those attributes.
They voted for this government and, this time, they
deserve it. So why
shouldn’t they have it? At what point does an electorate of nominal adults
deserve to live with the perfectly foreseeable results of its choices, whether
or not they happen to know specifically who Matt Gaetz is? When do the “normie
Republicans” who insisted on disbelieving Trump’s threats during the campaign
in order to rationalize voting for him again begin to consider that he
means the things he says?
We are nine years into this.
I think it’s time for them to get what they deserve. In
fact, I’d go further and say that there are three potential outcomes from an
administration staffed by Gaetzes and Gabbards—and, as far as I can see, all
are good in different ways.
One outcome is that everything turns out fine, or at
least better than expected. That would be good for obvious reasons.
Another is that this ends up being exactly the sort of
horror movie that people like me anticipate and Americans learn a valuable
lesson about letting gonzo populists take over the government. Maybe Gabbard
ends the “Five
Eyes” arrangement for intelligence-sharing and replaces it with a “Three
Eyes” system involving Moscow and Damascus instead. Or maybe Attorney General
Gaetz indicts Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg for sedition after they persist in
publishing criticism of Trump, no doubt to cheers from the alleged free-speech
enthusiasts of the MAGA right.
Or maybe the corruption of one enables the corruption of
the other. A Dispatch colleague smartly noted this morning that having
Gaetz at the DOJ won’t just mean official harassment of Trump’s enemies, it
will mean legal impunity for Trump’s allies—a “scandal multiplier” for the
administration potentially. If Gabbard gets caught passing documents to people
who shouldn’t have them, for instance, she won’t be held accountable by the
Trump Justice Department the way Robert Menendez was by
the Biden Justice Department. That would violate the first rule of
postliberalism: For
my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law. Trump’s “friends” inside
and outside the government will behave accordingly.
Maybe American voters will take in their corruption, grow
disgusted by it, and resolve to punish Republicans for it in 2028. That would
also be good.
But the third possible outcome is the most likely one:
Trump’s administration will govern terribly and most Americans just … won’t
care, any more than they cared about January 6 or about how the House
Republican majority governed over the last two years. They’ll care if inflation
starts rising again, for sure, or if Trump’s tariffs land us in a recession.
But civic concerns like persecuting political opponents, defying court orders,
using illegal procedures to install deputies, seizing policymaking power from
Congress—it’s all burps in the wind to them.
And in a way, I think, that outcome would be good too.
Well, not “good,” exactly. Neither you nor I want to live
in an America where caudillo-ism becomes the normal way government
functions. But those who enthusiastically chose Trump last Tuesday deserve
to live in that country. Fools who want to burn the constitutional order to the
ground deserve to live with the consequences of the constitutional order being
burned to the ground. Attorney General Gaetz is a meaningful step in that
direction.
I won’t lie to you: Part of me is looking forward to it.
It’s not just schadenfreude at getting to watch
anti-anti-Trump conservatives squirm as they justify the president’s latest
insane antic or the selfish pleasure of being proven
right over and over about how civically desiccated Americans are. It’s a
matter of finding contentment with the fact that there’s a meaningful
percentage of the country who cheers on the destruction of the liberalism that
made their country the greatest and most prosperous in history.
I wish you contentment in the years to come, dear reader.
Whether or not you helped buy the ticket, try to enjoy the ride.
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