The system worked. Donald Trump and his loyalists huffed and puffed about breaking the US Senate’s role as a check on bad appointments by the president, but in the end Matt Gaetz withdrew his name with shocking speed from consideration to be Trump’s attorney general.
This makes it less likely that Trump will force a showdown with Senate Republicans over his harebrained scheme to have the Senate declare itself in recess so that he can fill his Cabinet with temporary appointees. That avoids starting his term with an immediate constitutional crisis. Yet, it may also be good news for Trump, and perhaps even for Gaetz himself.
The Gaetz nomination was intended to signal Trump’s seriousness about shaking up the Department of Justice by picking a bomb-thrower who has been caustically critical of everything from the investigations and prosecutions of Trump to the prosecution of January 6 rioters and protesters. But it put Trump in the immediate and unnecessary position of having to push for an unprecedented recess, because Gaetz is neither liked nor respected on Capitol Hill and faced implacable opposition from enough Republican senators to sink the nomination.
Trump may have a strong hand right now, but he will need to pressure senators on many more votes over the next four years. He can save his political capital, and can roll into the holiday season with more post-victory goodwill among his party intact. While Republican senators may be alarmed at choices such as ex-Democrats Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, at least the nomination of converts who helped in an electoral victory is more explicable and less of a finger in the eye to Congressional allies than picking the rebel who overthrew the last Republican speaker of the House.
More importantly, if Trump takes the opportunity to pick a more serious, competent candidate, he stands a better chance of employing an AG who will actually carry out his agenda at Justice. Bending a large bureaucracy full of lawyers and investigators to your will isn’t easy. It’s doubly difficult if, like Gaetz, you have been repeatedly investigated for sordid matters such as allegedly paying a 17-year-old for sex – things that can and would be leaked to the press at times least favourable to Gaetz.
Recall that the anonymous “Deep Throat” source whose leaks to the Washington Post drove the Watergate scandal was a deputy director of the FBI. A candidate who enters the office with a weak public reputation and a ton of messy private baggage could be eaten alive by leaks.
There are many other candidates better prepared for the job. That includes a number of Republican state attorneys general and former United States attorneys, as well as governors and senators who have held those positions in the past. Moreover, if Trump replaces Gaetz with an attorney general who gets confirmed by the Senate, he need not worry about a temporary appointment that might be challenged in court.
As for Gaetz, assuming that he doesn’t reverse course and return to the House of Representatives in January, he can for now permanently bury what was apparently a damning House Ethics Committee report on his personal scandals. He can avoid a bruising Senate hearing that would have given a national platform to his accusers to stage a nasty public airing of his sexual past. If he leaves government, he can cash in as a media star – a role for which he clearly has the flair and a fan base.
Of course, Gaetz will be dogged by the same rumours if he ever again seeks higher office, but he at least would be able to fight them under more favourable conditions on the campaign trail than in a Senate hearing room where his own answers are under oath and under hostile questioning.
Wrapping this whole thing up in mid-November ensures, for both Trump and Gaetz, that this nomination will be far from the front pages come January. That is best for all concerned.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review