Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

“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.