I’m taking bets that Matt Gaetz will indeed be confirmed as our next attorney general. I know all the clever people say otherwise. NBC News, in a story you might want to bookmark to revisit later, reported over the weekend that more than half of Senate Republicans see no path to confirmation for Gaetz and “would not support” him. Gaetz is obviously unqualified in any legal or experiential sense, and that’s to say nothing of his photo exhibitions to his colleagues on the House floor. Putting him in charge of Justice, big-J or small, constitutes open mockery of this country’s ideals and is thoroughly insane to boot.
But don’t be so sure he won’t make it. Merrick Garland’s two-day confirmation hearing for attorney general was held on February 22 and 23, 2021. Late February is three months away. That’s a lot of time for Donald Trump to change resistant senators’ minds. And don’t think he won’t.
I’ve heard some theorizing that Trump isn’t really serious about this Gaetz appointment; that he’s willing to trade him for something else, or that he planted Gaetz as a distraction so other nearly as abominable choices like Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can slip through. Yes, that’s how normal politicians think in normal time on normal Earth. But none of that applies here.
My theory is much simpler: Trump nominated Gaetz because he wants Gaetz, for a few reasons. He wants to shock and offend people like us. He thinks Justice and the FBI are full of anti-Trump deep staters. He wants thousands of them to quit or resign. He doesn’t care about most of what the DOJ does. Civil rights enforcement? Please. Overseeing police departments? Come on.
If you squint really hard, you can convince yourself that he has some vague interest in antitrust, but it’s not rooted in any principle other than him wielding some power to take down the corporate empires of those who end up in his personal crosshairs (CNN, social media companies that were said to conspire against conservatives). But I imagine most of the people whose firms might run afoul of a Lina Khan are going to bend the knee to Trump. (Jeff Bezos, who occasionally crossed swords with Trump during his first term, has already bent two and is looking for a third.) The only thing Trump cares about, as far as the Justice Department is concerned, is using its resources to go after his enemies. Matt Gaetz is the man for that.
So it’s going to work like this: Trump chooses who he wants, whether it’s Gaetz or Gabbard or anyone else, to do what he wants them to do. And Republican senators are supposed to do what he says, period.
It’s that simple. Trump is intentionally testing the Senate. He’s going to demand, as an act of loyalty, that GOP senators give rubber-stamp approval to Gaetz, Gabbard, Kennedy, and the rest, in order to demonstrate their weakness and supplication and to crush any expectation that the upper body might try something like that old “separation of powers” stuff that led legislators in the pre-Trump era to provide a meaningful check on his authority.
I think Democratic Senator-elect Adam Schiff had it right when he told Jake Tapper Sunday: “That’s Trump’s point, because what he wants to do with these nominees is establish that the Congress of United States will not stand up to him with anything; if they will confirm Matt Gaetz, they will do anything he wants.”
It’s all kind of like that scene in The Manchurian Candidate when the North Korean operative asks Raymond Shaw who’s the best-liked member of the unit, and Raymond says it’s Johnny so-and-so, whatever the guy’s name was; and the North Korean man politely orders Raymond to go shoot Johnny right between the eyes, which Raymond calmly does. Normal morality and consequences are gone. There is only brainwashed servitude.
Trump will do whatever it takes to get all his picks confirmed. He and his people probably have dirt on every senator as it is. But he might not even need dirt. He just needs to go to their states and give a speech and denounce them from the stage as very weak. Actually, he doesn’t even have to do that. Social media will probably suffice in most cases. And so, the 25 or so senators who stand against Gaetz now will drop to 15, then seven, then maybe two or three just for show (he can afford to lose three on any single vote). Honestly, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, liked well enough at home that she beat a proto-Trumpian GOP loon named Joe Miller in a 2012 write-in campaign, is maybe the last of the truly independent-minded Republican senators in that body. The rest are either suck-ups or suck-ups-in-waiting.
There were a handful of occasions during Trump’s first term when some reasonably significant share of Republicans defied Trump. There was Ukraine aid. There was impeachment, kinda-sorta. There was a defense appropriation bill, in late 2020, when Trump was a lame duck. These occasions were few and far between, but they did exist. There was a sense then, a superiority that comes quite naturally to senators, that Trump was this newbie who needed to be schooled every once in a while, even if gently.
That sense is dead. Trump is now their emperor. His dominion over the Republican Party is total. So I wouldn’t bet on them defying him much, if at all. The elevation of John Thune to the post of GOP Senate leader might seem at first blush to cut against my thesis, and perhaps he’ll prove me wrong: Thune has a history of not being a complete Trump sycophant, going back to 2016 when he called on Trump to withdraw in favor of Mike Pence when the Access Hollywood tape came out.
On the other hand, that history could be precisely what welds Thune to Trump even more directly than might otherwise be the case. The whole right-wing media apparatus will be watching Thune very closely to make sure he toes the line.
We have more nominees surely being announced this week, and some big ones: Treasury, Labor, Agriculture, Housing, and of course Education (Christopher Rufo?). Most presidents-elect huddle with their teams and wonder if so-and-so is easily confirmable and might cost them political capital. If Democrats had held the Senate, Trump might behave differently. But with the Republicans in charge, his calculus is the opposite: He’s going to force them to cast votes that might be distasteful to some of them personally for the express purpose of humiliating them. History, alas, suggests that he is right to expect their servitude.
