Trump is destroying Washington in order to save it
American politics is a game of two parties in which Donald Trump wins either way. The president-elect’s first nominee for attorney general, the rubber-faced MAGA roué Matt Gaetz, was never going to pass the Senate.
Gaetz’s withdrawal on Thursday opens the path for Trump’s second nominee, the Florida lawyer Pam Bondi, to start cleaning the stables at the Department of Justice. This is what Trump wants and what he means by “revenge” on his enemies. They include his false friends among Senate Republicans.
Alexander Hamilton warned the Senate against appointing “unfit characters” to cabinet offices, and Gaetz was the least fit nominee in American history. A princeling of the Florida Republican Party, a Senator alleged that he boasts of necking powdered Viagra with energy drinks and is accused of drug-taking and bribery. He appears to have resigned his congressional seat to dodge the House Ethics Committee’s report on allegations that he had sex with a minor – accusations he has denied.
Pam Bondi is a real politician, not a social-media swinger. The Sunshine State’s attorney general between 2011 and 2019, she has serious convictions. None of them are criminal. The Senate will have no choice but to confirm her. A Trump courtier tells me Bondi is “ferocious”. It’s almost as if Trump always knew she was the right woman to fix the Department of Justice, which became a one-eyed partisan operation under the Obama and Biden-Harris administrations.
The Gaetz nomination rewarded the MAGA base who want to burn down the federal bureaucracies. The Bondi nomination, like Elon Musk’s appointment as the Doge of Government Efficiency, shows Trump’s real second-term aim: to reshape the administrative state in the Right’s favor. Only four of the 52 Republican senators opposed Gaetz’s nomination. One of them, Mitch McConnell, will leave the Senate in January. He already looks like the ghost of the Uniparty past.
It’s Trump’s party now, and he’s going to cry “Deep State” as often as he likes. He won back the party’s Senate majority. He’s the first Republican president to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. The Never Trumpers are reduced to a rump of media hacks, cashing out a diminishing stash of valid credit card numbers from 2016.
The Trumpologists speak of “4-D chess”, as though the orange man has a mind like Big Blue. But you don’t need to be Garry Kasparov on an Adderall jag to outsmart Washington. A senator’s idea of negotiations is dipping into the bottomless pork barrel to secure federal funds, then putting out his hand for donations every six years.
Trump has called the bluff of the duffers in the Senate. Within hours of Gaetz’s flameout, Senate Republicans were hinting that they favour the ‘roid-raging Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at Health & Human Services and the tattooed TV presenter Pete Hegseth as Defense Secretary.
Hegseth is a MAGA founder, a Trump supporter since 2016. He too is pursued by an allegation of sexual misconduct (no charges have been brought and Hegseth denies it), but his policy positions are boilerplate Republican patriotism. RFK Jr. is, or was for most of his life, Democratic royalty. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, is another Democratic defector.
And Marco Rubio, the nominee for Secretary of State, is a conventional Republican: a penitent anti-Trumper from the underclass of 2016, a master of the Senate soundbite who learned the hard way not to bite his master’s hand, and yet another Florida Republican.
Trump the “fascist” is playing the normal nomination game of trade-offs. Trump the purported MAGA maniac is picking ex-Democrats and mainstream Republicans. This is what a “cabinet of all the talents” looks like in the lurid age of social media. If he were a Democrat, the media would be calling him a unifier. They would be wrong. Trump intends to destroy the Washington village in order to save it.