By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times
The expression “The worse, the better” is often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, and captures a sort of messianic nihilism; the dream that escalating misery will hasten the fall of a corrupt order. Usually, I find this ethos despicable; in my experience, suffering only begets more suffering. I’m making an exception, however, for Donald Trump’s nomination of former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, a flagrant provocation that is, like a pulpy B movie, so bad it’s good.
While Trump’s choice of Gaetz to lead the Justice Department is a clear sign that his second administration will be catastrophically chaotic, vengeful and corrupt, that should never have been in doubt. Trump made no secret during his campaign of his desire to persecute his political enemies. Anyone he chose as attorney general would share his interest in turning the justice system into the enforcement arm of the MAGA movement. The selection of Gaetz just rips the mask off. With it, Trump is trolling not just his defeated opponents but many of his craven establishment supporters. It’s like Caligula trying to make his horse a consul.
Of all the people Trump was considering for AG, Gaetz is unique mainly for how much he is hated by other Republicans, and not just moderate ones. In the final months of the last Trump administration, the Justice Department opened an investigation into whether Gaetz had a relationship with an underage girl that violated federal sex trafficking laws. Although that inquiry was closed without charges, the House opened an ethics investigation into him. It was reportedly set to vote on releasing a damning report last Friday, which Gaetz may have tried to preempt by resigning, though it could still become public.
When Gaetz was accused of sleeping with the girl, “there’s a reason why no one in the conference came and defended him,” Markwayne Mullin, a very conservative Republican senator from Oklahoma, told CNN last year. His colleagues, said Mullin, had seen videos “of the girls that he had slept with,” which Gaetz allegedly showed off on the House floor. Gaetz was such a force for chaos in the chamber that during the messy struggle to elect a House speaker in January 2023, Mike Rogers, a Republican congressman from Alabama, seemed ready to physically attack him and had to be restrained by colleagues.
It should go without saying that Gaetz is not, by any normal standards, even a tiny bit qualified to be attorney general. He practiced law for only about two years before running for office, handling small-time civil matters, like suing an old woman for money she owed his father’s caregiving company.
His chief credential is not his mastery of the law but his contempt for it. “We’re proud of the work we did on Jan. 6 to make legitimate arguments about election integrity,” he told Steve Bannon in 2022. He’s called for abolishing both the FBI and the Justice Department unless they “come to heel.” If confirmed, he will be single-minded in his devotion to carrying out Trump’s will without concern for legal niceties.
Gaetz is not the only Trump nominee who seems to have been chosen precisely for his hostility to the values of the organization he’s supposed to lead. On Thursday, Trump announced plans to make Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s leading anti-vaxxer, secretary of health and human services. Pete Hegseth, the Fox News weekend host whom Trump wants to put atop the Pentagon — an institution that is supposed to be scrupulously apolitical — wrote a book describing “social justice saboteurs” as more dangerous to America than any external enemy. During his first administration, when Trump sought to turn the military against left-wing protesters, his defense officials thwarted him. Hegseth, who accused “progressive storm troopers” of turning our cities into “little Samaras,” a reference to an Iraqi city besieged by the Islamic State group, would almost certainly have fewer qualms.
“It’s the enemy from within,” Trump said of his opponents at a rally last month. “All the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country. That’s a bigger enemy than China and Russia.” Some of his supporters thrilled to this language, but others convinced themselves that he didn’t really mean it. By tapping Gaetz to be the highest law enforcement official in the land, Trump has done us the favor of stripping away whatever plausible deniability remained about his intentions. It’s a show of dominance directed more at Republicans than Democrats, meant to make them abase themselves by acquiescing to a nomination they know is indefensible.
Some social conservatives are aghast: The Christian legal group Liberty Counsel put out a press release describing the choice of Gaetz as “shocking and disappointing,” and Ben Domenech, co-founder of the right-wing website The Federalist, called him “absolutely vile,” among other insults I can’t repeat here. If Gaetz makes it all the way to the confirmation hearings, the proceedings will be a popcorn-worthy carnival of scandal and backbiting. Having won the presidency and both houses of Congress, Trump could have launched his new administration in an atmosphere of confident Republican unity. Instead, it will commence with the crisis, degradation and melodrama that is his natural habitat.
In the end, I’d expect almost all Republican senators to fall in line and humiliate themselves by voting for Gaetz. “I completely trust President Trump’s decision making on this one,” Mullin said on CNN on Wednesday, though he added that Gaetz would need to sell himself to the Senate. Even if a small number of senators find the fortitude to reject such a preposterous candidate, Trump may attempt to go around them by employing a never-used constitutional provision to force the Senate into recess so he can make appointments without its consent.
And if that doesn’t work, whoever Trump chooses instead of Gaetz will almost certainly be just as destructive, if less flamboyant in his immorality and lust for attention. Trump picked Gaetz, after all, because he’s an excellent representative of the MAGA movement.
Once Trump won, decent outcomes for the country were probably off the table. The institutions are unlikely to hold. Establishment Republicans cannot be counted on to protect us. The best we can hope for is that our new rulers will be stymied by incompetence, infighting and self-sabotage. In that respect, Gaetz may be just the man for the job.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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