Five Quick Things: Trump’s Cabinet Picks Are a Political Sea Change
I’ve been saying — I said it during the first segment of this week’s Spectacle Podcast, for example — that last Tuesday marked the beginning of a new era in American politics.
This is a theme I first started kicking around in The Revivalist Manifesto, my first political book, which I am earnestly flogging again because the damned thing is frighteningly relevant in the wake of the Nov. 5 election. Specifically, we’ve had three distinct eras in American politics. The first began with Thomas Jefferson’s victory over John Adams in the 1800 election; Jefferson’s Democratic Party dominated U.S. politics for the next 60 years and built an America that was highly individualistic, resistant to centralized government, agrarian, and relatively insular compared with later eras.
The 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln swept away that first era, and the Republican-dominated Second Era began with a civil war. But in the years following that conflict, the Gilded Age began, and an era of increasing urbanization, hyper-capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and a stronger federal government mostly built for facilitating westward expansion and building infrastructure, would follow.
But then, a severe — and mismanaged — economic downturn brought about the 1932 election, and with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory came not just the Great Depression (yes, FDR is responsible for that; stupid, socialistic economic policies greatly worsened what otherwise would have been a sharp recession followed by a healthy recovery) but World War II. And the America Roosevelt’s Democrats built would contain the New Deal and the Great Society, and lots of other previous public-sector denizens of Pandora’s Box.
We’d been living in the tail end of that Third Era.
But the Fourth has begun.
Donald Trump’s cabinet picks have been just about the perfect illumination of the sea change we’re seeing. And while I could highlight this fact with a number of them, Matt Gaetz being named attorney general is unmatched in how illustrative it is of a very new, very different political era.
1. Zero Fear of the Propaganda Press
You can tell this is the Fourth Era of American politics and not the Third Era simply because Trump has gone ahead with the Gaetz nomination. In the past, that simply couldn’t have happened, because a Republican president nominating so controversial a figure for so prominent a job would have been seen as crazy.
The legacy corporate media is, after all, discussing Gaetz’s nomination in exactly such terms.
As much as Gaetz is hated in Washington, D.C., and as freewheeling as the Biden Justice Department was about handing down indictments for people with whom they disagreed, the fact Gaetz didn’t get prosecuted as a “pedophile” (oh, come on) is a pretty good indication none of this was real.
And it’s actually a qualification, because the outrage of the left-wing Propaganda Press is now a feature rather than a bug. Their outrage is now political currency among GOP voters and even the apolitical who hate the legacy media with just as white-hot a passion. This is all something completely new — the Bush Republican Party might not have been capable of riding out such a storm, but this is a very different animal.
“I am the storm,” one imagines Trump saying. And so says Gaetz.
Megyn Kelly, on her Thursday podcast, had a near-perfect segment on the Gaetz nomination, calling him a “professional shit-stirrer”:
Nobody thinks Gaetz can survive Senate confirmation. They’re forgetting the likelihood that he’s going to be appointed in a recess.
A Gaetz recess appointment is absolutely perfect for everybody involved. Seriously, it is.
- Republican senators like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell get to avoid a direct confrontation with Trump (and also with Elon Musk, who has vowed to back a primary challenger against any GOP senator who bails on Trump’s agenda) without being on the hook for having voted for Gaetz;
- The media gets to screech about Gaetz, which will pump up their ratings and subscription counts — and Gaetz, who is one of the most media-savvy members of Congress, will almost certainly do interviews with them and fuel all of their fires;
- The House GOP leadership is ecstatic to be rid of Gaetz, who managed to bounce Kevin McCarthy out of his speaker’s chair and could very well have ended up engineering something similar against Mike Johnson for whatever grievances real and imagined he might have conjured;
- Gaetz gets to take the job and start making himself a hero to Trump voters by firing people left and right as soon as he walks in the door of the Justice Department headquarters building; and
- Trump can conserve political capital for other fights early in his administration.
This kind of calculus wasn’t possible in 2000. It probably wasn’t possible in 2020, either. But it definitely is now.
The thing is, a Gaetz recess appointment without much hope of 50 votes for confirmation and a JD Vance tiebreaker for the win essentially makes him a contract killer for the weaponized, corrupt DOJ bureaucracy. Gaetz would then be even more aggressive in breaking the Justice Department apart.
And that desperately does need to happen.
You can see this playing out very easily. Gaetz goes in, starts firing everybody, starts shutting down whole divisions of DOJ that shouldn’t exist anyway, and makes every enemy possible in that department and among its burgeoning mass of alumni before ejecting into a media job with Newsmax or Fox News or whatever MSNBC turns into once it’s sold.
And then somebody else who’s “respectable” is given the role of rebuilding the Justice Department into a smaller, leaner, and humbler entity less bent on tyranny and corruption.
2. It Has to Be This Way
Kelly pointed out an obvious truth that for some reason has escaped many of the pearl-clutchers over Gaetz’s nomination. Namely, that after the utter debacle at the beginning of his first term, in which ancient Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions took the job as Trump’s AG and then proceeded to recuse himself from the action as Democrats spun up the Mueller investigation out of paid-for “Trump-Russia” lies invented by Hillary Clinton’s campaign goons, you should have expected nothing less than Gaetz.
She’s right.
Trump went the establishment route in that job the first time, and he was utterly burned for it. If you want to blame anybody for Gaetz, blame Sessions.
And consider what things could have looked like eight years ago.
Had Trump an AG back then willing to protect him against the aggressions of the Deep State, there would have been no Mueller investigation and the Trump-Russia allegations would have lost oxygen fairly quickly. Trump wouldn’t have been politically weakened, he likely wouldn’t have lost the House and Senate in 2018 and his legislative agenda could have been much more complete. That might have provided him with a lot more political capital with which to insulate himself when COVID came along.
If you thought a conventional pick for AG was in the cards this time, you shouldn’t have. And you couldn’t have been more wrong.
3. We’re No Longer Soothing the Leviathan
In fact, Gaetz’s job at DOJ would be the same as Pete Hegseth’s job at Defense, Tulsi Gabbard’s job as Director of National Intelligence, and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy at the new Department of Governmental Efficiency. And Tom Homan’s job as the border czar.
It’s to get in the muck and strangle the beast. And if you’re Trump and you’re serious about doing those things, you need people who are already despised by the cool kids.
They hate Matt Gaetz already? That’s a feature. If and when he goes in, that loathing will be mixed with abject terror.
What happens when Gaetz decides to release everything DOJ and FBI have on the Jan. 6 pipe bombings? On Jack Smith? On all of the back-channel discussions between the Biden White House and the Biden Justice Department? The possibilities are endless.
The corruption is so deep and so well-known that all it really requires is someone with the brass balls to muck the place out. And you can’t get any ballsier than Matt Gaetz.
What’s fun — and transformational — about this is that Trump was specifically elected to tear down the Deep State. Hiring Gaetz is on brand, so those expressing shock and surprise are merely showing how behind the times they are.
The leviathan might roar at these developments, but its nemesis is hardly coming in the night.
4. Elite Credentials Are Anti-Credentials
Oh, but Matt Gaetz isn’t a former prosecutor? He doesn’t have a pedigree? He’s only practiced law for a couple of years?
Those are the arguments offered by those who aren’t calling him a nut or a crook or a child molester.
It’s precisely the same debate they’re having about Hegseth, who can’t possibly be qualified for defense secretary because all he managed was the rank of Major in the Army, and in his last job he’s a weekend host of Fox & Friends. Forget about the fact Hegseth has actually chewed dirt with the grunts in a combat zone and spent 20 years in the military, or that he runs a couple of nonprofits devoted to the welfare of veterans, or that he’s written multiple books on military readiness and strategy.
They’re screaming because these appointees don’t have elite credentials. But it’s people with elite credentials who have made a total mockery of these agencies that will now be torn down and rebuilt.
And the more screaming there is about the “unqualified,” the more the screamers come off as stooges for a failed, discredited ruling class. The public doesn’t care anymore about credentials. It cares about sand. Stones. Balls. Chutzpah. And it cares about real results.
5. Personnel Is Policy, Loyalty Is Mission
What the Gaetz appointment signifies is that Donald Trump learned a very valuable lesson about power politics in his first term. Namely, that while polish and a resume might be quite desirable for a blue-blood, stable organization, they’re utterly useless to you if you’re a wildcat.
And a presidential administration elected by common people in defiance of the lectures by Big Media and every other legacy institution is every bit a wildcat.
What you want if you’re going to war with the system is to surround yourself with people who are in a ride or die situation. Iconoclasts. Rogues. Outsiders. People whose only loyalty is to you, both because you’re the one giving them a chance either for redemption or to make a name and because they depend on you for air cover and longevity in the job.
Has-beens and profiteers like James Mattis and John Kelly thought it was their job to represent the leviathan to Trump rather than the other way around, and they all but ruined his administration. You don’t get that with a Matt Gaetz. With Gaetz you get someone who will kill for you.
And what’s so very different in this new era is that level of loyalty, and political bloodlust, is very, very different than what was in vogue in the Third Era.
The American Spectator’s founder, R. Emmett Tyrrell, once said that the liberal has the political libido of a nymphomaniac while the conservative has that of a eunuch. Trump is showing a great deal of libido in his cabinet hires, and Matt Gaetz might well be the most turgid of all.
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