Trump’s First Defeat
Well, that was fast.
Last Wednesday, President-Elect Donald Trump shocked even his allies by nominating Representative Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Today, Gaetz has pulled out of consideration, one day after meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.
“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” the Florida man wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I'll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”
For at least one presidential nominee to withdraw at some point in the process is very common. What is unusual is how quickly Gaetz’s nomination fell apart. Eight days is not the record, but it’s close. (Recall that White House Physician Ronny Jackson’s nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs took nearly a month to collapse.) Just two days ago, Trump was insisting he had no second thoughts about picking Gaetz.
[Listen: What Pete Hegseth’s nomination is all about]
The reason Gaetz withdrew is no secret and no surprise. He’s been shadowed for years by allegations of sex trafficking, paying for sex, drug use, and sex with an underage girl. Trump doesn’t appear to have bothered to vet Gaetz in any serious way before nominating him, but all of this was known. The Justice Department investigated Gaetz for years but in 2023 decided against bringing charges; the House Ethics Committee was still probing him. Gaetz himself denies any wrongdoing. The fact that Gaetz, like Trump, has a personal vendetta against the Justice Department seemed to be his main credential for the job.
When Gaetz was nominated, he also resigned from Congress. That froze the House Ethics Committee investigation, because he was no longer a member. Speaker Mike Johnson, a Gaetz ally albeit primly conservative where Gaetz is a libertine, opposed releasing the committee’s work, and the committee deadlocked in a vote. But Gaetz’s victory was hardly complete. His nomination dislodged lots of damaging new information, including testimony about him twice having sex with a 17-year-old, though witnesses believed that Gaetz did not know she was underage. A lawyer for two women said they testified to the House that Gaetz had paid them for sex. The New York Times published an impossibly elaborate diagram outlining payment schemes. Gaetz fooled around, and the public found out; by accepting the scrutiny that comes with a nomination, he also fooled around and found out.
But don’t cry too much for Gaetz, and not only because of his record as a scoundrel. (He’s detested by House colleagues, and many reports indicate that he shared naked videos of paramours on the House floor.) His infamy didn’t prevent his rise until now, and he is believed to have designs on running for governor of Florida when Ron DeSantis’s term ends.
The question is what this defeat portends for the rest of Trump’s slate of outrageous nominees. The president-elect likes to take a gamble, even if he sometimes loses, but as I argued last week, the presence of so many unqualified picks might perversely make it easier for some of them to get through—after all, the Senate can’t reject them all, right?
[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]
Gaetz’s speedy exit shows that Senate Republicans aren’t willing to accept literally anyone Trump throws their way, and the fact that they were able to send that message so quickly suggests just how deep their reservations were. If the rejection is a sign of weakness for Trump, it is also one for his vice president–elect, Senator J. D. Vance. Vance was given the tough job of squiring Gaetz around Senate offices yesterday to drum up support, which obviously did not go well.
The Gaetz failure doesn’t mean that senators will reject any other picks, but with Gaetz out of the way, the troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon will be able to get more attention. A police report about a sexual-assault allegation against Hegseth from 2017 was released today, and it’s a stomach-churning read. Alternatively, Gaetz could end up looking like a sacrificial pick to save the others, or like a stalking horse for Trump to appoint someone else at DOJ. It seems unlikely that Trump intended either of these—he doesn’t usually play to lose—but that could be the effect.
Before Trump chose Gaetz, he reportedly concluded that other contenders simply didn’t have what he wanted in an attorney general, according to The New York Times. Now he’ll have to go back his lists to choose someone who has one thing that Gaetz conspicuously lacked: the ability to get confirmed.