Chronicle of a Nominee’s Death Foretold

The unfortunate demise of the Trump administration's short-lived attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz, which is positive in the abstract but I'd rather he'd suffered at least another week of abuse.

Don’t slam the door on your way out, asshole. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

If Matt Gaetz ever had even a tiny sliver of hope of winning confirmation to be President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general, and in my opinion he didn’t – it vanished entirely in the period since his name was announced as more and more information continued to emerge that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that even if he wasn’t a pedophile, the alleged Gentlemen from the Great State of Florida was the moral equivalent of a shitstain the size of ten football fields. 

In fact, if Trump’s sole criteria for picking an attorney general is they had to be a pedophile, there are better qualified and ethical pedophiles he could have selected. Here, too, I’m going to give Gaetz the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s not, but even if Trump picked him believing it was true, the nation would have been far better served by appointing a real one.

The screws tightened severely on Gaetz over the past few days, which made his situation completely unsustainable and left him little choice than to get the hell out of Dodge City. Among the most damaging developments, putting aside the growing cracks in Gaetz’s support in the Senate, were that two lawyers who represented witnesses who gave evidence to the Justice Department and House Ethics Committee expressed outrage about the latter’s vote yesterday to maintain its position of keeping its investigative report about Gaetz secret. 

Trump’s nomination of Gaetz and continued public support for his pick, even as political and public opposition to confirming him expanded, didn’t go down well either. John Clune, the attorney for the 17-year-old girl at the center of the case against Gaetz called his nomination “a perverse development in a truly dark series of events.” He and Joel Leppard, the second lawyer, both promised to reveal more undisclosed evidence their clients provided to investigators. 

Meanwhile, it’s been widely reported that a hacker obtained the unredacted depositions of the 17-year-old and her friend who was at the party, which were almost certain to be made public, and God willing still will be. Gaetz was already toast, but these pieces of news and others turned him into burnt toast.

A more interesting question than why did Gaetz step aside today, is why would Trump nominate such a loathsome figure, especially as the revulsion and anger it was sure to immediately generate was also certain to grow, not diminish, under the closer scrutiny of the confirmation process? A second related question that springs to mind is what was Gaetz thinking in agreeing to accept the nomination when his reputation was inevitably going to be further slaughtered than it already was – and when your name is Matt Gaetz that’s not easy. 

Common sense suggests Gaetz never had a chance of being confirmed, which raises the question of why Trump nominated him in the first place? Two well-placed Republican sources I spoke to laid out a plausible scenario, which is based in part on information shared with them by even better placed sources, but they couldn’t confirm it’s accurate and I obviously can’t either.

Keeping that in mind, a nutshell synthesis of what the two sources shared with me is Trump knew from the get-go Gaetz was Dead on Arrival, but put his name into play anyway, because he viewed it purely as a strategic move – and a fairly clever one, if this version of events is correct –  that would return substantial indirect benefits. Gaetz also knew he’d likely go down in flames, even if like many others before him who have confronted death not with stoicism, but denial and desperation so he probably clung to hope until conceding defeat today.

From the perspective of Trump and his political advisors, the strategy was to “flood the zone” with cabinet nominees, including some that were near certain cannon fodder, with Gaetz at the top of that list. The administration would be happy in the unlikely event that any of the dregs somehow passed Senate scrutiny, but completely unbothered if they didn’t, the calculation being that the Democratic and a few potential Republican rejectionists wouldn’t block all of his preferred choices even if they were all completely unqualified or unsuitable for the respective positions he’d allotted them for fear of looking intransigent, or they lacked the courage or integrity to go to the mattresses more than once or twice. 

Hence, the president’s enemies would be more than satisfied by being able to brag about how they saved the nation from the nightmare scenario of Attorney General Matt Gaetz; meanwhile, Trump might be able to sneak through a replacement nominee who was just as bad or worse, and had been held in reserve for that reason rather than being nominated first. For example, one of the sources cited the possibility of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as a possible substitute for Gaetz, but I’m pretty sure he was joking. 

The same logic applies in seeking to up the odds of Senate confirmation for Trump’s original picks for other positions that the president, in the opinion of the sources, deems more important than attorney general. Examples cited by one or the other in this context – and this list should not be considered exhaustive – in order of nominees Trump knows will encounter significant opposition, but is most determined to get through by hook or crook no matter what the political cost.   

—RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services, who both sources evaluated as being well ahead of any other already-named nominees in the category of longshots for reasons of lunacy, moral repugnancy, and/or idiocy.

—Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon and Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, in a too-close-to-call dead heat finish.

—Puppy-killing South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem at Homeland Security, though in a somewhat different category of nominees who have at least a reasonable chance of being confirmed, but tossing a Gaetz or two out the window as roadkill will significantly ratchet up their odds of winning approval.

What about Gaetz’s view of the situation?

This seems more apparent as an explanation, though that doesn't mean it will succeed if it was in fact the plan. The short version is that Gaetz was likely to emerge from the confirmation battle in a far better position, whether the Senate approved or rejected his nomination, than he would have been had he continued with the status quo of keeping his seat in congress, and at worse no more fucked than he already was.

To be more specific, if the president miraculously found a way to get Gaetz through the confirmation process – which would have likely required, with no guarantee of success, funneling untold millions in bribes into the offshore accounts of a dozen or so senators, and assassinating any that refused to take a payoff – then the question of the benefit to Gaetz answers itself. In the more likely scenario that Gaetz’s nomination was rejected by an unprecedented margin of 100 to 0 and his name was dragged through the mud in the process, what difference does that make? Virtually the entire country already believes he’s a serial pedophile; it’s hard to suffer reputational damage when you’ve already hit rock bottom.

Meanwhile, even if the following pair of pluses only provide short-term relief that gives Gaetz more time to make a plan to disappear off the radar screen of global law enforcement, it still puts him ahead of where he was before he resigned from the House. 

First, when Gaetz sent his letter of resignation House Speaker Mike Johnson – virtually at the same moment Trump offered him the attorney general job, which is one of a number of clues that the fast one-two punch was choreographed ahead of time – he simultaneously killed off any chance that the House Ethics Committee would continue on investigating the charges against him because it no longer has jurisdiction since he forfeited his standing as a member of the House.

Second, Gaetz’s resignation also ended the possibility that the House would eventually vote to expel him if the more lurid allegations surrounding him are confirmed. Gaetz probably wasn’t thrilled about being forced to quit Congress, but being expelled – which has only happened to six members up until now – would be a far greater humiliation. I doubt it will make the public think less of him than it does about his current image as a sex criminal at large, but it would be a bigger blow to Gaetz and his family, especially his father who’s a former president of the Florida Senate.

Third, and of most importance, Trump knew what he was getting into when he nominated Gaetz, who didn’t without any critical information he didn’t already know. The president also will appreciate that Gaetz didn’t make a fuss about making his exit, so his standing with Trump, which was already in a very favorable position, will only improve further.

Trump puts loyalty ahead of all else and he’s surely assured Gaetz already that he’ll be rewarded for his past political support and friendship. I don’t know what the payoff will be, maybe Trump gives him a job in his administration that doesn’t require Senate confirmation, or perhaps the president or one of his political fixers makes a few phone calls and before you know it “The New and Improved Matt Gaetz Prime Time Hour” debuts on Fox News and the host gets paid $2 million annually, or if Gaetz is ever charged and sentenced during Trump’s second term there’s already a ore-signed pardon in a safe at Mar-a-Lago.

Whatever proves to be the case, it’s unthinkable that Trump will passively stand by and watch a good man like Gaetz be destroyed by the Woke Mob.