Just days after securing a second term in the White House, Donald Trump sent a thinly-veiled threat to his party’s leaders on Capitol Hill: if they did not allow his nominees to bypass Senate approval, he would endorse Republicans who would.
The message, delivered with characteristic bombast on social media, was in keeping with the president-elect’s strategy to roll over traditional and legal checks on presidential power and consolidate control over the government in the White House.
Then came his Matt Gaetz problem.
Gaetz’s withdrawal from the nomination to be attorney-general, amid an escalating swirl of lurid allegations about his sexual behaviour — which he denies — was a sharp setback for Trump.
It was also the clearest sign yet that the president-elect’s plans to undermine rival power centres in Washington could face resistance. And that resistance is coming from an unexpected place: Senate Republicans.
During Trump’s first term in office, he was repeatedly frustrated in the Senate, where Republican iconoclasts such as Arizona’s John McCain and Utah’s Mitt Romney regularly stood up to the more impulsive initiatives emanating from the White House.
But Trump bet this time would be different. His strong performance in the November election, and his “coattails” that enabled Republicans to win closely-fought Senate races in battleground states including Pennsylvania and Ohio, led many to believe the chamber would be little more than a rubber stamp.
The first sign Trump would face a bit more spine in the Senate than he had counted on came last week, when Republicans chose South Dakota institutionalist John Thune as their new leader, relegating Maga-friendly Floridian Rick Scott to a distant third in a secret caucus ballot.
But the withdrawal of Gaetz was a significantly more important sign that Senate Republicans would not quickly cede their prerogatives to the president-elect.
The failure of the Gaetz nomination has all but killed the idea that Trump could name a large number of his cabinet by “recess appointments”, a constitutional back door that allows presidents to put nominees into office in an acting capacity if the Senate is on recess.
Some Trump aides had openly mused about forcing Republican leaders in the Senate to call a recess — almost a European-style dissolving of parliament — so that he could put his entire cabinet in place.
Closed-door messaging from several Republican senators, however, made clear two things: Trump would not be able to bypass the Senate to get officials in through recess appointments, and Gaetz did not have the votes to be confirmed as attorney-general.
Gaetz, a former Florida congressman, was brought down by a history of belittling his fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill and mounting allegations of sexual impropriety.
In a post on X, Gaetz — who has denied all allegations of wrongdoing — said his nomination was “unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance nomination”. Trump in turn praised the former Florida lawmaker in a post on his Truth Social platform, saying the conservative had a “wonderful future” ahead of him.
But Gaetz’s withdrawal has raised questions about whether Senate Republicans will show similar resistance to other controversial nominees now suffering from the traditional Washington drip of revelations that would fell cabinet appointments for any other president.
Top of that list includes defence secretary nominee Pete Hegseth — the former Fox News host who has proposed firing top military leaders and faced an allegation of sexual assault — and Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard — a former Democratic congresswoman who has praised Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and been accused of parroting Kremlin propaganda.
Hegseth has never been charged with a crime and has denied all wrongdoing. But like Gaetz, he has spent this week on Capitol Hill in an aggressive push to try to drum up support from lawmakers for his nomination, accompanied by vice-president-elect JD Vance.
The failure of Trump’s number-one pick for attorney-general to progress to even the early stages of a Senate vetting process is arguably the biggest blow to his efforts to build an inner circle that will carry out his aggressive domestic agenda.
The Department of Justice is central to Trump’s plans to seek “retribution” for individuals he sees as wronged — including himself. He has also threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” outgoing US President Joe Biden and his family.
Many legal experts and Trump allies had expected that, if confirmed, Gaetz — one of Trump’s fiercest defenders and one of the most vocal critics of the DoJ under Biden — would have few qualms about taking orders from the incoming president.
Gaetz made headlines last year when he told an audience of conservative activists that he and other Trump allies would bring the DoJ and other federal agencies to “heel”.
“We either get this government back on our side or we defund, and get rid, abolish . . . every last one of them,” he said in March 2023.
Steve Bannon, a former top Trump adviser, this month told NBC News that the president-elect “is going to hit the justice department with a blowtorch and Matt Gaetz is that torch”.
Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney-general who Trump has named as Gaetz’s replacement at the justice department, has a more traditional political and legal background. But Trump insisted on Tuesday that she was very much aligned with his plans.
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponised against me and other Republicans — Not any more. Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again,” Trump said on Truth Social, adding that he had known her for years and she was an “America first fighter”.
Before Bondi was chosen, Paul Butler, professor at Georgetown Law, said the “working assumption” should be that Trump was seeking retribution and “will nominate for attorney-general a person who’s willing to do that”.
Bondi, who is known to be a close ally of Susie Wiles, who will serve as chief of staff in Trump’s second term and is seen as a moderating force within Trump’s inner circle, is expected to be more easily confirmed by the Senate.
Since leaving the Florida attorney-general’s office in 2019, she has been working as a lobbyist at Ballard Partners, which has offices in Florida and Washington and has close ties to Trump’s inner circle.
But Bondi is not a moderate: after the 2020 election, she backed Trump’s claims that the race against Biden had been rigged. She will now retrace Gaetz’s steps to Capitol Hill to lobby senators for her own confirmation in the next few days and weeks.
But even if she has an easier time than Gaetz, the drama surrounding him has offered the first opening for Democrats to attack Trump for falling short in tapping the best to lead his second government.
“A qualified nominee for the highest position in law enforcement in America must be honest and complete in disclosing his background. Mr Gaetz did not meet that standard,” said Dick Durbin, the Senate judiciary committee chair, on Thursday afternoon.
Additional reporting by Alex Rogers in Palm Beach
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