Congressional Republicans who choose to defer to the president-elect’s worst instincts will do him, themselves, their party, and the country no favors.
Congressional Republicans who choose to defer to the president-elect’s worst instincts will do him, themselves, their party, and the country no favors.
Y ou can already feel the shock of Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Matt Gaetz to head the Justice Department wearing off.
Maybe the most hated man in Congress — a figure who is uniquely saddled with ethical scandals himself — Gaetz is just the latest wrecking ball in human form to get Trump’s nod for a cabinet post. Tulsi Gabbard, with her naïve credulousness about even the most outlandish anti-American narratives spread by America’s enemies, is another. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be next. When it comes to saving Trump from his worst instincts, the GOP only has so much bandwidth. Republicans will have to pick their battles.
Resignation is in the air. Sure, Gaetz is “not their favorite,” CBS News reporter Robert Costa wrote of the Senate GOP. “But they also don’t have a lot of energy for pushing back. Trump runs the show, they say.” That’s a cop-out, and a wholly inadvisable one.
In the strictest constitutional terms, Trump does not, in fact, “run the show” in the upper chamber of Congress. But even if the legislative GOP is eager to defer to the will of the voters and give Trump carte blanche to do as he pleases, there’s a difference between being eager and being politically suicidal. Trump — to say nothing of the country as a whole — would ultimately be better served if the Senate vetted Gaetz as thoroughly and aggressively as possible. That wouldn’t be an act of disloyalty, or pandering to the cocktail class, or whatever else the agitators on social media might say. It would be an act of essential political hygiene.
If only to uncover the many skeletons allegedly lurking in Gaetz’s closet now, thus inoculating him and (importantly) the Senate Republicans who might confirm him against the scandal that would erupt when that information became public on its own, the GOP should put the screws to the Florida congressman. If he survives the grilling, he’ll emerge stronger for it. If he doesn’t, he wasn’t cut out to serve as America’s top cop in the first place.
Mandates are subjective things, and Trump isn’t the only figure in Washington who owes his or her position to the trust of the voters. The Senate’s 100 members do, too. And to survey how the Senate GOP’s leadership elections shook out, that body doesn’t seem to be in the mood to move fast and break things. GOP senators would be wise to lean into that boring institutionalism, even if it makes them a foil for Trump’s biggest boosters. The alternative is failure — his and theirs alike.
The president-elect’s impressive victory last Tuesday certainly earned him the latitude to experiment with voters’ foremost priorities — the economy, measured by price stability and wage growth, and immigration as it relates to Joe Biden’s migrant crisis. But it’s not at all clear that voters gave him the tether he seems to think he has to exact vengeance, and that is what the Gaetz and Gabbard nominations represent.
Trump believes that his first term and much of his post-presidency were needlessly complicated by the so-called “deep state.” Professional civil servants and bureaucrats in America’s intelligence services and federal law enforcement dogged him remorselessly, his and the broader MAGA universe’s thinking goes. They should be put in their place.
It’s Trump’s executive branch; he can do what he likes with it. And perhaps he will install pliant figures in positions of authority that refocus these rogue institutions on their narrow warrants. But it’s highly likely that Trump’s desire to mete out a comeuppance to all the people he’s wanted to humble for years will produce a lot of dysfunction along the way. That’s precisely what most voters don’t like about him.
Many in the pundit class spent the election cycle marveling at the retrospective improvement in voters’ perceptions of Trump’s first term. It must also be noted that Trump started from a low baseline. And while it will take several weeks still for 2024’s exit polling to be properly understood, we can safely deduce from the results that Trump did not become wildly popular overnight. Trump’s personal favorability rating on election night was eleven points underwater (44 to 55 percent). Another 55 percent of voters described Trump’s views as “too extreme,” a figure that must include a statistically significant number of his own voters. “Underscoring the emotion associated with the contest, preliminarily 36% of voters say they’d be ‘scared’ if Trump were elected,” ABC’s write-up read, “while 29% would be scared by a Harris win.”
Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 against a backdrop of chaos — most of which wasn’t Trump’s fault. Biden proceeded to squander his commission from voters to restore normalcy. He deferred to progressive activists on crime, racial “equity,” demand-side economics, the permeability of constitutional proscriptions, and the intrinsic virtue of riotous malcontents menacing American Jews and rendering life on their campuses miserable. Suddenly, voters looked around and saw that the chaos they’d voted against in 2020 had followed them well into this decade, and wasn’t Trump’s.
But even given those prevailing conditions, this is still an evenly divided country. Indeed, as of this writing, just about 3 million raw votes separate Trump from Kamala Harris out of over 150 million cast, and that margin may still decrease a bit by the time all the votes are counted. Trump benefited from a direct comparison to the many disasters over which the Biden administration presided, but he will be judged on his own merits now. Republicans in Congress do him no favors by deferring to his worst instincts and letting the sycophants in his orbit, for whom no Trump idea is a bad idea, dictate the course of events. On that front, we’re already off to an rough start.
The GOP’s down-ballot elected officials have control over their own destinies, and they would contribute to the party’s institutional health if they started acting like it. That may be thankless work, but such is life in public service. If elected Republicans cede to Trump a monopoly on leadership, they may soon find that voters have not suddenly transformed into wild-eyed fanatics who are just here for the spectacle of it all. Voters want results — and if Trump doesn’t deliver, they will have no qualms about giving the other party another shot.