Paul Ingrassia’s Story Is Not That Exceptional

Tuesday night, the White House acknowledged the inevitable and withdrew the nomination of Paul Ingrassia to lead the Office of Special Counsel.

Ingrassia had no business being anywhere near a federal job, let alone a Senate-confirmed position running an office charged with enforcing federal ethics rules. But he was not withdrawn because the administration just became aware of his many disqualifying statements and actions. He was withdrawn because Senate Republicans made it clear to the White House that he would not have the votes to be confirmed.

This has been treated as an unprecedented show of resistance and backbone by Senate Republicans and an exception to the rule that has prevailed this year. The Washington Post editorial board put it this way yesterday:

One of the differences between President Donald Trump’s first and second terms is the meekness of Senate Republicans. The GOP caucus in 2025 has acquiesced to appointments of extreme or unqualified people to powerful executive-branch roles who never would have passed muster in 2017. But it’s good to know there’s still a limit somewhere after Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) warned Monday night that his conference would reject the nomination of Paul Ingrassia, a 30-year-old provocateur, to lead the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. . . . Republican and Democratic senators are too in thrall to presidents of their parties, and it’s damaging the constitutional system. Any flickers of independence deserve at least faint praise.

This view of things is not exactly wrong, but I do think it misses an important dynamic of Trump’s first year, which may well be getting intentionally buried by both parties.

It’s true that there has been remarkably little open and formal resistance to Trump’s nominations — in fact, no presidential nominee for a Senate-confirmed position has actually lost a confirmation vote this year. And it’s also true that Republican senators have approved some plainly unfit nominees for important positions. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the Secretary of Health and Human Services for God’s sake, and he’s just one of many examples. Republicans senators have not wanted to challenge the president in public.

But it is also true that the Trump administration has faced some very significant resistance more privately to a large number of nominees, and that this has led a surprising number of them to be withdrawn. So far this year, the White House has withdrawn 49 nominations for Senate-confirmed positions. As Gabe Fleisher pointed out earlier this week, that is a (much) larger number of nominees than any modern president has had to withdraw from consideration in any year of his presidency.

And it is a particularly large number of withdrawn nominees in the first year of a new presidency. Ronald Reagan withdrew five nominations in his first year; for George H.W. Bush it was three; for Bill Clinton six; for George W. Bush seven; for Barack Obama twelve; for both Donald Trump in his first term and for Joe Biden the number was 13. The year is not even over and Trump has had to withdraw 49 nominations.

Withdrawn nominations, rather than flat-out lost votes on the floor, are generally how the Senate works its will in the confirmation process. No cabinet-level nominee has actually been voted down on the Senate floor since 1989, and fairly few sub-cabinet nominees have.

A significant number (though certainly not all) of the nominations withdrawn this year have failed because Republican senators made it known to the White House that they did not have enough support to be confirmed. But this process has been exceptionally quiet and submerged, and even the sheer number of withdrawals has not drawn much attention.

This is surely in part because it is in no one’s interest to draw attention to it. The administration wants to always look triumphant, regardless of reality. Republican senators want to appear to be firmly backing the president, which they mostly are. Democratic senators want to paint Republicans as Trump’s feeble stooges, which they mostly are. The political press is now so fragmented and polarized that few observers of Congress can see a good reason to tell this actually quite interesting story. And so we are left with yet another instance of the rhetoric and reality of the Trump presidency differing in ways that obscure the dynamics of this strange time because they don’t advance any straightforward narrative.

Something similar could be said of the Trump administration’s record in the federal courts this year. Lots of people in Washington walk around with the sense that the courts are letting Trump get away with anything he wants to do, but the record just doesn’t reflect that. The administration’s desire to seem always to be winning (which, among other things, has meant that DOJ appeals relatively few lower-court losses, to avoid Supreme Court losses), and the desire of both Republicans and Democrats to enforce that narrative for their own very different reasons can leave our perception of events pretty distorted.

None of this means the Trump administration isn’t getting all kinds of things done and isn’t pushing, stretching, and expanding executive power in many troubling ways. It just means that it’s hard to tell exactly what the administration is doing because there is an unusual amount of distance between what is said and what is done by the executive branch at this point.

Every time some new and striking move is announced, it’s a good idea to make a note of it and then check in maybe a month or two later with a simple question: Did that thing really happen? You’ll be amazed at how often the answer is “no,” and therefore at the difficulty involved in just getting a clear sense of where things stand.

That may even be true about our perception of the state of the all-important separation of powers at this point. This Congress plainly is letting this president walk all over it. But how and where that rule applies, and where there are some very important exceptions, is nonetheless worth knowing.