In Matt Gaetz, Trump finds a lawless lawman

Rep. Matt Gaetz in Phoenix in December 2022 (Gage Skidmore)
John Stoehr
November 14, 2024Bank

Donald Trump has dominated Washington for nearly a decade. You’d think the Very Serious People who explain our politics to us would have figured him out by now. But given the reaction to Trump’s recent cabinet nominations, members of the pundit corps apparently still find it convenient to gaze at the president-elect with childlike wonder.

Yesterday, he said he is nominating former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz to be the next United States attorney general. Gaetz is not only a yes-man. He’s not only an insurgent. According to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he’s a statutory rapist. Indeed, a House ethics panel was poised to release a “highly damaging” report Friday. That won’t happen now. After Trump’s announcement, Gaetz resigned.

From what I can tell, the news of Gaetz’s nomination was stunning to the Senate Republicans who are tasked with confirming or denying his appointment. It was also stunning to people who should no longer be stunned. “The Gaetz nomination is so off-the-wall,” saidTimes columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, “that I half believe he's sacrificial so Senate Republicans will have an easier time confirming all the other questionable picks, having shown their independence by icing Gaetz.”

I don’t mean to pick on Klein. I just think he’s representative of a kind of very clever and highly educated pundit who inhabits virtually all of the top media outlets in America, and who spends his time reading tea leaves to deliver fugue-like prognostications that are embarrassments of abstraction and complexity when the truth is lying in plain sight.

Trump wants a criminal to be the country’s top lawman.

He wants someone who will obey his every wish without regard for decency, morality, federal statute or starchy concepts like “the rule of law.” Trump campaigned on vengeance against those who wronged him. He vowed to pardon J6 insurrectionists after turning into martyrs of the “deep state.” He made himself clear when he said “the enemy within” is more dangerous than foreign adversaries like Russia. He spelled out what he wanted and the electorate gave its blessing.

There is only one law in America now.

Its name is Donald Trump.

Gaetz’s nomination is the logical conclusion of the unprecedented election of a former president who tried overthrowing the people’s will, who had been convicted of 34 felonies and who had been indicted on scores of other crimes. But Very Serious People don’t recognize the enormity of it all. Instead, they seem to insist on seeing politics as they always have seen it – as a contest of ideas between partisans who may disagree on details but agree on the fundamental values of America.

We are so far beyond the decorous debates of the past between liberals and conservatives that we need a whole new vocabulary to describe the kind of people Trump wants in his administration.

Gaetz isn’t “controversial.” He’s been credibly accused of sex trafficking minors. Tulsi Gabbard isn’t a “controversial” pick to be director of national intelligence. She’s a Kremlin asset. Robert F Kennedy Jr isn’t “controversial.” He’s a roid-raging anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, but Trump wants him to be in charge of health and human resources.

As for the choice of Fox host Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, he’s a Christian nationalist who would corrupt the military by purging generals who are “insufficiently loyal” to Trump; help unravel the postwar international order that America built and that all international trade and finance depends on, raising the specter of another world war; and lead the way in using the military in domestic disputes, including the assassination of Trump’s “enemies within.”

Hegseth isn’t a “controversial” choice.

He’s an abomination.

This isn’t 16-dimensional chess. This is blunt-force trauma. Gaetz isn’t a decoy so Trump’s other “questionable picks,” as Klein puts it, won’t seem so questionable to Senate Republicans. Trump is putting up an apparent rapist and sex trafficker, because he wants an apparent rapist and sex trafficker to be in charge of the administration of justice.

There are some who can still recognize the meaning of a lawless attorney general in the form of Matt Gaetz. On a conference call yesterday with a group of investors, CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin said the mood changed suddenly after news of his nomination came out. Sorkin said “the shift in tone went from, 'Wow, we're going to have a great economy and all of these things and I don't have to worry,' to, 'OK, maybe now I have to worry' was like in the blink of an eye."

What are they worried about?

“When it comes to law and order,” Sorkin said, “when it comes to the Justice Department and what this is ultimately going to look like, what prosecutions are going to look like, that threw a lot of people back on their feet … The question is whether they can stand up and say so publicly and I think unfortunately the answer is still no and especially no because of the role this individual may ultimately play” (my italics).

The rule of law is what makes it possible to be rich in the United States. It “is the foundation on which the security of property rests,” wrote Professor Heather Cox Richardson this morning. “There is a reason that foreign oligarchs park their money in democracies.”

But if Matt Gaetz becomes attorney general, at the behest of a president who is himself a criminal, traitor, fraud and rapist, the foundation on which the rights of property depend will cease to be as solid. Maybe the investor class thought they could control Trump. If so, they realized yesterday such hopes are illusory. And now it’s too late, as Sorkin said, “because of the role this individual may ultimately play” — because the rule of law won’t protect them from a lawless AG.

With the rule of law, the rich are rich. Without it, the rich are puppets.

Again, this isn’t 16-dimensional chess.

This is blunt-force trauma.