The Senate will be a rubber stamp on everything else Trump wants for the next 4 years.
This happened because Gaetz is truly that awful AND because Gaetz knows the Ethics Committee report is really really bad and he doesn’t want it to get out.
Bit of both, I’m guessing. While the Senate will largely support Trump, they will do so in a way that indicates that they cede none of their actual power to him. And Gaetz is so reprehensible that this was a perfect opportunity to flex.
Right, and everyone gets to do a face-save of “sorry, Big Guy, we wish we didn’t but we have to do this to protect you from looking bad”.
It’s great news that Gaetz won’t be AG, and that he’s no longer in Congress (for now).
When he resigned, Gaetz said he wouldn’t come back to Congress even though he’d just been reelected. But that was before he withdrew from consideration for AG. I suppose he could change his mind and come back to Congress when it reconvenes on January 3. But the ethics committee report is hanging over his head, and it must make him look really terrible. If he did come back, I’d expect either for him to be forced to resign again, or for the House to expel him.
One way to survive a scandal is to have a lot of allies who are willing to stand up for you. But almost everyone on Capital Hill hates Gaetz. He seems to have no friends there at all.
Of course, whoever Trump nominates for AG now will also be terrible. Just about everyone he’s nominated so far has been awful. How about Nancy Grace, or Wayne La Pierre, or someone equally odious and unqualified?
It’s also possible that Trump will find a job for Gaetz that doesn’t require congressional approval. I can imagine Trump doing that just to piss people off.
This is terrifying, given what he has done in Texas and gotten away with.
Did someone say Nancy Grace?
OMG…gag…
What about Jeanine Pirro?
That was me. I can’t find the article where I originally got it, but I did find this Reuters article from today, which says the Senate confirmation requirement is different from the Vacancies Act provisions.
If the Secretary office is vacant, the top deputy can carry out the functions, because that is a Senate-confirmed position. Or, the President can appoint a temporary person from another department, provided that person currently holds a Senate confirmed position.
So even if Trump appoints Gaetz to a non-Senate confirmed position, that doesn’t allow him to move Gaetz later to a position that requires Senate confirmation, like AG.
The name for Gaetz’s replacement I heard floated on NBC was Todd Blanche
Perhaps DeSantis will appoint himself to Rubio’s seat and Gaetz will run for governor.
In this scenario, under the Federal Vacancies
act, Gaetz would have to serve in a senior executive position at the agency for 90 days PRIOR to the end of the previous Senate-confirmed officeholder’s service. Even if Merrick Garland hired him now, there isn’t enough time for him to meet this requirement.
The more I think about it, this all seems a bit too staged.
Here are my priors:
- Gaetz knew the ethics report would be awful, and quite possibly could lead to his ouster from the House. At the least it would put the party in a hell of a spot trying to keep him in office
- The Senate needs to show that they aren’t a complete rubber-stamp for every crappy nominee Trump throws up, just 99% of them
- Gaetz doesn’t want to just resign, because that makes you a loser and also confirms that the ethics report was really really bad
- The GOP doesn’t want to have an empty House seat for very long, or have to deal with the fallout of Gaetz being forcibly removed from the House
- Trump knows that MAGA-nuts love themselves some Matt Gaetz, but that Gaetz himself is incompetent and should not be trusted with a key position
So, Trump nominates a man he knows wouldn’t be confirmed by the Senate, and would be bad at the job anyway. This allows Gaetz to dodge the ethics report, resign from Congress without being a quitter, and then claim that he had to withdraw his nomination because of those big bad non-MAGA RINOs in the Senate. The Senate gets to claim that they are doing their due diligence in opposing the worst of Trump’s nominees. And Trump gets to appoint the person he wanted all along (likely Paxton, IMO, but could be Blanche or some other toady lawyer).
A perfect plan.
I don’t think Trump plays 4-D chess. Trump thought he’d be able to get Gaetz pushed through but has found out he’d have a fight on his hands. Since he’s lazy, he went ahead and gave up. Why should he fight for Gaetz? A man Trump barely even knows. Maybe Gaetz got him coffee once?
Honestly, you don’t need a perfect plan when you have people that will cover for or explain away your mistakes.
he’s a thoroughly despicable person, and, unfortunately, an all too common example of what the current Republican party has become. There was a recent thread on here discussing whether you can tell what type of person someone is by their looks. While I generally agree with the consensus that you can’t, in Gaetz’s case he looks exactly like the type of person he appears to be, a leering predator.
Unless Gaetz ends up with a delicious consolation prize, I’m glad this happened, even though whoever ends up as AG will be horrible anyway.
But at least Gaetz himself is facing consequences for being such a slime bag(*), and for that one tiny bit of justice in an unjust world, I am grateful.
(*) As far as we know, anyway - while I don’t think Trump plays 4-D chess, I’m not yet ready to assume that Gaetz’s goose is cooked. I’ll give it a little time to play out.
I really like this! And while I wouldn’t rule it out as impossible, I would be more inclined to believe it if a) it weren’t too clever by a half for Trump and his minions to come up with, and b) Trump believes he can do anything he wants and this will be seen by some as him NOT getting what he wants. And I think his ego is too big to allow that.
That’s the kind of thing they do enjoy doing, and (sadly) Gaetz has a good chance of being elected to the Florida Governor’s Mansion. This is the state that elected Medicare-Fraud King Rick Scott to the US Senate, after all.
But there has been a lot of talk of DeSantis naming Lara Trump to fill Rubio’s Senate seat. It would be quite awkward to suddenly snub her and take the post himself. Even famous-for-being-awkward Ron DeSantis might hesitate to cross Donald to that extent.
DeSantis is term-limited after January 2027. It’s possible that Gaetz will grab some private-sector millions, being a “consultant” for numerous big corps, until then. Then become Governor in the 2026 Florida election, then, after a good term of stamping down the little guy and elevating the one-percenters in approved GOP fashion … hope everyone eventually forgets about his proclivities and makes him President in a landslide! (Assuming we’re still having actual elections in, perhaps, 2032.)
As for who Donald nominates in place of Gaetz: someone devoted to him and free from anything resembling integrity. (Several good options have been mentioned in the thread already.)
He’s never said the best at what. 
From what I recall (sorry, I don’t have the source handy) Gaetz was the one who expressed eager willingness to break the law and use the AG position for evil. That’s why Trump wanted him in particular. But I don’t imagine it will be too hard to find some other bootlicker who wants to abuse the power of that office in very specific ways.