Tom Williams /CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be defense secretary, makes his way to a meeting with Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC), December 3, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
If Trump were a little less reckless, vindictive, and vain, our republic would be in even more trouble. But Trump is Trump. And some of his bizarre nominees to high office seem calculated less to achieve his own goals than to outrage liberals. However, even in today’s Trumpified Republican Senate, there are limits.
First, Matt Gaetz went down as Trump’s nominee for attorney general. JD Vance was hastily dispatched to line up Senate support. Vance has his own deficiencies, but he can count. Gaetz abruptly withdrew, saying that he had become a distraction. (Funny, that never stopped him before.)
Yesterday, Chad Chronister, Trump’s nominee for chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration, an obscure Florida sheriff, withdrew after less than a day, after complaints by Republicans that he had arrested a local preacher for defying COVID lockdown orders. Given Trump’s obsession with reducing fentanyl smuggling, you might think he’d want someone competent at DEA.
Why Chronister? His father-in-law, Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., former San Francisco 49ers owner, whom Trump pardoned in 2020 for a gambling payoff conviction, has been a major Trump donor.
Speaking of Florida, it now appears that the nomination of Pete Hegseth is also going to be pulled, possibly to be replaced as defense secretary-designate by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Jane Mayer in The New Yorker broke the story of the latest Hegseth mess, in which he was fired from his jobs heading two nonprofit veterans organizations after repeated staff complaints of drunkenness, womanizing, and financial mismanagement. This followed the disclosure of a letter from Hegseth’s own mother telling him, “You are an abuser of women.”
There is a pattern here beyond the sheer lunacy of the nominations. All of this backpedaling reflects opposition from key Republican senators, who have warned Trump that several of his nominees can’t be confirmed. They are also the likely sources of the leaks to that effect to the press. And there will be more.
As Yogi Berra once reportedly said, never make predictions, especially about the future. But my prediction is that at least four more will almost surely be pulled: RFK Jr. as HHS secretary, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Mehmet Oz as head of Medicare and Medicaid, and Kash Patel as FBI director.
Notably, the Trump camp, under pressure from Senate Republicans, has also caved on the issue of FBI vetting of prospective nominees. Had the FBI investigated Gaetz and Hegseth, the nominations would never have seen the light of day.
The Tuesday announcement by Trump’s transition operation left itself some wiggle room. The agreement with the Justice Department allows FBI background checks of nominees but does not explicitly require them. Expect more Senate pushback on that.
So here’s where we are: Trump’s original ploy of demanding recess appointments is dead. Some of his nominees have gone down before they even got to the hearing stage, and several more will not survive FBI background investigations and hearings.
It’s too soon to conclude that non-MAGA Republican senators have recovered their souls, but some have recovered their wits. Trump’s staggering overreach has reminded about a dozen GOP senators that there is more to their political success than just kowtowing to Dear Leader.
There are still immense Trump threats to American democracy, but it’s a start.
