Gaetz pulls out

In Washington, you don’t name anyone disruptive or potentially transformative to your administration without dealing with flack from the Senate. They like things straightforward, predictable, vetted, established and preplanned — and Donald Trump’s cabinet of outsiders is anything but. The Brett Kavanaugh nomination was widely considered to be dead even among his most emphatic supporters (reportedly even the president himself) before his stunning performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee righted the ship. Now, several members of the incoming Trump 47 team faces a certain onslaught from Democrats and potentially wavering support from some Republicans. So getting the cabinet the president wants will require the expenditure of political capital, as it always does with such a close partisan margin for error.

Given that, Matt Gaetz’s announcement this afternoon that he is withdrawing from contention to be Trump’s attorney general is not all that surprising. There is no question at this point that the nomination with the weakest standing was Gaetz’s — not just because of his widely known bad relationships with many of his fellow Republicans, but because of the obviously difficult positions it puts so many senators in. His nomination would have required the support of fifty Republican senators — meaning that every one of them, including the twenty up for re-election in 2026 including two brand new senators yet to be named in Ohio and Florida, could fairly have been described in campaign ads in two years’ time as the deciding vote for Gaetz. “He wasn’t convicted of any federal crime” would have been thin gruel to offer in response.

This basic math had even public supporters of Gaetz questioning to Punchbowl whether there was a strategy to get to fifty: “Sources familiar with the process say the Trump team has yet to articulate a clear plan for winning the confirmation fight, as even some public Gaetz supporters in the Senate tell us there’s no path to fifty votes.”

Without that path, the tension that emerged was whether Gaetz would even make it to a Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing process, with the ever escalating leaks from prior investigations. Even in the absence of a completed House Ethics Committee report — still unreleased, despite calls even from Republicans that it should be — the news wasn’t looking any better. And as the Hill reported early this morning:

Some Republicans are privately suggesting Gaetz should consider withdrawing his nomination to save himself the wrenching ordeal of an embarrassing confirmation hearing if he’s unlikely to be confirmed in the end.

“The most humane way, not only to Mr. Gaetz but to the dignity of our process — the best thing to do is to convince the president that the votes aren’t there, regardless of his strong-arming, and Gaetz can decide it’s not his to fight for,” said one Republican senator who requested anonymity to comment on the bleak prospects for Gaetz’s nomination.

The question for the Trump Team was mostly about biting off more than they can chew right off the bat. The Gaetz nomination was in its best case scenario a distraction, one that would have resulted in a drag on momentum in the Senate and a souring of relationships with moderate lame ducks who are the most likely to break with Trump — not just on that nomination, but potentially legislative priorities as well. That’s not how you get a mandate rolling early with unified support.

If the president-elect truly believed Gaetz is the person — the only person — he wants in the attorney general job, he would have to have been confident that the fight was worth it. His old favorites, my colleagues at Fox & Friends, pointed out this morning the downside of spinning your wheels for the next two months, as the earliest Gaetz would have been considered was the end of January. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle,” Gaetz said in the X post in which he withdrew. Onto the next one…