Trump moves to burn down the rule of law
His cabinet nominations are obscene and augur dark days to come.
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When the sordid history of the second Trump administration is written, should we all survive that long, it will be difficult to sort out which of his early cabinet picks were the most atrocious. And while handing over control of the military to a weekend Fox News host or putting an anti-vax creep in charge of America’s top public health agency are really bad, it will be hard to sink lower than Matt Gaetz being nominated as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Let’s pretend, for just a moment, that Gaetz isn’t just being given this job because he’s a lib-triggering Trump crony and evaluate him on the merits. Gaetz’s legal experience, such as it is, seems to consist of a stint at a small firm in Florida, Anchors Garden, where he worked after graduating from law school in 2007. The firm currently has only nine attorneys, and Gaetz devotes precisely one line to the experience in his self-servingly weird House bio, saying, “Prior to serving in Congress, Matt worked as an attorney in Northwest Florida with the Keefe, Anchors & Gordon law firm, where he advocated for a more open and transparent government.”
Advocating for a more open and transparent government sounds pretty important, right? But while the firm does have a government affairs and public records practice, when Mother Jones did a deep dive into Gaetz’s experience there, what they turned up instead was that he working on things like debt collection and representing a homeowners’ association over a dispute about a beach volleyball net. It isn’t even entirely clear when Gaetz stopped working at the firm. His House bio skips ahead to his 2010 election to the Florida House, and his legal work is never mentioned again.
This is not the biography of someone you would hire to be an assistant district attorney in a mid-size American city, much less the head of the entire Department of Justice.
The problem here, then, isn’t just ideology, although there are plenty of problems there as well.
Compare Gaetz to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general pick during his previous term. Sure, Sessions was so racist that he couldn’t get confirmed as a judge. But he also spent 12 years as the US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and two years as the Alabama attorney general before being elected to four consecutive Senate terms. During his time in the Senate, he served on the Senate Judiciary Committee, becoming its ranking member in 2009. Sessions was a repulsive and retrograde choice for AG, but he wasn’t a demonstrably unqualified one.
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There’s also the haphazard nature with which the Gaetz appointment came about. Gaetz was not one of the names initially tossed about as a possible attorney general. Instead, we were all living in fear of, say, Judge Aileen Cannon being rewarded for her service to Trump in getting rid of that pesky classified documents case. But all it took, apparently, was a plane ride with Trump on Wednesday and, as Politico reported, Gaetz’s willingness to “go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.”
And that’s all Gaetz really does offer. He’ll be thrilled to destroy the DOJ from within, to wreck its ability to actually enforce the laws, and instead turn it into a device for Trump to pursue his personal and political grievances. Trump and his fellow travelers have made it clear that they see the DOJ not as an agency that needs independence from the president to fully and fairly execute the laws but instead as one that does Trump’s bidding. As conservative lawyer and Clarence and Ginni Thomas superfan Mark Paoletta explained it, “Career DOJ lawyers must be fully committed to implementing President Trump’s policies or they should leave or be fired.”
Trump’s priorities, such as they are, for Gaetz are to “end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department.” As Philip Bump pointed out in the Washington Post, these priorities are “broadly imaginary” and are in large part nothing but Trump’s grievances about the DOJ having the audacity to investigate him.
It gets even shadier
Tapping Gaetz for AG doesn’t just do him a solid by giving him a job he’s wildly unqualified for. It also, conveniently, makes it more difficult for the public to find out more about his alleged sexual misconduct, including allegations that he participated in the trafficking of a 17-year-old girl.
The House Ethics Committee has been looking into the allegations for close to two years and was set to vote this week on releasing the report. (It couldn’t have been released earlier because the committee doesn’t allow publication close to both primary and general elections.) But if someone resigns from Congress — which is what Gaetz did immediately after getting the AG nod — the Ethics Committee no longer has jurisdiction over them, and therefore any investigation just stops.
Gaetz wasn’t obliged to resign his seat just because he got nominated. Indeed, the normal course of action would be to keep the seat until being confirmed, so the move has House Speaker Mike Johnson having to feebly lie about how Gaetz did so “out of deference to us.”
Despite Gaetz’s resignation, details from the report are starting to leak. ABC reported yesterday that a woman testified to the Ethics Committee that Gaetz had sex with her when she was 17. (You might recall that Gaetz was in the news in 2021 for making Venmo payments to a convicted sex trafficker, one of them using a nickname for a young woman in the memo.)
A Miami Herald report published yesterday contains more details about the accusations swirling around Gaetz pertaining to a July 2017 party at the Orlando-area home of ex-Florida lawmaker Chris Dorworth:
New details about Gaetz became public in September as part of a federal civil lawsuit filed by Dorworth in 2023. Testimony from witnesses — one of whom was Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend — claimed that Gaetz was at the party at Dorworth’s home. Forensic evidence from Gaetz’s cell phone also indicated that Gaetz was at the home. Moreover, a sworn affidavit by a witness said the underage girl, identified as A.B., was naked, and that party guests were having sex and consuming alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy and cocaine, court records show.
Gaetz denies any wrongdoing, but even Republicans like former Speaker Kevin McCarthy don’t buy it. (Watch below.)
Trump is, of course, uniquely suited to understanding the necessity of staying one step ahead of damaging information and using the levers of power to protect oneself rather than serve the country. Gaetz is basically Trump writ small, a petty little tyrant who came to prominence thanks to Daddy’s money, a misogynist who sees women as objects for the taking, and an unqualified troll who has bullied his way to the top.
Republicans prepare to knuckle under
Theoretically, Gaetz might have a rocky road to confirmation. Indeed, naming him was so out of left field that there has been speculation that Gaetz is a sacrificial lamb — a nominee who will get blown up so that the actual attorney general pick can sail through through in the wake of that wreckage.
Some Republicans have pretended they will have a spine about this, with Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Joni Ernst, and Thom Tillis all expressing concerns. But there’s no real reason to believe the GOP will stand against anything Trump wants. Whenever there has been an opportunity to meet the moment, to truly stand for something, and to stop Trump’s worst excesses, Republicans have with very few exceptions failed. Those senators vying for the chamber’s leadership spot couldn’t fall over themselves fast enough to declare they’ll do anything to push Trump’s picks through, so don’t expect the whole advice and consent thing to have any meaningful role here. (And the richest man in the world is now literally in Trump’s administration and will gleefully fund primary challenges to any Republican who gets in the way.)
If Gaetz becomes head of the DOJ, he will take control of a department that, up until last year, was investigating whether to bring criminal charges against him for sex trafficking offenses. It’s distressingly similar to Trump being able to take charge of a government he sought to destroy. In both cases, part of the failure can be placed at the feet of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who moved far too cautiously and slowly with both Gaetz and Trump. But don’t expect Gaetz to make the same mistake. He’ll hit the ground running, ready to cut heads.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Well written by Lisa, as usual, but also very depressive reading. Unfortunately, also true! From across the pond: , may I say that the average American is pretty naive; do the majority really want to see America destroyed from the inside, or did they simply believe that Trump would not implement his “promises”? Somehow, sometime the tide will turn. Too much pessimism does not help, but understandably, right now it is very difficult. Allow grief and sadness, but also allow that to grow into strength and belief that things will change again - nothing is permanent.
Much love 🥰 to the staff of Public Notice and the readers.
We now will have a mentally ill president who also is moving into dementia nominating a whole truckload of incompetent misfits to fill key governing spots. We once were the shining spot on the hill--so to speak--but now we will be the rusty can in the garbage heap of the world. This incoming president has no regard for anyone or anything other than himself. Watch out now as he has already started to scheme to stay in office until--well he has no end date so I will have to say it--death overtakes him. That cannot happen too soon.