Opinion | Trump’s pick of Matt Gaetz has the thinnest of silver linings

Many of Donald Trump’s choices for Cabinet nominations can be appropriately described as some combination of absurd, baffling and shocking. But his announcement Wednesday that he wants Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general has received far more immediate pushback. The opposition to Gaetz, who resigned his congressional seat after Trump’s announcement, stems less from his obvious lack of qualifications than the fact that so many of his former colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, despise him.

Yet if Gaetz manages to get confirmed, as terrible as that would most likely be for the country, it could have been even worse.

As Trump set about filling his Cabinet, the position of attorney general was always going to be among the most important. In Trump’s first term, he discovered that appointing conservative crusaders was not enough to do what Trump thinks is the attorney general’s job: shielding the president. What he needed, Trump decided, was people who put their loyalty to him above the law, the Constitution and the country. For Trump, the ideal attorney general will quash inconvenient investigations, fire anyone whose commitment to the MAGA cult is questionable and prosecute his enemies.

There’s an old adage that in Congress there are “work horses” and “show horses,” those who do the difficult labor of legislating and those more interested in preening for the cameras. But today’s age of outrage media has given rise to a new class of representatives who seemingly measure their success by how many liberals hate them. That’s what Gaetz has been.

But among the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Lauren Boeberts, Gaetz has been especially unpopular. That was true long before the House Ethics Committee began investigating allegations that Gaetz used drugs and paid for sex with underage girls (Gaetz has denied the allegations, and a Justice Department investigation was closed without charges). Before Gaetz’s resignation, the committee’s report was supposed to be released Friday. While the committee’s chair said the report would not be released, senators from both parties say they want to see the probe’s findings.

Whatever happens with the report, reactions from Capitol Hill Republicans to Gaetz’s nomination ranged from disbelief to disgust. Even his supporters describe Gaetz as a force of unfocused destruction. “President Trump is going to hit the Justice Department with a blowtorch, and Matt Gaetz is that torch,” said Steve Bannon.

Blowtorches do tremendous damage, it’s true — but Gaetz might light his own shoes on fire in the process. While he is technically a lawyer, he has no experience to help him understand the complexities of the Justice Department and how he might go about overhauling or dismantling it. A mismanaged department — especially one suffering from mass resignations, which Gaetz’s confirmation could well produce — would be one less able to carry out Trump’s mercurial whims. Gaetz could wind up paying more attention to distracting squabbles and pointless vendettas than remaking the department into a smoothly running engine of MAGA retribution. There are worse things than chaos.

Other names mentioned as possible attorneys general had far more experience and competence than Gaetz and just as much commitment to the MAGA cause. They included Mark Paoletta, a close friend of Clarence Thomas’ who worked in multiple Republican administrations; he has posted lengthy missives on social media explaining the need to purge the Justice Department of “deep state” officials who fail to do Trump’s bidding. But he was passed over, as was Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official in Trump’s first term who went to such lengths to try to overturn the 2020 election that he was indicted in Georgia and a disciplinary council recommended that his law license be suspended. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, whom Trump also considered for a Supreme Court seat, is another Trump ally who was in contention. 

Gaetz was such an outlandish choice that he was apparently on no one’s short list. But he had the other contenders beat in one crucial area: endlessly yelling about liberals on TV. And few things matter more to Trump. 

If Gaetz manages to get confirmed — or if Trump circumvents the Senate to give him a recess appointment — he would likely bring chaos and vindictiveness with him to the Justice Department, which is exactly what Trump wants. But we may look back and say that a loud and incompetent buffoon was both a disaster and yet preferable to a quieter but equally radical figure who would undermine democratic principles in a more methodical and capable way. It is the thinnest of silver linings. But over the next four years, we are going to have to take victories where we can find them.