The Situation: Four Is Easier Than One

The Situation on Monday asked whether everything—the entire situation—is the fault of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Today, I want to contemplate the group of people the president-elect has nominated to key cabinet positions. I will reserve comment on the individual nominees and their respective qualifications—or disqualifications—until they come before their respective committees for hearings, assuming they are not installed by recess appointment. Some may drop out or be replaced, after all. Or President-elect Donald Trump may ditch some. I don’t want to spend time thinking about how many sexual assaults, or sexual encounters with minors, by how unqualified a candidate who is how actively hostile to the mission of the agency he or she has been named to head should trigger how many Republican senators to vote “no”—at least not unless and until I have to. 

For now, then, let’s consider them as a group and with reference to the following paradox: Had Trump nominated Matt Gaetz to be attorney general—but not Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—I feel reasonably confident that the Senate would reject him. Had Trump nominated Gabbard, but not Gaetz, Hegseth, or Kennedy, I suspect she would go down to defeat too. Ditto Hegseth if Trump sent him up by his lonesome. And the same goes for Kennedy. Name any one of these people without the others, and the Senate might do its job. 

But by naming not one but four wildly unqualified—even anti-qualified—nominees, Trump actually makes them each harder for senators to oppose. 

With Trump, it’s always impossible to tell whether the mayhem he causes is just random chaos or whether it’s strategic. But this situation, whether he or anyone else thought it through logically or not, actually does have a logic. The logic of the “flood the zone with shit” strategy toward cabinet nominees goes something like this. 

It is almost unthinkable that four Republican senators have enough backbone to oppose all four of the nominees who exhibit some combination of extreme unsuitability for office and policy attitudes antithetical to their agencies’ mission. So from the point of view of a savvy Republican senator who wants to do the right thing, it is important to pick one’s battles carefully. The trouble arises when he or she tries to decide which battles to pick. 

Said senator might start by saying that the president is entitled to a cabinet of like-minded folks but that he is not entitled to a cabinet of sex criminals, even if they haven’t been charged. But this principle might sweep a bit too far. It knocks out Gaetz, which many Republicans don’t seem to mind. But it would also knock out Hegseth, who seems to have had a sexual assault complaint against him as well. And come to think of it, it would say something very awkward about Trump’s own appropriateness to sit in the Oval Office—something the president-elect might not appreciate. What’s more, if we’re nixing senatorial “consent” over matters of consent, what about other crimes of a deviant nature—like, for example, leaving a dead bear cub in Central Park and faking an accident to explain its death?

So then our hypothetical Republican senator might say that the real issue is what the nominee believes, not what skeletons may be in his or her closet. Nominees who believe in the mission of their agencies can be confirmed. Those who are truly radical cannot. But this approach would wipe out at least three nominees. Gabbard promotes Russian influence operations of precisely the type the intelligence community tries to counter, after all. Kennedy doesn’t believe in vaccines of precisely the type the Food and Drug Administration approves and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urges people to take. Gaetz talks about bringing “to heel” federal law enforcement or getting rid of it all together. Only Hegseth could survive this test, if even he could. 

So then maybe our Republican senator falls back on objective qualifications. But here the nominees literally all fail. These are, after all, four of the least qualified nominees for their positions in the history of those positions. 

All of which sets up the problem: If you come out against one of the nominees, and you articulate a reason for your opposition, that logic will almost certainly apply to at least one of the other nominees too. 

The traditional solution to a problem like this is inconsistency. You come out against Gaetz, say, but not against Hegseth, and you just don’t answer questions about the difference—or maybe you make it all about the difference between sex with minors and less-than-consensual sex with adults. Or you come out against Gabbard on Russia-related grounds and just say nothing about the fact that Gaetz’s rhetoric about Ukraine is terrible too. 

But our savvy Republican senator will detect a problem with this plan: Trump’s demands for loyalty are absolute. Oppose him on one nominee, and he’ll treat it as the grossest of betrayals. Again, if Gaetz were alone, there would be safety in numbers in opposing him. Every president loses one sacrificial victim to the Senate. But there won’t be safety in numbers if some Republicans are opposing Gabbard, some Gaetz, some Kennedy, and some Hegseth. Of course, the caucus could discuss the matter and coordinate, but do you really want to speak up in a caucus meeting seeking coordination among senators on which of Trump’s nominees to oppose?

There’s another reason our savvy Republican senator will hesitate before opposing four unacceptable nominees, where he may be willing to bite the bullet on one: To oppose four key nominees at the outset of his administration is to announce that the president of your own party has disastrous judgment. Opposing one nominee, after all, might signal a difference of opinion. The president and I disagree about Matt Gaetz, a senator might say, or I disagree with the president—who nominally picks only the best people—about Tulsi Gabbard. Even opposing two nominees could be framed as a difference of principle of some kind: The president and I have different views of what sort of sexual impropriety should disqualify someone from senatorial confirmation. 

But how can a senator oppose the president on four nominations, including three that directly involve national security matters, and purport to trust him to name a fifth nominee?

In short, there’s real danger that Trump may get away with more with respect to unacceptable nominees by compounding the issue than by presenting it cautiously. 

There is no good solution to this problem. It will not do, and it would breach faith with the men and women of the intelligence community, to tolerate Gabbard by way of defeating Gaetz—and the vice versa is just as unacceptable. Allowing a vaccine denier to take charge of the Department of Health and Human Services to make sure you have the votes to keep the guy with the extreme tattoos who wants to yank women out of combat roles is no bargain either. 

The only course, in my opinion, is to treat each nominee as a separate challenge, to methodically develop a record as to who each one is and to not let early successes—if there are any—act as the offering that will satisfy some demand for tribute. 

The point here is not, in short, a show of force. It’s actually to stop these people from taking office—or, at a minimum, to require them to take office with the senators voting to confirm them doing so without any semblance of plausible deniability as to who they are, what they believe, and what they promise to do. 

The Situation continues tomorrow.