Trump’s risky cabinet pick

An earlier version of this article was first published in the On the Trail 2024 newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox on Friday mornings here.
As Trump’s newly minted White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles’ first ask was that the “clowns” be kept at bay. Toward the end of Trump’s presidential campaign, as a cast of troublemakers and opportunists circled in, cleanup duty often fell to Wiles. Per Tim Alberta’s reporting in The Atlantic, Wiles — Trump’s stoic campaign manager — gently pushed back on Trump’s insistence that Lara Loomer travel on the campaign plane; later, when the incident became major news, she regretted not pushing harder. In October, when a comic at the Madison Square Garden rally let off a riff of racist and antisemitic jokes, Wiles was the one who had to brief Trump on what occurred.
After Election Day, when Trump asked Wiles to be his White House chief of staff, Wiles had one reasonable stipulation: “The clown car can’t come into the White House at will,” she reportedly told Trump, per CNN.
This was not a new issue. Throughout Trump’s campaign, concerns about who should and shouldn’t be associated with the president-elect consumed advisers and staffers. When the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 became a punching bag for Democrats, the Trump camp disavowed it and elevated staffers from other conservative think tanks. Donald Trump Jr. spent months crafting a “blacklist” of potential staffers who should not be included in a second Trump administration. Shortly after the Republican National Convention, a Trump campaign adviser griped to me about the campaign’s choice to give Peter Navarro a speaking slot. “The guy’s nothing but trouble,” the adviser said.
Now, less than two weeks after Trump’s victory, the president-elect is quickly staffing up his White House — and the clown car is veering incredibly close. Some of his announced nominees for Cabinet positions or top administration jobs will likely get through Senate confirmation without much problem, like Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, who has earned rave reviews from even some of his Democratic colleagues, NOTUS reports. But others — like Tulsi Gabbard (for director of national intelligence) and Kristi Noem (for DHS secretary) — have raised concerns.
Or so they did midday Wednesday. That afternoon, Trump’s team managed to suck away all attention from the other nominees by casually announcing Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Gaetz, who promptly resigned his House seat after Trump’s announcement, is the subject of a federal sex trafficking investigation based on allegations that Gaetz paid underage girls for sex and transported them across state lines.
Trump’s announcement Wednesday — including Trump’s declaration to restore “Honesty, Integrity, and Transparency at DOJ” — sent shockwaves through Congress. A string of Gaetz’s House Republican colleagues expressed doubt that Gaetz could possibly be confirmed. A string of Senate Republicans, who would do the confirming, agreed: Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said she doesn’t think it’s a “serious nomination”; Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she was “shocked”; Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said Gates has a “steep hill to climb”; and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said he’d “absolutely” like to review the findings from the House Ethics investigation into Gaetz.
Will Gaetz’s nomination die in the Senate? Perhaps, especially if the ethics report is released or leaked. But this is Trump’s show now, and Trump alone calls the shots. Is it worth risking a messy confirmation fight — likely pitting Trump and his Senate allies against other Republican heretics — this early in Trump’s pending term? Some GOP senators told CBS’ Robert Acosta they aren’t so sure — they “don’t have a lot of energy for pushing back,” Acosta reported. “Trump runs the show, they say.” If they give in and allow Gaetz through, he’ll oversee the same Department of Justice that investigated him — and that has two active cases against President-elect Trump.
So, where was Susie Wiles? Not in the room, it appears. Politico reporter Meridith McGraw — an ace on the campaign trail this cycle, and author of the scoopy “Trump in Exile” — noted that Wiles was not involved in the Gaetz decision. The whole plan came about just hours before the official decision, per Politico Playbook, and it all occurred “aboard Trump’s airplane en route to Washington, on which Gaetz was a passenger.” Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn pushed Trump to pick Gaetz; Trump relented. All the while, per Playbook, “incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was in a different, adjacent room on the plane, apparently unaware.”
The White House chief of staff has no formal role, of course, in selecting or vetting cabinet members. And there’s no guarantee Wiles would have objected to the Gaetz pick. Wiles apparently acquiesced to Gaetz being a frequent campaign surrogate for Trump, including as a speaker at the Republican National Convention. Wiles and Gaetz appear to have a longstanding relationship — when Gaetz first arrived to Congress and Wiles was a D.C. lobbyist, Gaetz often turned to his fellow Floridian as a liaison with Trump. “Even as a friend of the president who speaks frequently with the president, sometimes I have to call Susie Wiles to get my way,” Gaetz told Politico in 2018.
If Wiles cannot stop the clown car, though, who will? The desire for “adults in the room” inspired a number of otherwise Trump-averse figures to hold their noses and stick it out during the Trump administration. Miles Taylor, the former DHS chief of staff, was among them; in 2018, he published a New York Times op-ed — signed “anonymous” — declaring himself part of the “resistance.” Last week, he wrote another one, begging “Republicans with integrity” and “conservatives of conscience” to join the Trump administration. “My advice to fellow conservatives ahead of Mr. Trump’s return to the presidency is not to run from him, as some might say they should,” he wrote. “Instead, I urge them to join him, as I once did.” Doing so, Taylor wrote, would provide an essential check on Trump’s power.
Taylor’s op-ed published the day after Election Day. When I texted Taylor Thursday, as news of Gaetz and the other Trump appointees circulated, Taylor demurred. “Not making any further comment on it,” he said.
The death of identity politics? As the cause of Kamala Harris’ loss — and Democrats’ losses in down-ballot races, across the country — is litigated, one common refrain is Democrats’ lurch to the left on issues related to gender, race and sexual identity. Two good reads: Democratic officeholders tell Politico’s Jonathan Martin that they need to be less “dogmatic” and get rid of the “buzzwords”; Steve Krakauer writes in The Hill that college-educated Democrats need to stop being so “annoying.”
The death of decency? What will Trump’s greatest legacy be? The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins writes: “In his near decade as America’s main character, he has thoroughly desensitized voters to behavior that, in another era, they would have deemed disqualifying in a president. The national bar for outrage keeps rising; the ability to be shocked has dwindled.”
The death of … death? In Trump’s return, evangelical leaders see a spiritual revival in their churches. Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins heard from Trump’s top evangelical supporters, who see a resurgence of enthusiasm from their followers. “I think what appeals to many evangelicals about Trump is they believe that President Trump will do effectively what (God) has commanded government to do,” one pastor said.