We are now engaged in what we in the press like to call a spirited debate about the confirmation prospects of one Matt Gaetz, the galactically unqualified and credibly accused sexual predator, to be the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. During Donald Trump’s first term in office, Gaetz was embroiled in a lengthy sex-trafficking investigation involving a minor girl, opened under Attorney General Bill Barr. He has now narrowly avoided learning the results of a House Ethics Committee probe over those same allegations including sexual misconduct. (ABC News has reported that a woman testified before the committee that Gaetz had sex with her when she was 17.) All that considered, of course it makes sense that this would come down to an Apprentice-style nail-biter as to whether he can garner the votes necessary to be confirmed to the job of running the organization that was once investigating him. And since Gaetz has not a scintilla of expertise or experience necessary to run the massive law-enforcement agency, it stands to reason that the only urgently important question facing the nation is whether four Republican senators might dig deep and find it within themselves to say as much.
If you care about such things, there are loads of senatorial quotes to be mined for meaning. There is this one, from Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, showing open contempt for the nomination: “I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general. We need to have a serious attorney general. And I’m looking forward to the opportunity to consider somebody that is serious.” We have the gauzy hand-waving of Texas’ John Cornyn: “I’m still trying to absorb all this. I don’t really know him, other than his public persona.” And we have the two faces of Oklahoma’s Markwayne Mullin, who concedes that while he and Gaetz have “had our differences” in the past, “I completely trust President Trump’s decisionmaking on this one.”
A year ago, the very same Mullin told CNN that as far as Gaetz was concerned, “we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor … of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.”
Given that Gaetz was openly showing photos of young women to his House colleagues, at his job, one might find it odd that 2024 Mullin believes that in order to get the job, Gaetz “has to come to … the Senate and sell himself. There’s a lot of questions that are going to be out there. He’s got to answer those questions.” In a sane and normal world, there would be no prospect of any such “sale” to be made. But we are not in a sane and normal world; we are in the world in which Sen. Lindsey Graham says, “I’m telling my Democratic friends: Elections have consequences, whether you like it or not. … You are accusing Matt of doing the very thing that you did. Matt Gaetz didn’t lie under oath, Matt Gaetz did not sign FISA warrants that were based on Russian disinformation, so we’re going to give the president a chance to put his people forward.”
We can talk in stentorian terms about whether the august body that is the U.S. Senate in fact plans to confirm an insurrection performance artist, someone whose chief qualification for the law-enforcement post is, as Politico reported, his willingness to “go over there and start cuttin’ fuckin’ heads.” But it’s worth recalling that the GOP senators are not exactly models of augustness themselves; these are—indeed—some of the very same august body that actually cheered on the insurrection. It is true that others deplored the insurrection—but they then went on to vote to acquit the president after he was impeached for it. Mitch McConnell even announced at the time that “there’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” before he voted to acquit. Newly minted Senate Majority Leader John Thune voted to acquit, while announcing: “My vote to acquit should not be viewed as exoneration. … What former President Trump did to undermine faith in our election system and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is inexcusable.”
We could talk about the same august Republicans in the Senate and their votes over Brett Kavanaugh, but again, why bother?
Maybe they really will rally and protect the institution from being rolled again by Donald Trump. It’s possible, sure. But the final data point that has been missing from this conversation are the words of Mitt Romney, in his searing interview last year with McKay Coppins in the Atlantic. Reread it this week as you pick your way through all the promises that Senate Republicans have made claiming to be opponents of MAGA chaos agents. Just a few choice excerpts to guide your thinking (the me in what follows is Coppins).
On Jan. 2, 2021, Romney sends a text to Mitch McConnell:
“In case you have not heard this, I just got a call from Angus King, who said that he had spoken with a senior official at the Pentagon who reports that they are seeing very disturbing social media traffic regarding the protests planned on the 6th. There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol. I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.”
McConnell never responds.
“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?
Retirement was death. The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power. One of his new colleagues told him that the first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?”
Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddlerlike psyche. Romney recalled one senior Republican senator frankly admitting, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”
One afternoon in March 2019, Trump paid a visit to the Senate Republicans’ weekly caucus lunch. He was in a buoyant mood—two days earlier, the Justice Department had announced that the much-anticipated report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. As Romney later wrote in his journal, the president was met with a standing ovation fit for a conquering hero, and then launched into some rambling remarks. He talked about the so-called Russia hoax and relitigated the recent midterm elections and swung wildly from one tangent to another. He declared, somewhat implausibly, that the GOP would soon become “the party of health care.” The senators were respectful and attentive. As soon as Trump left, Romney recalled, the Republican caucus burst into laughter.
There’s so much more. Nothing in Coppins’ account signals a Senate inclined to hatch a backbone. But here is the section that has haunted me in the year since publication:
Some of the reluctance to hold Trump accountable was a function of the same old perverse political incentives—elected Republicans feared a political backlash from their base. But after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged. One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him—why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.
That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame. That is the category error we continue to make when we hold out hope that Republicans, or the institutions in thrall to Republicans, might choose this precise minute to break free from the miasma of violence and lawlessness and vengeance and stupidity. We forget that they aren’t merely self-interested careerists willing to whisper home truths while they trumpet lies; they aren’t just willing to sacrifice themselves to the collective-action defense holding that if bravery were necessary, someone else ought to be brave. They are also, at bottom, genuinely terrified: They are afraid that their families and their children will be physically harmed by a movement that has proved that if they lose under the law, they can win with a stick. Whether those fears are genuine or pretextual we may never know. But it shouldn’t surprise anybody should we discover that all the GOP senators making harrumphy noises about needing to ask the tough questions of stunt-nominee Gaetz will ultimately buckle when they weigh the hardships of yet again serving as a doormat for Donald Trump against the real, visceral, chilling threat of getting themselves on the wrong side of the guy who is being nominated only because of his commitment to lawlessness and revenge. If GOP senators were too afraid to vote publicly to impeach Donald Trump for fear that their children would be collateral damage, what possible reason would they have to vote against Matt Gaetz as AG, who genuinely stands solely for raining down collateral damage?
We’ve entered the stage of Trumpist collapse in which people who seek to harm those seen as insufficiently loyal are being promoted over those with actual skills, or vision, or politics. Matt Gaetz is the open threat of violence and targeted prosecution that follows a refusal to take seriously the veiled threat of violence and targeted prosecution. They broke it; they bought it. Far too late to suggest they can choose to return what he will be selling.
