Just days after he won reelection, Donald Trump began rolling out his Cabinet picks, the people who’ll run the machinery of the federal government over the next four years. His nominees so far include a few normal Republicans, like Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state, as well as a growing number of wildly unqualified extremists, like Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general. On this week’s episode of Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the harrowing possibility of a government staffed by dangerous conspiracy theorists, alleged sex offenders, and apologists for Vladimir Putin. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: The Senate Republicans have to pick their battles. We have CBS News’ Robert Costa saying that some Republican senators think maybe it’s not worth it to fight Matt Gaetz’s confirmation. At the same time, we’re seeing a lot of GOP stalwarts, including Ed Whelan, saying Gaetz is one too far. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse tweeted on Wednesday evening: “Autocrats like to make minions crawl. Gaetz and Gabbard nominations will test Republican senators’ willingness to crawl for Trump.”
This is complete speculation, but do you have some sense of what the bridge too far here is? Is it RFK Jr.? Is it Tulsi Gabbard, who would in fact endanger national security? Is it Gaetz? Senate Republicans need just four no votes to make this not happen. Will there be defections?
Mark Joseph Stern: I think there’s a real chance that we won’t see defections, at least not the number necessary to block a nominee. And, Dahlia, this is what it looks like when the guardrails are gone. What we’re seeing, postelection, is the corruption of Trumpism without any meaningful check from the other branches or institutions. In 2016 Trump’s election felt like a fluke. And there were some Republicans in the Senate who would sort of stand up to him, sometimes. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski didn’t cover themselves in glory, but they did have a limit. They definitely didn’t act as though Trump had some meaningful mandate.
Plus, back then, the courts were not fully corrupted: The Supreme Court still had Justice Anthony Kennedy and a version of Chief Justice John Roberts who was not totally MAGA-pilled. We had lower courts that were fairly aggressive in blocking aspects of Trump’s agenda that went too far. There was a sense that the Senate might stand up to Trump’s more extreme nominees but that if it let these people through and they tried to do crazy stuff, the courts would be a meaningful backstop.
Now I feel like both those layers of protection against autocracy are just gone. The Senate looks prepared to roll over. These so-called moderates might say nasty stuff about Gaetz off the record, or criticize his character, but how many of them are actually saying: “Donald Trump doesn’t get a blank check in the Senate, and we will exercise our duty to say no when we need to”? None of them have come out and declared: “We will say no.” Even Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Republican from Louisiana who’s kind of a moderate—who is a doctor himself—reacted mildly to the nomination of RFK Jr. for the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy is an anti-vax crank who wants to pull vaccines from the market, who wants to halt research into diseases at HHS, who wants to blow up the biopharma industry and halt decades of progress in treating all kinds of ailments. Cassidy couldn’t even say: “This guy’s a nut, and I’m voting no”!
That does not give me optimism that Cassidy will find his spine down the road. One thing we learned from Trump’s first term is that Republicans don’t tend to grow spines as they go along. What we’re seeing now, frankly, looks a lot like what we’ve seen in other countries that have slid into autocracy, like Hungary and, until recently, Poland. The ruling party came in and pulled all the right levers to entrench their power, to ensure they could act as strongmen without real checks from the other branches, and cow everybody in their party into obedience. That’s the dynamic in the United States right now. And it is so different from 2017, when we knew that the Supreme Court had a limit, that it would draw the line, and we felt even Senate Republicans might draw a line, which they occasionally did. I don’t see that line-drawing today.
So, yes, it terrifies me that these nuts might clear the Senate. And it also terrifies me to think about what they’ll do—what they’ll get away with—once they are in power. I don’t see other ostensibly independent institutions preparing to stand up to the excesses of Trumpism. What I see, what I fear, is that they will interpret the election as a green light for Trump do whatever he wants, since he actually did win the popular vote this time, so they should either actively assist him or get out of his way.
Two things. First, I’ve never been sadder to agree with you. Second, if you want to really freak yourself out, go back and read the excerpt from McKay Coppins’ biography of Mitt Romney was published in the Atlantic last year. One Republican senator after another justified voting to acquit Trump after Jan. 6 by saying they were scared for their children. They were scared for their wives. They were scared for their families. They were afraid people would come after them for standing up to Trump.
Reading it now is pretty bracing, because if they weren’t prepared to convict Trump after hiding out in basements on Jan. 6, it’s hard to imagine they’re going to vote, four years later, against someone like Matt Gaetz—who is the actual human embodiment of what lawlessness and retribution really are. I want to be wrong about this. But if you were too scared then to do the right thing, it is really, really tough to imagine constructing a spine now that Trump is actually in a position to put you in the crosshairs.