When Republican members of the Senate gathered in Washington this week to name their leadership to run the chamber next year, there were some preliminary rumblings about the need to get rid of establishment types and hire some fiery MAGA figures. The prime candidate was Florida senator Rick Scott, who challenged front-runners John Thune and John Cornyn for the position being vacated by longtime Trump frenemy Mitch McConnell.
When the voting began on Wednesday morning, it became quickly apparent that the Scott insurgency, backed by a constellation of online MAGA stars including Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, didn’t have the juice to win. In the first round of voting, Scott finished third with 13 votes behind Thune with 23 and Cornyn with 15. Then in the second round, Thune won the gig by a 29-23 vote. He may want to demand a recount.
Even as Thune was winning his leadership election, the president-elect was naming an increasingly alarming list of unqualified and/or extremist nominees for Senate-confirmed positions. The first big howler was Fox News personality Pete Hegseth for secretary of Defense. Then came the proposed director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democrat and fierce opponent of the bipartisan national-security establishment. But the pièce de résistance was Trump’s announcement of Florida representative Matt Gaetz, the man who personally defenestrated Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, to become America’s chief law-enforcement officer as attorney general. Aside from his reputation as a bomb-thrower in the House, Gaetz was for a good while under investigation by the same Justice Department (and more recently by the House Committee on Ethics) for possible sex-trafficking charges, as ABC News observed in announcing this startling nomination:
The investigation into Gaetz stemmed from a probe into the Florida congressman’s onetime friend, former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, who was sentenced in 2022 to 11 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to multiple charges, including sex trafficking a minor and introducing the minor to other “adult men.”
Since the Justice Department declined to charge Gaetz following its investigation, the Florida congressman has faced an ongoing probe by the House Ethics Committee regarding the same allegations.
While Gaetz has denied any wrongdoing, he remains under a cloud, and is widely regarded as one of the baddest of the bad boys of the MAGA movement. Aside from his longstanding alliance with Trump himself (and with other ultra-MAGA types like his colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene), Gaetz is also friends with Susie Wiles, the former Trump-campaign honcho and incoming White House chief of staff.
So with the majority of Cabinet and other Senate-confirmed positions yet to be filled (and with RFK Jr. among others still impatiently waiting for their rewards), Trump is already sending a clown car of problematic nominations toward Thune’s caucus. Will he bend the knee out of gratitude for the president-elect’s decision not to displace him in favor of Scott? Will he pick one or two of the worst nominees to block and hope the boss will be satisfied with half a loaf of crazy? Or will he stand up for the independence of the Senate against a newly elected chief executive who has dominated his party like a medieval warlord? This last possibility seems unlikely.
In this febrile atmosphere, there’s even a rumor circulating that Trump has a scheme for bypassing the Senate altogether:
As unlikely as it seems, this scenario would help explain why Trump suddenly started demanding recess appointment powers from majority leader aspirants over the weekend.
In any event, this probably isn’t what Thune bargained for during his long-planned rise to the top position in the Senate. He may now have to hope that his new powers don’t turn out to be roadkill on Trump’s race toward the day-one dictatorship the once and future president once “jokingly” promised.
