The Emperor's New Cabinet: Postscript

Margaret Rutherford as Miss Jane Marple, via Novel Suspects.

The details of how Matt Gaetz got the attorney general offer have been coming out like the facts in an Agatha Christie puzzle—I mean literally who was heard whispering with whom and where they were sitting on the plane—particularly in a Politico report (I first heard about it from Jay Kuo) citing their reporter Meridith McGraw, and it's stimulating the narrativium for me: I'm pretty sure I know what happened, and it's not at all what you might think, or what Tim Snyder has suggested, but something much more farcical, though perhaps equally chilling.

The background is that Republican operative Susie Wiles, co-chair of the Trump campaign and soon-to-be chief of staff, has been playing adult-in-the-room, keeping the boss on a bit of a leash and trying to keep him sensible, and had furnished him with a nice respectable shortlist of attorney general candidates, but he didn't like them. He wants his Roy Cohn, and the guys on the list seemed to have a different concept of the job; as Marc Caputo reports it, they

looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit....

The Gaetz-for-AG plan came together [Wednesday], just hours before it was announced, Meridith tells us. It was hatched aboard Trump’s airplane en route to Washington, on which Gaetz was a passenger. A Trump official revealed more details to Playbook late last night: BORIS EPSHTEYN played a central role in the development, lobbying Trump to choose Gaetz while incoming White House chief of staff SUSIE WILES was in a different, adjacent room on the plane, apparently unaware.

So the setup is the two thugs, Epshteyn and Gaetz, confabulating, and Gaetz in a state of high anxiety, with the House Ethics Committee report coming out in 48 hours, and you know it's going to be really bad, and one of them comes up with a brilliant idea for a scheme: if they can get Trump to solve his attorney general problem by naming Gaetz, Gaetz will have an excuse for resigning his House seat and stopping the release of the report. They can do it right now, while Wiles isn't looking.

So Epshteyn walks over to where Trump is sitting and starts pitching him to give Gaetz the job: Gaetz wouldn't be giving him constitutional bullshit, he'd be hounding your enemies, sir, just like you wanted. In Caputo's words, he'd "go over there and start cuttin' fuckin' heads." 

And of course Trump loves it—he wouldn't have thought of it himself, but he doesn't care that Gaetz is completely unqualified (he'd already named the equally unqualified Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to their important national security positions), and he doesn't care that Gaetz is a coke-snorting child fucker who told former Rep., now Senator Markwayne Mullin he would "crush Viagra and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night" (though I'm guessing Trump—and Wiles—did not realize how much trouble Gaetz was in with the ethics committee). Gaetz is his kind of guy, a guy who understands his own hopes and aspirations, and once he's made up his mind there's nothing Wiles can do about it.

In other words, the fact that Gaetz is under investigation for sex trafficking is the fundamental reason that he is slated to become attorney general. It's happening because of the investigation and wouldn't have happened otherwise, though none of the characters but him and Epshteyn realize this. 

And I still have hopes the plan may fall through, because they weren't going to able to hide the crucial element, but the main thing I'm wondering about is how pervasive this kind of thing is in Trumpworld; how much it's pure thug behavior, rather than the big political issues we try to focus our minds on, that drives what happens there.