Trump’s pick for attorney general will get to burnish his MAGA-loyalist credentials whether or not the Senate confirms him.
Yesterday, when Donald Trump announced that he wanted Representative Matt Gaetz to lead the Department of Justice, virtually all Democrats—and even some Republicans—were aghast. The man who was the subject of a federal sex-crimes investigation will now be America’s chief prosecutor? they wondered, eyes wide. Attorney General Matt Gaetz?
They may have to get used to it. “It’s the absolute perfect pick,” Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign strategist, told me last night. “It’s pure Trump, it’s pure MAGA—and it’s a huge reality check on John Thune,” he added, referring to the South Dakota senator and incoming Senate majority leader generally regarded as an establishment type. Gaetz might be a pariah among his congressional colleagues—and inspire revulsion more widely—but the Florida Republican has consistently remained popular with the one person who matters: Trump.
Gaetz has always sought political relevance and power. Dismissed by many, including GOP colleagues, as a self-promoter, Gaetz’s superpower has been understanding far more clearly than they do how power works in the Trumposphere. And that insight has enabled him to become consigliere to the former and soon-to-be president. “For all the things people say about Gaetz that are true, the one thing about Matt that people don’t fully respect is that the guy is not an idiot,” Steve Schale, a Florida Democratic consultant who knew Gaetz during his time in the state legislature, told me. Now is when Gaetz’s hard work starts to pay off—even if the Senate declines to confirm him.
“Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney,” Trump wrote on Truth Social yesterday, although the truth seems more obvious: Gaetz has scant experience as a lawyer; more important to Trump, he’d be a scrappy loyalist. A few hours after the announcement, Gaetz resigned from Congress. Perhaps the move was a show of confidence in his own nomination; more likely, it was a perfect opportunity to escape the political repercussions of a long-awaited Ethics Committee report. (Gaetz has repeatedly denied the allegations against him. The DOJ dropped its criminal investigation in 2022, but the House panel inquiry had continued—and was set to vote on whether to release its findings soon.)
To understand why Trump chose Gaetz, it helps to understand Gaetz himself. Earlier this year, when I profiled Gaetz, I wrote about his childhood in the Florida panhandle, where his family’s vacation home was the house from The Truman Show, the film whose main character’s entire life is revealed to have been a performance for public consumption. Gaetz’s father, Don, was an extremely wealthy business owner and a powerful establishment Republican, the leader of the state Senate. In high school, Gaetz was entitled, smart, and not very popular. “He would pick debates with people over things that didn’t matter, because he just wanted to,” one of his former debate-club teammates told me.
