The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Opinion Writer
Talk about a quick and humiliating smackdown. Florida Man Matt Gaetz was announced as Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general on a Wednesday. Eight days later, his complete unfitness for the job had become so undeniable and insurmountable that he withdrew from consideration. The nomination didn’t last even a full Scaramucci.
This could not have happened to a more deserving guy.
For those who care about checks and balances, Gaetzgate was about so much more than the political fate of a proud poster boy for arrested development who has the morals of a coked-up bonobo. Trump’s decision to put him forward was an early, gross test for the president-elect’s entire Senate team.
Republican lawmakers were being asked to lash themselves to the personification of Trump’s morally bankrupt impulses, to choke down their bile and prove just how low they were willing to go. How they handled this challenge was going to be an early signpost of, as well as a building block in, their relationship with the second Trump administration.
No one knew this better than the president-elect himself. By now, the Republican House conference has been pretty thoroughly MAGAfied. And while the Senate has been trending Trumpier as well, the transformation is not yet complete. There are still some Republican senators who value the chamber’s role as an independent power center. With Gaetz, the MAGA king was watching to see if there was a line that his Senate subjects would not yet cross.
Make no mistake. This is just the beginning of Trump’s efforts to bring the upper chamber to heel. His M.O. is to relentlessly pressure-test people and institutions. Those who don’t crumble at first are hit again. And again. The goal is to shatter the resisters’ spines, one vertebra at a time if necessary, so that they don’t just bow before him but rather collapse in a gelatinous blob. Like, say, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
But for now, Gaetz’s implosion is cause for a tiny moment of celebration — and for a hat tip to the Senate Republicans who made it happen.
Opinion Staff Editor
It only took two weeks after Election Day for House Republicans to bully Representative-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware, who will become the first openly transgender member of Congress in January.
On Monday an exhausting Republican from South Carolina, Representative Nancy Mace, announced plans to introduce a measure that would bar McBride and any other trans women working in the Capitol from using women’s restrooms there. On Wednesday in response, Speaker Mike Johnson announced a move that would prohibit transgender people from using “single-sex facilities” on the House side of the Capitol and in House office buildings, including restrooms, changing rooms and locker rooms, that match their gender identity.
While abhorrent, this move is straight out of a longtime reactionary playbook. A decade ago, after their attempts to exclude gay people from public life finally failed, Republicans began to use bathroom bills to stir up a culture war targeting transgender Americans, a smaller group with fewer legal protections. Their attempt succeeded; now debates over trans existence have become a feature of everyday political discourse.
Provocateurs like Mace build political capital by tying the juvenile urge to gossip about people’s privates to the assumption that “men” set loose in women’s bathrooms will commit sexual violence. Demagogues prey on many Americans’ inexperience with transgender identity and women’s very real fears about being assaulted, cynically casting trans women as others who invade otherwise safe spaces.
That approach was evident in Johnson’s explanation of his decision: “Women deserve women’s-only spaces.” It evidently does not matter to him that one woman — McBride — will be excluded from them.
By casting McBride and women like her as others instead of targeting the men (say, those poised to lead the executive branch) who have been credibly accused of perpetrating sexual violence, women of the right can drape themselves in pseudofeminist cloth while sidestepping any work of true feminism that would make them too left-leaning for their conservative audiences.
There is no evidence that suggests that trans women perpetrate sexual violence when they use the women’s restroom. But these sorts of policies aren’t about reality; they are about cultural posturing and fomenting division between cisgender straight women and L.G.B.T.Q. people (who otherwise would be natural allies).
Today’s patriarchal systems need amateur Phyllis Schlaflys to spread traditional ideas about gender that distract women from their relentless pursuit of dignity, equality and freedom. In exchange for loudly playing that role, legislators like Mace and Johnson get to break through a noisy political environment and capture a cascade of public attention; one need only look at Mace’s latest dog-whistle-filled social media tirade and the scrutiny it has provoked to see this particular culture warrior’s grift in action.
A climate of fear that targets trans people may be electorally expedient, but Mace should consider the slippery slope she treads. The enforcement of biological essentialism when it comes to sex was long used as a justification to exclude women from public spaces, professions and full citizenship. Once the right has successfully excluded trans women (and, presumably, all other queer people) from public life, they will need new fuel for their outrage fire. I suspect whichever women are left will be high on their list of targets.
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Editorial Board Member
The election of Donald Trump was a political thunderbolt, but was it a surprise? A new study conducted by researchers from Louisiana State University, NORC at the University of Chicago and the University of Maryland suggests it should not have been. Conducted before the election, the poll found a deep cynicism about the state of the country and its future across the political spectrum.
Asked whether they believed America’s best days were ahead, whether the United States was the greatest country in the world and whether they can trust people in government, a strong majority of respondents from every political leaning gave a resounding “no.” A quarter of Americans said the country needed a total upheaval.
Where earlier data was available, the study found that by comparison, the nation has grown far more pessimistic. Twenty years ago, fewer than half of respondents said politicians were in it only for themselves. Today it’s 70 percent. Back then, a third said people in government could be trusted to do what’s right; this time, it was fewer than 20 percent.
The study, “Civic Cynicism in the United States: A Typology of Americans,” released on Nov. 15, divided respondents into five broad groups. The largest were the “classically liberal” (22 percent), the “mostly MAGA” (21 percent) and the “ambivalent” (29 percent), flanked on one side by die-hard optimists, the “believers” (13 percent), and on the other by the “disillusioned” (15 percent), who thought the American dream had moved out of reach.
The categories broadly define the political chasm that has so divided America, and what the study found troubling was the degree to which pessimism was shared by all of the groups.
“In a sense, it is in the deep chords of distrust where Americans seem most united,” wrote the authors of the report in their introduction. Similar majorities of the “classically liberal” and “mostly MAGA” said the country needs “substantial” change, and they broadly agreed in their cynicism about the political system and in the importance of the rule of law, constitutional liberties and democracy to the American national identity.
The difference, of course, was in how they defined the terms and whom they held responsible for the state of affairs. The “mostly MAGA” group, for example, expressed what the study described as “deep distrust, bordering on antipathy,” for the press. A far greater percentage of that group’s members said Christian culture was essential to national identity and felt far more threatened than the other groups by immigrants and minorities.
There is far more parsing of what we Americans think and fear in the 89-page report, and sadly, it confirms what most of us have observed. In the end, however, it leaves unanswered the wrenching question that we must answer if things are to improve: Why?
Why has America fallen into the deep malaise quantified by this study? Why are we so down on our country, our government, our prospects? Why is there so much hatred in our civil discourse?
Editorial Board Member
On election eve in Philadelphia, Oprah Winfrey issued this warning to a rally full of Kamala Harris supporters: “If we don’t show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.” Winfrey was once one of the most trusted figures in American public life. And yet most voters did not believe her. The next day, Donald Trump won the popular vote.
It’s become clear that the better part of the American electorate doesn’t buy the argument that Trump is dragging the country toward fascism, even as he announces plans to go after his political enemies and purge the federal government of civil servants who don’t bend the knee. Smart people are warning about what’s coming. But a great many Americans don’t believe it. Indeed, according to a recent survey, 43 percent of registered voters considered Harris to be the real threat.
What accounts for Democrats’ stunning loss of credibility with such a wide swath of the American electorate? To be sure, misinformation, conspiracy theories and social media “broligarchy” have played a role. But those are far from the only causes. Public opinion polls suggest that for a great many voters, the criminal prosecutions of Trump created the impression among millions of voters that Democrats started doing authoritarianism first.
Even though President Biden had nothing to do with the criminal cases that were filed, nearly two-thirds of Americans felt that the Department of Justice case against Trump for mishandling classified documents was politically motivated, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. And after Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury in a hush money case involving the porn star Stormy Daniels, 57 percent of people said they considered the prosecution to be “motivated by politics,” according to another poll. It’s the same story in Georgia, where Trump was indicted on charges related to election interference.
If people believe that Democrats are the ones prosecuting their political opponents on flimsy charges and trying to throw them in jail, then Trump is essentially inoculated from accusations of authoritarianism going forward.
Democrats will have to figure out how to counter this false narrative in the months and years ahead. I’m reminded of a column that my colleague David Brooks wrote in 2022, just as Republicans looked ready to quit Trump — and then the F.B.I. raided Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. “Did the F.B.I. Just Re-elect Donald Trump?” he asked. I hate to say it, but I think it might have.
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Acceding to Ukraine’s longstanding pleas for permission to fire American missiles into Russian territory may be the last thing President Biden can do for the Ukrainians — or on any other foreign front, for that matter — before leaving office. That makes for dodgy optics, because it saddles an incoming administration with a policy shift Biden himself long resisted because he thought it carried too great a risk of plunging America into a direct confrontation with Russia.
But it was arguably something he would have done in any case, given that Russia was preparing to throw 10,000 imported North Korean troops into the war and had just launched its largest air attack on Ukraine in months.
The argument from Ukraine and its Western supporters is this: If Russia is not constrained in battering every corner of Ukraine, as it demonstrated on Sunday, why should Ukraine be constrained in its fight? The weapon in question, the Army Tactical Missile System (known as ATACMS, pronounced attack-ums), which Ukraine has already been using in Russian-occupied territory, has a relatively limited range of about 190 miles, but that would put a lot of Russian bases, ammunition storage areas and logistical hubs in range. It could be immediately useful in blunting the counteroffensive Russia is preparing to retake the chunk of territory Ukraine seized in the Kursk region. That is where the North Koreans are supposed to be deployed.
The argument against allowing long-range strikes with NATO missiles is that this is the one action against which Vladimir Putin has drawn an explicit red line. “This escalates tensions to a qualitatively new level,” said the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov. That does not mean World War III, as Donald Trump’s allies have shouted, but Russia will most likely feel compelled to retaliate against the United States and its allies in some way, probably asymmetrically and indirectly, further escalating the conflict.
Military experts doubt that firing Western missiles into Russia — whether ATACMS or similar systems that Britain and France may now supply — will alter the course of the war any more than the other vaunted weapons the United States agreed to supply after an initial reluctance, like the Abrams tank or the F-16 jet fighter. Ukraine has already been firing its own drones deep into Russia, and it has been using ATACMS against Russian targets in Crimea and other occupied territories. Russia, meanwhile, is still steadily grinding forward at a rate of up to a mile a day in the Donetsk region.
In any case, Trump will be able to return to a red light on the ATACMS when he takes office on Jan. 20. During the campaign, he declared that he would promptly end the war, though he never made clear how. Kremlin-allied commentators tried to get Trump’s ear by claiming that Biden’s decision reduced his negotiating options and left him with the threat of a global standoff.
But then Biden’s last act on the international stage may also help the Ukrainians persuade Trump that if they are properly armed and can stand up to Russia, a negotiated settlement becomes more likely.
Opinion Columnist
Donald Trump’s nominations of Matt Gaetz to be attorney general and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of Health and Human Services are similar in the degree of opposition that they’re likely to provoke, but I suspect the intentions behind each choice are quite different.
Gaetz is Trump’s passion pick, and according to the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo he aced his interview with the president-elect by ignoring talk of legal niceties and promising to cut a swath through the Justice Department. Despite all the speculation about some kind of multidimensional chess involved in the appointment, it seems likely that Trump very straightforwardly wants Gaetz to be confirmed, and that the Florida congressman is precisely the kind of figure he desires to have as attorney general.
With Kennedy, on the other hand, the pick feels more like conventional coalition management, with much less personal presidential passion invested in the choice. Trump benefited meaningfully from Kennedy’s endorsement, and those who voted for the former Democratic and third party candidate represent a distinct faction — crunchy, suspicious, anti-establishment, often erstwhile lefties — within the broader Trumpist tent. So the nomination is best understood as a reward for that support, a largely transactional gesture.
Yes, Trump shares some version of Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism. But it’s doubtful that the president-elect cares deeply about the issue, let alone about how Health and Human Services approaches food additives or pesticides or chronic illness; it’s more likely he just wants to keep Kennedy and his constituency onside.
Which means in turn that he may not be terribly disappointed if the Kennedy nomination goes down to defeat in the Senate. He can say he tried, he did his best, and hand out some ceremonial public-health role as a consolation prize. And if a few Republican senators decide that they need to vote down Kennedy but then can’t also vote down Gaetz — well, that might be an entirely acceptable outcome for the president-elect.
And needless to say, this has been a good 48 hours for Pete Hegseth’s nomination to be secretary of defense.
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Contributing Opinion Writer
Justice Juan Merchan originally scheduled the sentencing of Donald Trump for July, after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in the New York hush-money case. But after the Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that sitting presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for official acts, the judge delayed sentencing until September, pending his review of how the court’s decision affected certain portions of the case.
At the urging of Trump’s lawyers (and with no objections from the prosecution), Merchan decided not to insert himself into the presidential campaign just a few weeks before the election. He pushed back the immunity review and rescheduled sentencing for Nov. 26. After Trump’s victory at the polls, the best chance for punishment in this case was suspended sentences — probably probation and a fine, but still, conceivably, a short time in prison — to be imposed after Trump is required by the 22nd Amendment to leave office on Jan. 20, 2029.
But now, after new motions by the defense, the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo has obtained from the judge a pause in the case until Nov. 19 to give the D.A.’s office time to balance what Colangelo called the unprecedented “competing interests” of the jury’s verdict and “the office of the president.”
Competing interests? Only in the narrowest sense, because it’s not really that complicated. Elections and jury verdicts are both essential elements of democracy; one does not supersede the other.
On one side, there’s the court’s duty to uphold the integrity of the criminal justice system and the rule of law, an obligation that has never been more crucial than it is today. More practically, why should any citizen put up with the sacrifices of serving on a jury if the verdict will be subordinated to the defendant’s convenience, even if the defendant is the president-elect?
On the other side, Trump is once again arguing that the president is above the law and that his time is too precious for this low-level wrangling.
But sentencing, as opposed to prosecution, is not explicitly mentioned in either the Justice Department’s guidelines barring the prosecution of presidents (which don’t apply to states, anyway) or the court’s immunity decision. Why not? The strong legal answer of the prosecution and the judge should be that when a president contests a suspended sentence, it is much less time-consuming than depositions and the other demands of being a defendant.
As someone who was in the courtroom every day of the trial, I worry that prosecutors may figure that their case is doomed on appeal, so why take all the heat from MAGA world? But there’s no compelling reason to be fatalistic about the Supreme Court, which, despite some awful decisions, has rejected Trump’s position or decided not to review his appeals on dozens of occasions over the years. Maybe his felony convictions will be among them.
The Manhattan D.A., Alvin Bragg, has already shown himself to be fearless. Now he must press forward — whatever the chances of success — to bolster the Constitution. And Merchan, who respectfully ignored Trump’s attacks on the court during the trial, shouldn’t buckle now.
Opinion Columnist
Throughout the presidential campaign, I noticed that Trump supporters tended to fall into one of two camps. The first camp — core MAGA — heard Donald Trump’s wild rhetoric, including his vows to punish his political enemies, and loved every bit of it. They voted for Trump because they believed he’d do exactly what he said.
Then there was a different camp — normie Republican — that had an entirely different view. They did not believe Trump’s words. They rolled their eyes at media alarmism and responded with some version of “stop clutching your pearls. This is just Trump being Trump. He’s far more bark than bite.”
But Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general, along with his selection of Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, shows that Trump did mean what he said. He is going to govern with a sense of vengeance, and personal loyalty really is the coin of his realm.
Gaetz’s nomination is particularly dreadful. He isn’t just the least-qualified attorney general in American history (he barely practiced law before running for elected office and has served mainly as a MAGA gadfly in Congress), he’s also remarkably dishonest and depraved.
Gaetz has created immense turmoil in the House. He was primarily responsible for deposing the House speaker Kevin McCarthy in a fit of pique, and he’s so alienated House colleagues that one had to be physically restrained from attacking him on the House floor. He has a reputation as showing colleagues explicit pictures of his sexual partners, and he is under a House ethics investigation into whether he had sex with an underage girl while he was a member of Congress.
Gaetz has denied these claims, and the Department of Justice closed its own investigation into sex trafficking and obstruction of justice last year.
Gaetz’s nomination is a test for Senate Republicans. Can they summon up the minimum level of decency and moral courage to reject Gaetz? Or will they utterly abdicate their constitutional role of advice and consent in favor of simply consenting even to Trump’s worst whims?
No matter what happens next, however, Gaetz’s nomination is reaffirmation that the Donald Trump who tried to overthrow an American election hasn’t matured or evolved or grown. He is who he is, and it should surprise no one that he nominated a vengeful loyalist to lead the most powerful law enforcement agency in the United States.
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