Matt Gaetz Withdraws as Trump's AG Pick

Don't credit the Senate. The public did it, polling suggests.

Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for Attorney General today. The Florida congressman said in a statement that “my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.” Gaetz’s withdrawal follows sexual misconduct allegations involving a 17-year-old girl. The major media will undoubtedly credit this moment of accountability to the integrity of this or that Republican senator in some arcane Senate maneuver that only the experts understand. But the real hero here is the public.

Gaetz’s announcement on X

Polling shows that Gaetz was the least popular of Trump’s motley group of nominees. In fact, he was the only nominee whom the majority of Americans surveyed disapproved of. Thankfully, (alleged) sexual assault of minors is still a red line. Gaetz’s withdrawal shows Donald Trump’s power is not absolute. Not even close.

Initially, Trump’s nomination of Gaetz triggered a frenzy on cable media, which warned in countless segments of the “constitutional crisis” that would result if/when Trump circumvented Senate confirmation to install Gaetz as AG through a recess appointment. All very Washington, with its obsessive focus on process .

To give you a sense of the cable panic, I made a supercut of the segments below.

I was critical of the freakout in a piece I wrote at the time, stressing that Trump’s end-run to avoid Senate confirmation was only hypothetical. In light of Gaetz’s announcement, it seems I was correct. Trump could have tried to appoint Gaetz when the Senate was in recess but did not, or could have simply made him Acting Attorney General. The public pressure was clearly just too much, and Gaetz likely did not want his personal life and alleged misconduct further exposed.

Gaetz’s withdrawal is an object lesson in a simple fact: even a president like Trump can’t be a dictator. I’m not arguing that The System Works. And I do believe that Trump as president can and will do dangerous and damaging things. But I think we should focus on the real things rather than imagined ones. Hyperbole might make for better ratings, but it leaves the public misinformed as well as uninformed about the actual bad stuff that’s happening. Worst of all, fearmongering, like obsessing over process, disempowers ordinary people. When you tell people fascism is here and that government amounts to opaque processes you can’t understand, they disengage.

However, the Gaetz episode shows that it isn’t all about process. Trump, after all, could have made him Acting AG. But he didn’t, because people have power. We are not powerless in the face of a fascist dictator.

Major media too often wants you to be a spectator, experiencing the rather crude list of emotions their coverage is designed to provoke. “In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement,” as Orwell put it. Thankfully, there’s a lot more to humanity than those lizard brain emotions. I’ve seen it myself since launching this newsletter and realizing people are willing to engage with far more nuanced coverage than the news industry generally thinks. Help us provide more of this kind of coverage — and show the news industry the public is smarter than it thinks — by becoming a subscriber below

Now let’s see how long Pete Hegseth lasts.

— Edited by William M. Arkin