This is an adapted excerpt from the November 21 episode of “The ReidOut.”
On Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump announced as attorney general Matt Gaetz that he would no longer consider his name. “[I]It is clear that my confirmation unfairly became a distraction from the critical work of the Trump/Vance transition,” Gaetz wrote on X.
But let’s be clear: Gaetz didn’t quit because he was a “distraction”; he stopped because the votes weren’t there. The new administration could not convince enough Republican senators to support Gaetz. This abrupt withdrawal is a hugely embarrassing moment for Trump. The president-elect thought he had a mandate to nominate whoever he wanted and push them through, regardless of what skeletons were in their closet.
This is Trump’s first major failure since winning a second term, and it should be seen as such. It’s also a failure by newly elected Vice President JD Vance, who personally lobbied his Republican colleagues in the Senate on Gaetz’s behalf. Clearly he failed to convince enough of them to come over.
Within hours of Gaetz’s withdrawal, Trump named his longtime ally and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as his new choice to lead the Justice Department. Bondi started out as a relatively Jeb Bush-like Republican. As Florida’s attorney general, she took on the opioid crisis and led an unsuccessful challenge to the Affordable Care Act – bread-and-butter Republican issues. She’s not someone with a penchant for chasing enemies like Gaetz, so it would be interesting to see if she stands up to Trump.
In 2017, Bondi was rumored to be in the running for a nomination as part of Trump’s first Cabinet, but at the time they were unsure she would be confirmed due to a controversy surrounding a donation Trump made to her campaign in 2013, briefly before that. she declined to join a lawsuit against the now-defunct Trump University.
Overall, I’d say Bondi brings the basic qualifications that Gaetz didn’t have. She could certainly be the administrator of the Department of Justice. But in the coming weeks we’ll see how the politics, including that 2013 donation, play out.
Allison Detzel contributed.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
