Trump's Magic? Gone.
The fallout from Gaetz.
The most obvious thing about the failed Matt Gaetz nomination for Attorney General is that its demise was overdetermined, which is social science for “there’s gonna be a pile on!”
It begins with a high-profile, obvious-to-grasp scandal. A sex scandal, at that, which is always good for extra media attention. It was also a pre-existing scandal, so it took very little for the media to be convinced that it was a big story. And it continued to produce new developments, making it both a fresh story for the press and hard for allies of the incoming president to assume that they knew the worst and assess whether they were willing to live with it. On top of that, the president made it clear he was not doing normal vetting of his nominees, which provided another reason for those who might normally have immediately supported him to choose to wait and see instead.
There’s more! Gaetz was an unusually unqualified nominee, making it harder to make an easy positive case for him. Also? By all accounts he’s personally unpopular on the Hill.
Beyond all of that? His specialty that drew him to Trump – willingness to use the Justice Department to go after Trump’s enemies – wasn’t one that Republican organized groups particularly care about. So none of them seem to have rallied to him, either.
With so many things against him and so few in his favor, Gaetz flamed out quickly – his nomination went from iffy to Not Dead Yet to Dead-Parrot Dead in record time.1 Indeed the only problem for analysts is with so many factors all pointing in the same direction it’s difficult to assess whether one (or more) dominated or they all contributed. That is, perhaps a major sex scandal or a nominee everyone hates is what predicts doom, or perhaps it’s a bit of some or all of them.
Some pundits (and many Trump apologists) on Thursday speculated that the president-elect had stayed one step ahead of everyone again; by serving up one sacrificial pick, Trump made all his other selections seem normal by comparison. Or perhaps there was some other clever ploy at work. I’m very confident that’s not the case. The Gaetz fiasco and the other clownish selections are clearly a costly misfire for Trump; the only question now is how costly.
How does it hurt Trump? For one thing, he ruined his media honeymoon. Winning a presidential election often buys a politician weeks of positive coverage; Trump had about a week of that before scandal headlines about Gaetz and other nominees, and we’re now getting stories about how things are going badly for him. That should reduce or even reverse any polling bump he might have received. It also more generally pushes the media from framing everything around the president-elect’s amazing victory to his struggles.
But worse than that is that Trump has squandered one of the most important things that presidents get from winning: Magic.
Okay, presidents-elect aren’t really magic. For a time, however, people really believe that they are. Oh, they don’t necessarily say it like that, but that’s basically what they’re thinking.
After all, most people (whether they realize it or not) attribute victorious campaigns to the skills and abilities of the candidate. Never mind that that’s almost never actually true because winning and losing is usually far more about the “fundamentals” such as the incumbent’s popularity or lack thereof, the economy, and other such conditions. Conditions over which the candidates, especially non-incumbents, have basically zero control. And never mind too that whatever the minimal effects of the campaign as a whole might be, the skills and personality traits of the winner are only a minor part of that. Trump and Joe Biden and Barack Obama and George W. Bush didn’t make the ads, or figure out where to run them, or organize the precincts, or any of the other things that everyone from volunteers to high-priced campaign professionals do.
Nevertheless, once the election is over, it’s the candidates and their skills that always wind up getting a massively disproportionate amount of the credit. And everyone from the White House press corps to Members of Congress to bureaucrats strongly tend to believe in it, until at some point it turns out that the president is after all just a regular human being with normal strengths and weaknesses.2
Well, that “at some point” has come for Trump far sooner than it normally does. It’s not yet Thanksgiving, and no one any more outside his strongest supporters believes that everything he touches turns to gold.3 And yes, that matters. Just take the remaining difficult nominations such as Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Pete Hegseth. We’ll see whether some or all of them survive the confirmation process. But any sense of certainty, the idea that no one will ever defy Trump again? History. And that affects how Senators and others treat the nominations. If everyone assumes confirmation is inevitable, than jumping on the bandwagon makes sense. The more uncertainty, the more it looks smart to sit back and wait. And of course that’s doubly so since Senators can’t possibly have much confidence in the vetting process.
Remember: Trump will get his way with Republicans in Congress and elsewhere no matter what because he’s doing what they want, rather than the other way around. But it sure helps to have everyone believe you’re an automatic winner, no matter how bad the situation looks. And that’s gone now.
The Dead Ranks, for nominations and bills and other such things:
Nearly Dead/Not Dead Yet, like various characters in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, some of whom survived and some of whom did not;
Mostly Dead, like Westley in The Princess Bride before Miracle Max revived him;
Bernie-in-Bernie’s 2 Dead: He starts dancing around sometimes, but otherwise is pretty much just dead (and yes, they really did make a second movie. The gag is that he’s still dead);
Bernie Dead: In the original Weekend at Bernie’s, of course, Bernie is entirely dead but propped up to look alive; and,
Dead Parrot Dead, which is as dead as anything can be.
Another way of looking at this “magic” is that it’s a special case of Richard Neustadt’s idea of “professional reputation” only in this case it’s something that presidents start out with, rather than something built up through their carefully observed actions.
Yes, some people will still pretend. And if he gets a string of wins, that will help his reputation. But the serious belief in magic is surely gone. By the way, Trump isn’t the first (other than himself) modern president to squander his magic before taking office; Bill Clinton had a terrible transition followed by an awful first six months before eventually becoming quite good at the job.
I keep telling people that, even if the Gaetz nomination was intended as some 4-D chess move (unlikely), it's *never* a good idea to squabble with your party over a bad nominee. Morever, the fourth dimension is not needed! Trump's going to get just about everyone he wants, so why engage in high-stakes, low-reward strategy?
Insightful. Thanks