“Going down the list of attorneys general before Barr, you will see people with extensive legal experience, including former prosecutors, Justice Department officials, judges, and state attorneys general. Gaetz, by contrast, is a 42-year-old graduate of William & Mary Law School who briefly worked for a law firm in Fort Walton Beach before entering state politics in 2010, two years after he was admitted to the Florida bar. He served in Florida’s legislature for six years before he was elected to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District in 2016.
Gaetz’s skimpy legal background is not the only reason many people, including Republican colleagues as well as Democrats, were dismayed by Trump’s choice. As Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella noted, Rep. Mike Simpson (R–Idaho) “summed up the general reaction” on Capitol Hill with this response to news of the nomination: “Are you shittin’ me?” When asked what he thought about Gaetz as attorney general, Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas) was a bit more diplomatic, saying, “I’m trying to absorb all of this.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) said Gaetz is “not a serious candidate.” The New York Times describes him as “one of the most reviled members of his conference.””
…
“Whatever you make of McCarthy’s ouster, Gaetz’s recklessness was on full display in his defenses of Trump. On the night before former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was scheduled to testify before the House Oversight Committee in February 2019, Gaetz directed a tweet at him: “Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot…”
When Democrats accused Gaetz of trying to intimidate Cohen, Gaetz defended the tweet. “This isn’t witness tampering,” he said. “This is witness testing. I don’t threaten anybody.” He later reconsidered that response, deleting the tweet and apologizing to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.). “While it is important 2 create context around the testimony of liars like Michael Cohen, it was NOT my intent to threaten, as some believe I did,” he wrote. “I’m deleting the tweet & I should have chosen words that better showed my intent. I’m sorry.””
…
“Gaetz joined 138 other House Republicans in objecting to electoral votes for Joe Biden. When Trump supporters enraged at Biden’s supposedly phony victory invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Gaetz sought to blame leftist provocateurs for the riot. “Some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters,” he said on the House floor the next day. “They were masquerading as Trump supporters and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.””
“his victory virtually guarantees that he will never face serious legal accountability for an avalanche of alleged wrongdoing.”
…
“Even the civil cases against him will now face new obstacles. Presidents can, in some circumstances, be subject to civil penalties from private lawsuits, but Trump will surely try to use the cloak of the presidency to avoid paying the hundreds of millions of dollars he owes in judgments for sexual abuse, defamation and corporate fraud.”
“She doesn’t seek or attract attention.
She has a hand and a say in just about everything he does and every decision that’s made. I talked to more than 100 people for the profile I wrote earlier this year, and there’s some disagreement about how exactly she does that. But there’s no debate whatsoever about her constitutional allergy to the limelight.
Since Donald Trump became the dominant figure in American politics, nobody has been this important and this close to him in this role for this long. Nobody. That she’s going to be his chief of staff is news in only the most technical sense — because in reality it’s simply a continuation of what she’s been to him for the last four years. And in 2016 and 2020, too, she helmed his Florida operation.”
…
“She’s in the past described herself as “a moderate on the political spectrum” but she talks as much about disposition as ideology. “I come from a very traditional background. In my early career things like manners mattered and there was an expected level of decorum,” she told me earlier this year. “And so I get it that the GOP of today is different. There are changes we must live with in order to get done the things we’re trying to do.” There’s certainly a way to see and study the evolution of the Republican Party over the last half-century through the lens of her long career. So what does she believe? She believes in working and working hard for the person she’s working for. She believes in being valuable to the principal.”
…
“There’s a legitimate mutual respect. He listens to her. She brings to the rooms she’s in with him a certain equanimity. They’re in many ways very, very different, but they also recognize something in each other. She’s smart, she’s competitive, and she can be, in her own out-of-the-way, soft-spoken, “who, me?” manner, pretty cutthroat. There’s a yin-and-yang component to the two of them: Trump reads the stage directions — he’s all text and no subtext — and she’s essentially the utter opposite. I’m tempted to say he needs her and he knows it. Maybe more to the point, though, they need each other.
She’s clear-eyed about the terms of engagement. She doesn’t control him — nobody controls him — and she doesn’t try. But strategically, temperamentally, even psychologically, she can try to help him, advise him, guide him. And it doesn’t work all the time — she very clearly hasn’t made Trump someone or something he’s not — but it can and does work some of the time.
I’m thinking here about something she once told me about her mother: “She woke up an optimist every day, and she started every day like that, and it would fall apart or it wouldn’t …”
There are multiple definitions of the word I’m about to use and I think in her case they all apply.
Susie manages.”
…
“She’s not just a calming presence. She’s an experienced operator. And she’s no stranger to the dark arts. She’s a savvy source-builder in the intersecting worlds of politics and media and has been for years quite effective at shaping perceptions that help clients and hurt opponents.”
“A conservative lawyer working on Donald Trump’s transition, Mark Paoletta, offered a stark warning to career Justice Department lawyers Monday that those who refuse to advance Trump’s agenda should resign or face the possibility of being fired.
“Once the decision is made to move forward, career employees are required to implement the President’s plan,” Paoletta wrote in a post on X responding to a POLITICO story detailing widespread fear among DOJ lawyers about being asked to advance or defend policies they consider unethical or illegal.
“If these career DOJ employees won’t implement President Trump’s program in good faith, they should leave,” Paoletta said. “Those employees who engage in so-called ‘resistance’ against the duly-elected President’s lawful agenda would be subverting American democracy. … [t]hose that take such actions would be subject to disciplinary measures, including termination.””
“Take his decision to tap Homan — a polarizing immigration hard-liner and former author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto — as “border czar” rather than a Cabinet position that would require Senate confirmation.
Trump on Monday praised Homan, whom he appointed as acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director shortly after taking office in 2017, as a “stalwart on Border Control” in a Truth Social post announcing the pick.
It’s a strong signal that despite his campaign-trail disavowals, Trump is willing to welcome those aligned with Project 2025 into his administration. But putting Homan in the White House, and not in charge of an agency, will limit his legal authority over border policy, and force him to work through people who have been confirmed by the Senate, or through those holding relevant posts as acting officials or through recess appointments.”
The Democrats, universities, and media have their faults and have been too woke, but the lies, bullshit, propaganda, and poor error-correction instincts of Trump, RFK Jr, Tucker Carlson, and others is not a better alternative.
“President-elect Donald Trump was indicted four times — including two indictments arising out of his failed attempt to steal the 2020 election. One of these indictments even yielded a conviction, albeit on 34 relatively minor charges of falsifying business records.
But the extraordinary protections the American system gives to sitting presidents will ensure that Trump won’t be going to prison. He’s going to the White House instead.”
…
“Two of the indictments against Trump are federal, and two were brought by state prosecutors in New York and Georgia. The federal indictments (one about Trump’s role in fomenting the January 6 insurrection, and the other about his handling of classified documents) are the most immediately vulnerable. Once Trump becomes president, he will have full command and control over the US Department of Justice, and can simply order it to drop all the federal charges against him. Once he does, those cases will simply go away.
The White House does have a longstanding norm of non-interference with criminal prosecutions, but this norm is nothing more than that — a voluntary limit that past presidents placed on their own exercise of power in order to prevent politicization of the criminal justice system. As president, Trump is under no constitutional obligation to obey this norm. He nominates the attorney general, and he can fire the head of the Justice Department at any time.”
…
“The fate of the state charges against Trump is a little more uncertain, in large part because there’s never been a state indictment of a sitting president before, so there are no legal precedents governing what happens if a state attempts such a prosecution (or, in the case of New York, to impose a serious sentence on a president who was already convicted).
It is highly unlikely that the state prosecutions can move forward, however, at least until Trump leaves office. On the federal level, the Department of Justice has long maintained that it cannot indict a sitting president for a variety of practical reasons: The burden of defending against criminal charges would diminish the president’s ability to do their job, as would the “public stigma and opprobrium occasioned by the initiation of criminal proceedings.” Additionally, if the president were incarcerated, that would make it “physically impossible for the president to carry out his duties.”
There’s little doubt that the current Supreme Court, which recently held that Trump is immune to prosecution for many crimes he committed while in office, would embrace the Justice Department’s reasoning.”
…
“These same practical considerations would apply with equal force to a state prosecution of a president, and there’s also one other reason why a constitutional limit on state indictments of the president makes sense. Without such a limit, a state led by the president’s political enemies could potentially bring frivolous criminal charges against that president.”
“It is important to remember that, as dire as things are, the United States is not Hungary.
When Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, he had a two-thirds majority in the country’s parliament — one that allowed him to pass a new constitution that twisted election rules in his party’s favor and imposed political controls on the judiciary. Trump has no such majority, and the US Constitution is nearly impossible to amend.
America’s federal structure also creates quite a few checks on the national government’s power. Election administration in America is done at the state level, which makes it very hard for Trump to seize control over it from Washington. A lot of prosecution is done by district attorneys who don’t answer to Trump and might resist federal bullying.
The American media is much bigger and more robust than its Hungarian peers. Orbán brought the press to heel by, among other things, politicizing government ad purchasing — a stream of revenue that the American press, for all our problems, does not depend on.
But most fundamentally, the American population has something Hungarians didn’t: advanced warning.
While the form of subtle authoritarianism pioneered in Hungary was novel in 2010, it’s well understood today. Orbán managed to come across as a “normal” democratic leader until it was too late to undo what he had done; Trump is taking office with roughly half the voting public primed to see him as a threat to democracy and resist as such. He can expect major opposition to his most authoritarian plans not only from the elected opposition, but from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society, and the people themselves.
This is the case against despair.
As grim as things seem now, little in politics is a given — especially not the outcome of a struggle as titanic as the one about to unfold in the United States. While Trump has four years to attack democracy, using a playbook he and his team have been developing since the moment he left office, defenders of democracy have also had time to prepare and develop countermeasures. Now is the time to begin deploying them.
Trump has won the presidency, which gives him a tremendous amount of power to make his antidemocratic dreams into reality. But it is not unlimited power, and there are robust means of resistance. The fate of the American republic will depend on how willing Americans are to take up the fight.”
“President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was powered by a remarkably consistent nationwide trend of voters turning against the Democratic ticket. Vice President Kamala Harris performed worse than President Joe Biden did in 2020 nearly everywhere: in big cities and rural areas, in blue states and red ones.”
…
“What happened on Tuesday is part of a worldwide wave of anti-incumbent sentiment.
2024 was the largest year of elections in global history; more people voted this year than ever before. And across the world, voters told the party in power — regardless of their ideology or history — that it was time for a change.”
…
“One credible answer is inflation. Countries around the world experienced rising prices after the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant global supply chain disruptions, and voters hate inflation. Even though the inflation rate has gone down in quite a few places, including the United States, prices remain much higher than they were prior to the pandemic. People remember the low prices they’ve lost, and they are hurting — hurting enough that they see an otherwise-booming economy as a failure.
As much sense as the inflation story makes, it remains an unproven one. We’ll need a lot more evidence, including detailed data on the US election that isn’t available yet, to be sure whether it’s right.”