Trump suffers first defeat but as always doubles down for the next fight

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — For Donald Trump, every defeat is just the catalyst for his next battle.

No sooner had the president-elect suffered his first big reversal since winning reelection – when his scandal-tainted pick for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew Thursday after days of steadily worsening scrutiny over alleged sexual misconduct – Trump doubled down.

In Gaetz’s place, Trump chose Florida’s former attorney general, Pam Bondi, another ultra-loyal MAGA warrior who is one of the most outspoken proponents of his theory that US justice was weaponized against him.

Gaetz – who denies wrongdoing – may be gone, but Trump’s craving for the Department of Justice to act like his personal team of lawyers rather than an independent guardian of the law is showing all signs of remaining intact.

On the face of it, Gaetz’s withdrawal was an embarrassing defeat as he lost a tussle with Republican senators who didn’t relish the dilemma that would have come with a vote either for Gaetz or against Trump. Sources told CNN that the president-elect wanted Gaetz because he shared his desire to purge ‘deep state’ adversaries in the DOJ and was completely loyal. But Trump forgot another necessary quality — that his pick not create any discomfort for the senators he needs to keep on his side even as they look at their own next election battles.

The Gaetz disaster suggests that despite his big election win, some laws of political gravity still apply to Trump.

There was a sense of hubris from Trump in picking possibly the least qualified, most controversial and disliked potential attorney general nominee in modern history. His selection of other Cabinet picks – who seem, by normal standards, deeply unqualified – also looks like the kind of classic overreach and misreading of a mandate that can get new presidents into trouble.

The haphazard decision making and lack of vetting that led to the Gaetz selection — sources said Trump settled on him while flying to and from Washington last week — hardly suggests his second term will be much more disciplined than his first. And picking a candidate whose main qualifications seemed the certainty he’d delight Trump’s base and horrify elites underscores the president-elect’s impulsiveness.

Yet Trump’s omnipotence in the GOP – and his party’s refusal to convict him in two impeachment trials – means that it would be unwise to see Gaetz’s downfall as a harbinger of the new Senate GOP majority’s willingness to curb an all-powerful new president. With constitutional honor satisfied, and feeling an obligation to their party leader, some senators might even be more disposed to back Trump’s other provocative picks.

And the loss of Gaetz – whom Trump said Thursday has a “wonderful future” – is likely to have no impact on the goals of a second presidency that Trump has promised to devote to retribution.

Scandals surrounding Trump’s picks mirror his own legal morass

White House administrations always reflect the person at the top.

This may explain why two-and-a-half weeks into his transition, several of Trump’s Cabinet picks are embroiled in allegations of sexual misconduct, ethics or legal controversy.

Former Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for the Department of Defense, is facing fresh revelations about an alleged sexual assault of a woman in California seven years ago. Like Gaetz, Hegseth was not prosecuted over the allegation and denies he did anything wrong. His lawyer has said, however, that while the Iraq and Afghanistan combat veteran regards the encounter as consensual, he entered into a settlement agreement with his accuser that included an undisclosed payment and a confidentiality clause.

In yet another cloud gathering around a Trump Cabinet pick, CNN reported Thursday on a lawsuit that alleges that Linda McMahon, who the president-elect wants to lead the Department of Education, knowingly enabled the sexual exploitation of children by a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) employee as early as the 1980s. McMahon denies the allegations.

There is also fresh scrutiny of allegations that Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., groped a part-time babysitter who worked for him between 1998 and 1999. The woman, Eliza Cooney, recently spoke to USA Today and said she wished “we were electing people with fewer skeletons in their closet.” In a podcast interview over the summer, Kennedy declined to acknowledge the allegations first raised by Vanity Fair but then said he’d had a “very rambunctious youth” and had not been a “church boy.” When asked directly whether he denied sexually assaulting Cooney, Kennedy repeated, “I’m not going to comment on it.”

Chaos is a function of Trumpism not a flaw

In any normal administration, such a wave of scandal surrounding multiple picks would be seen as evidence of a transition in disarray.

But Trump’s political career has never followed conventional patterns. Chaos is endemic, and it’s where the president-elect thrives in a cloak of impunity. Trump’s own history of legal struggles and sexual misconduct allegations, all of which he’s denied, may mean that such vulnerabilities in others don’t represent the same impediment to advancement as they might for another president.

Last year, for example, a Manhattan federal jury found in a civil case that Trump sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll in a department store in 1996 and awarded her damages for battery and defamation. Shortly before the 2016 election, Trump boasted on a leaked “Access Hollywood” tape that famous people like him could grab women by the genitals and “they let you do it.” And earlier this year, Trump was convicted of a felony in a case arising out of a hush money payment he made to an adult film star. He denies wrongdoing in all cases. None of it stopped him from winning a historic second term earlier this month.

After the “Me Too” movement exposed years of abuse of women in showbiz, the media, politics and business, Trump’s capacity to defy such allegations is rare for such a public person. And his defiance may have factored into his Cabinet picks and commitment to stick with them despite some allegations having already been public or new information that subsequently became available.

Allegations against Trump have long been disregarded by his voters, many of whom believe he has been subject to witch hunts by Democratic prosecutors. Social conservatives, meanwhile, sometimes rationalize questions about his personal ethics or behavior that give them doubt by pointing to the Supreme Court majority he built.

But the collapse of Gaetz for attorney general suggests that Trump’s Teflon hide is not transferable and that his MAGA apprentices lack his capacity to face down almost any scandal and survive. The next person to test this gauntlet may be Hegseth, who held multiple meetings with senators Thursday.

While they are proponents of Trump’s smash mouth, stunt politics, neither Gaetz nor Hegseth possess his power or political aura to intimidate wavering Republicans into complicity. And Gaetz is notoriously unpopular on Capitol Hill.

Trump called Gaetz Thursday morning and told him he didn’t have the votes to win confirmation, CNN’s Kristen Holmes reported, according to a source with direct knowledge of the call. The president-elect didn’t tell Gaetz to drop out, this source said. But Gaetz had been facing the pressure of a congressional showdown over a House Ethics Committee report into his alleged sexual misconduct and drug abuse.

He withdrew moments after CNN’s Paula Reid and Sarah Ferris reported that the woman who said she had sex with Gaetz while a minor told the Ethics Committee she had two sexual encounters with him at one party in 2017, according to sources familiar with her testimony. The woman, who was 17 at the time, testified that the second encounter included another adult woman.

Gaetz’s stunt politics finally backfired

Gaetz offered the classic sentiments of a Cabinet pick defeated in a confirmation fight by writing on X that his plight was “unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.”

The end of his battle for one of the most critical jobs in the Cabinet quickly increased the heat around some of Trump’s other controversial Cabinet picks, including Hegseth, former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was chosen to be director of national intelligence, and Kennedy.

Political ramifications of the failed Gaetz confirmation drive — which collapsed two months before he could be officially nominated by the new president — are intriguing but still hard to game out.

This is unlikely, however, to dent the president-elect’s prowess among his most loyal supporters. And the storm and stress of Trumpism is certain to produce a myriad of political earthquakes and scandals before and after the inauguration, so the Gaetz chapter will likely end up being regarded as a tiny blip in a longer melodrama. Plenty of presidents get a Cabinet pick knocked back and do just fine.

On Capitol Hill, there was a sense of relief among Senate Republican that there would be no vote on the nomination early next year. Some may have been dreading a vote against Trump that might invite primary challenges. Others, like Maine Sen. Susan Collins or North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, may also have worried that a vote to confirm Gaetz would have hurt them statewide in their 2026 reelection races.

Gaetz’s withdrawal, however, is not a great look for Vice President-elect JD Vance, the Ohio senator whom Trump designated to lobby his colleagues with Gaetz in tow this week.

And true to form, in picking Bondi, Trump has selected another person who will alarm DC’s establishment and will be equally dedicated to doing the boss’ work in defenestrating the DOJ. Bondi has had her own controversies – she once denied that a $25,000 charitable donation Trump sent her was in any way connected to her decision not to pursue action against Trump University.

But she’s got one thing that Gaetz lacked – she’s likely to be far more confirmable in next year’s Republican-led Senate.

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