The Explosion of Matt Gaetz and Other Early Lessons in Trump 2.0

That was fast. Barely two weeks after winning reëlection, Donald Trump has already so thoroughly owned the news cycle that I’m not sure anyone even recalls that Joe Biden is still President. (It was his eighty-second birthday on Wednesday, by the way.) One of the themes of this year’s campaign was the apparent mass amnesia among many Americans of just what the Trump Presidency was like. Every day since Trump won has been a crash course in remembering: the cryptic all-caps social-media posts at all hours, containing major government announcements; the erratic decision-making that stuns even his most senior advisers; the casual shattering of norms, rules, and traditions, any one of which would have provoked days of controversy for another politician. Scandals were endemic to the first Trump Presidency. But this many? In just the first two weeks of an incoming Administration? No, there is no precedent.

Consider this sampling of CNN headlines from Thursday morning: “Police report reveals new details from sexual assault claim against Hegseth”; “Linda McMahon, Trump’s Education pick, was sued for allegedly enabling sexual abuse of children”; “New document details the trail of payments Gaetz made to women.” The metastasizing plotlines forced impossible choices. Should you spend your time trying to decipher the leaked chart from the Matt Gaetz sex-trafficking investigation, the one with all the complicated lines tracing Venmo payments between Trump’s would-be Attorney General and women he allegedly compensated for sex? Or reading the twenty-two-page police report documenting the allegations of a woman who says that she was sexually assaulted at a Republican conference in California a few years back by Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host chosen by Trump as Secretary of Defense? As pure distraction, it was hard to beat the video playing in an endless social-media loop of McMahon, the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, dressed in business attire, appearing to violently slap her own daughter, all in good fun, of course. Which was enough to distract from reports that McMahon, Trump’s nominee to head an Education Department that he pledged on the campaign trail to eliminate, once falsely claimed to have a college degree in education.

At such a moment, it was hard to even remember the other Trump outrages. R.F.K., Jr., Trump’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, seeking to ban fluoride from the water and undermining public confidence in lifesaving vaccines? So last week. (Though I missed a few updates in the past few days on the Kennedy front, including a former babysitter for his children speaking out publicly about how Kennedy sexually accosted her and the revelation that Kennedy previously compared Trump to Hitler and praised descriptions of his supporters as “outright Nazis.”) On Tuesday, Trump named Sean Duffy, a former congressman from Wisconsin turned lobbyist, as his choice for Transportation Secretary. Duffy, who has no known experience in the transportation sector, is a Fox News contributor; when Trump announced the pick, he praised Duffy’s “STAR” wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, who, along with Hegseth, is a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend.” If confirmed, Duffy will be the first Cabinet member to have been on the cast of MTV’s “The Real World.” On Wednesday, it was reported that Trump was expected to choose Russell Vought, his first-term budget director, to return to his post as head of the Office of Management and Budget; Vought is a chief architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the radical nine-hundred-page agenda for a second Trump term that Trump repeatedly disavowed during the campaign. By the Washington Post’s count, Vought is the fifth senior Trump nominee who has been credited by name as a contributor to Project 2025. The other four are Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar”; John Ratcliffe, his choice to run the C.I.A.; Pete Hoekstra, his nominee for Ambassador to Canada; and Brendan Carr, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on transforming the Federal Communications Commission, which Trump now wants him to lead.

But there was little time to consider the implications. By lunchtime on Thursday, Gaetz announced that he was withdrawing from consideration as Attorney General. In a statement on X, Gaetz, who had long been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, complained “that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition” at a moment when “there is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle.” Soon after, CNN reported that the Ethics Committee had been told of a second, previously unknown, alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a seventeen-year-old. Was this, one instantly wondered, what had prompted his sudden announcement? Or, was it instead, the brutal math he faced in the Senate, where it appeared there were at least four Republicans implacably opposed to his confirmation, the magic number required to sink him? Coming a mere sixteen days after the election, Gaetz’s retreat was the fastest collapsed Cabinet nomination in modern history. By Thursday evening, Trump had already anointed a new appointee, one with presumably more surmountable controversies: Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida.

Trump overwhelms. He exhausts. Back in 2018, that was one of the original impetuses for this column—as a response to the condition of not being able to remember by Thursday the deeply upsetting things that Trump had done on Tuesday. The first couple of weeks of Trump redux suggest that this will be even more the case during his second four years in office. Yet it is striking how little having lived through it before provides in the way of wisdom for how to navigate the onslaught once again. Tuning out will be the answer for many, I suspect—an understandable response, but hardly a desirable one, at least from the point of view of democracy’s survival. Remember all that earnest discussion about “deplatforming” Trump in 2021? A certain number of liberals probably slept better at night as a result. But if the assumption was that Trump was a spent force in American politics, or that excluding him from front-page coverage would somehow erase his political appeal to a large swath of the population, well, that was not correct.

If anything, I fear we’ve collectively slipped right back into the status quo ante-Biden. There’s a muscle memory to it; after all, it’s only been four years. During Trump’s first term, I found that one of the benefits of having covered Washington for so long was the ability to observe when Trump was departing from the accepted playbook of past Presidents—when he was actually making history, as opposed to merely infuriating his many critics in extreme but still familiar ways. This time that challenge remains, but is compounded greatly by his much more explicit agenda of blowing up the federal government, of revenge and retribution, of seizing power for himself and an ever-more-unconstrained White House. Trump 1.0 was a test for the system, but it was also a trial for an inexperienced leader who had the inclination of a wrecking ball but often lacked the capacity or the cadres to follow through; Trump 2.0 is about an all-out attack on that system by a leader who fears neither Congress nor the courts nor the voters whom he will never have to face again.

Will Trump overreach with more Matt Gaetzes? Undoubtedly. Will he be able to find a way despite narrow Republican majorities on Capitol Hill to pass some of his more extreme proposals into law? Probably so. But no one can yet say for sure what will happen if Trump actually follows through on threats to round up and deport millions of illegal immigrants, or tanks the economy by imposing across-the-board tariffs on goods from all our major trading partners. My fear, for now, is a different one: that the stories we don’t have time to scream about amid all the other outrages could end up being the most outrageous ones of all.

Consider that, in just the past few days, while the investigative reporters were doing the grim, necessary work of digging up the personal skeletons that Gaetz and Co. preferred to hide, there were also reports about Trump’s decision to flout federal ethics and conflict-of-interest rules; his refusal to subject some appointees to the customary F.B.I. background checks; his plan to set up a new board to vet military generals for political reliability; and his decision to vest sweeping unauthorized and unaccountable authority in a new commission, co-headed by his campaign benefactor Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to recommend cuts of up to two trillion dollars in the national budget.

Eight years into Trump, none of us can honestly claim to have figured out how to cover Trump. I certainly have not. We’re all worn out, and he hasn’t even been inaugurated, again, yet. At such a time, perhaps moving to Canada is an appropriate response. I haven’t ruled anything out. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing it all down. I don’t need a catchy slogan. It’s another Thursday in the Trump era, and a lot of crazy shit has happened. ♦