Why Trump is sticking with Gaetz, Hegseth despite new accusations – and his 'Morning Joe' meeting

If you take a step back – make that several steps back – it’s easier to understand what Donald Trump is doing.

Why would he deliberately ignite a media firestorm over such controversial nominees as Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, and to a lesser degree with Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.?

The short answer is that the president-elect can’t run again and wants these nominees to disrupt – or even blow up – the departments they’d be in charge of running. And if they don’t have the usual credentials, if they’ve never run a large organization, he doesn’t give a damn.

But wouldn’t it better serve his purposes to nominate equally disruptive Cabinet members who don’t have the baggage of a Matt Gaetz? But would they have the unquestioned loyalty?

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Even skeptical members of his inner circle have no choice but to let Trump be Trump.  

If Gaetz were to become attorney general, for instance, he could fire FBI chief Chris Wray rather than Trump having to be the bad guy. 

The thinking in Trump World is that the Senate won’t be able to reject more than two of his nominees. So even if Gaetz, who doesn’t appear to have the votes, is rejected, and perhaps Hegseth as well, everyone else gets through, including Kennedy and Gabbard.

And wouldn’t it be hard for the Republican Senate, in the wake of such rejections, to be essentially obligated to approve the replacement nominees, given the magnitude of Trump’s victory? Is this 4-dimensional chess?

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was on the plane, with Gaetz, when Trump offered the now-former congressman the AG’s job. Whether Wiles, who ran a tightly organized campaign, knew about it or not, she had no power to stop it.

Privately, some Trump advisers are opposed to the most radioactive picks, but they also know that the boss gets what he wants.  

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The incoming Senate majority leader, John Thune, who’s not a Trump fan and was opposed by Trump, is deemed not likely to go along with recess appointments, which would be surrendering the chamber’s constitutional role of advise and consent.

New reporting has complicated things for Gaetz and Hegseth, the decorated Army combat veteran and former Fox weekend host tapped to run the Pentagon. 

The Washington Post scoop about Hegseth’s lawyer saying he paid off a female accuser who says he raped her in 2017, as part of a non-disclosure agreement, would sink a nominee under any other president. Hegseth, visibly intoxicated, says the encounter in his hotel room was consensual; the 30-year-old woman was at the conservative conference with her husband and small children.

In the case of Gaetz, House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t want the ethics committee report released, since the man has resigned his seat. Does anyone doubt that if this was a Democrat, he would take the opposite stance and denounce the nominee as a pervert?  

In any event, a lawyer for multiple women making accusations of sexual misconduct told ABC that two of his clients say Gaetz paid them for sex. And he plans more interviews.

Attorney Joel Leppard said that in their House ethics testimony, staffers "essentially put the Venmo payments on the screen and asked about them. And my clients repeatedly testified, ‘What was this payment for?’ ‘That was for sex.'" .

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Leppard had previously said that one of his clients had also watched Gaetz have sex with a minor.

John Clune, another lawyer for a woman who contends that Gaetz had sex with a minor then in high school, called the Gaetz nomination "a perverse development in a truly dark series of events."

And as CNN noted, one of the underage girls says she had sex with Gaetz on an air hockey table, according to her testimony.

One thing is certain: Trump continues to support both nominees. He is not going to back down.

By the way, if Kamala Harris had won the election, I’d be scrutinizing her nominees the same way. A number of pro-Trumpers online accused me of Trump Derangement Syndrome for covering the most controversial nominees, which is hilarious because the president-elect granted me two interviews in 10 months, one just a couple of weeks before the election, and told me that both were fair.

Meanwhile, Trump’s decision to meet with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who have relentlessly bashed him for the last seven years, was a brilliant move. Both made the request, and Trump was magnanimous enough to grant them an audience at Mar-a-Lago – really a stunning development.

As they explained yesterday on "Morning Joe:"

"We talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents and media outlets. We talked about that a good bit," Scarborough said.

"It will come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues and we told him so."

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What they did agree on, Brzezinski said, "was to restart communications."

She noted that her father, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, "often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed. That is a task shared by reporters and commentators alike. We had not spoken to Trump since March of 2020, other than a personal call that Joe made after the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania."

Trump was "cheerful and upbeat" and "seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues."

As for the expected liberal backlash for meeting with a man they’d described as a fascist, Mika turned it around: "Why wouldn’t we?"

Trump later told Fox’s Brooke Singman: "Many things were discussed, and I very much appreciated the fact that they wanted to have open communication. In many ways, it’s too bad that it wasn’t done long ago…

"In order to Make America Great Again, it is very important, if not vital, to have a free, fair and open media or press." 

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Trump also said of his meeting with the husband-and-wife MSNBC hosts that they "congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless campaign, one for the history books,’ which I really believe it was, but it was also a campaign where I worked long and hard — perhaps longer and harder than any presidential candidate in history."

"We talked about various Cabinet members — both announced and to be announced. As expected, they like some very much, but not all. The meeting ended in a very positive manner, and we agreed to speak in the future." And here’s the olive branch: "I expect this will take place with others in the media, even those that have been extremely hostile."

Trump said he has "an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the press."

"If not treated fairly, however, that will end."

So there you have it, a carrot and a stick. 

The denunciations came fast and furious.

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"Byron York – Annals of shamelessness: They call Trump a fascist, and much, much more, and then, just 22 days after his 'Nazi-like' rally, they fly to Florida for an audience. Afterward, they say, 'We didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues,' but they want to 'restart communications.' What?"

Steve Cortes – "It’s difficult to overstate how dishonest these two are. Mika & Joe scream for months that Trump is a ‘fascist’ who would ‘end democracy.’ Now that he’s elected — and very popular — they visit him like it’s just coffee with an opposing party politician???"

I couldn’t disagree more. The meeting, which may not be unrelated to ratings, means they will have some access to their onetime friend and, they say, criticize him when they think he’s wrong.

Who wants to hear another four years of Trump-bashing, which didn’t work? This way they can report what the next president says and then take a stance. And with Trump vowing to reach out to other hostile outlets, I hope the truce lasts.

Footnote: Trump has named former Congressman Sean Duffy, a co-host of "Bottom Line" on FOX Business, as Transportation secretary.