In today’s newsletter, Trump’s shocking choice for attorney general. More:

Matt Gaetz.

Photography by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker

Dexter Filkins
Editor

When I met Matt Gaetz Earlier this year, after a Republican campaign event in Little Elm, Texas — where he had just wowed a crowd at a brewery, sharing his plans for saving “a diminished country” — I asked him what kind of philosophy he brought to his country. work. He described it as “a libertarianism with a populist flavor – or a populism with a libertarian flavor”. And then Gaetz went on to describe his views on Congress, where he had served since 2017. “It’s so corrupt,” he said. “This is my main thesis. It’s just broken.

To that end, at least, Gaetz, whom President-elect Donald Trump chose yesterday to be his attorney general, has been consistent: In eight years as a congressman in Washington, Gaetz has devoted his energies to tearing down and mocking what he considers to be a corrupt political order, sometimes by means so audacious that his colleagues in the House had never dared attempt. Gaetz’s personal life has been equally unbridled; he was the subject of a Justice Department investigation into allegations that he helped transport a seventeen-year-old girl across state lines, and he was facing the results of an investigation into this and other issues by the House Ethics Committee.

How far is Gaetz willing to go? After Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election, Gaetz was one of several members of Congress who met with Vice President Mike Pence to discuss the use of parliamentary rules to reject votes from voters. At the same time, Gaetz requested a full presidential pardon for himself for any crimes he may have committed – a pardon that would have been more generous than that received by President Richard Nixon in 1974 after his resignation. during Watergate. scandal. (Trump ignored Gaetz’s request.) And in 2023, Gaetz led efforts to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on the grounds that he had cooperated with Democratic leaders to avoid a potentially catastrophic default. on the federal government’s debt. Along with only a handful of other Republicans, Gaetz succeeded spectacularly, making McCarthy the first Speaker of the House of Representatives in American history to be ousted from office.

Gaetz donned a gas mask on the House floor to dramatize the tyranny of COVID restrictions, and he allegedly showed other members racy photos of women he claimed to have slept with. He can be very funny. When I reminded Gaetz that the The Wall Street Journal The editorial board, after attacking McCarthy as the leader of the “chaos caucus,” retorted, “It was the first regime change they opposed.”

Now, as Trump’s nominee to become the nation’s top law enforcement official, Gaetz — and the country — will face some consequential questions: What does he intend to build, the if applicable? And what standards and rules is he prepared to respect? In his memoir “Firebrand,” published in 2020, Gaetz suggested that such questions, even for a member of Congress, were irrelevant. “All political lives end in failure, in one sense, but some are spectacular,” he writes. “Better to be a spectacle than to end up never having said anything worth canceling because no one was listening in the first place.”

Perhaps Senate Republicans, even though they have been callous during Trump’s first term, will pressure him for answers.

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Daily cartoon

Cartoon by Bob Eckstein

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P.S.Tulsi Gabbard was chosen by Trump as his choice to become director of national intelligence. Revisit Kelefa Sanneh’s Company Profile of the woman who was once a pro-choice Democrat, before joining the Republican Party: “She has a servant’s attitude, a servant’s heart,” said her guru, a man named Chris Butler. “Whether she is in politics or anything else, she will carry with her the heart of that same servant.”

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Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.