What the Matt Gaetz Withdrawal Tells Us: They're Dumb

This wasn't some 4-D chess perpetrated by Donald Trump. This was an idiot error - one of many that we can exploit.

Hello!

Let’s talk about what the Matt Gaetz nomination for Attorney General tells us about the next four years. It tells us we have something concrete to exploit: their idiocy.

Some are speculating that this was Trump’s plan all along: to nominate Gaetz so he could resign from Congress to avoid having the House Ethics report come out so that Trump could subsequently appoint him to a position that doesn’t require confirmation of the Senate.

Although diabolical, and therefore certainly within the purview of something Trump would do, he’s simply not capable of that kind of masterminding. While it may be true that his resignation was to avoid the release of the House Ethics report, it’s certainly not true that this was the plan all along.

Had Trump wanted to eventually nominate him for a position that doesn’t require confirmation of the Senate - he could have done that in the first place and avoided a withdrawal for the nomination of Attorney General. He would have just nominated him to a position like the ones Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk have - a consultancy position advising a cabinet member without having to go through advice and consent of the Senate. But Trump didn’t do that. He appointed him to Attorney General. And when it looked like it wasn’t going to go well for him (with senators like Murkowski, McConnell, Collins, Curtis, and Mullins as hard no’s), Trump frantically called multiple senators and begged them to reconsider.

No one does that if that was the plan all along. You don’t panic and beg friends for favors, or threaten them with being primaried, or call for recess appointments, if you’re doing what you intended to do. Panic is never part of a well-thought-out plan

That exposes the fact that Trump is dumb, and that he doesn’t vet his nominees. It shows he makes knee-jerk decisions that aren’t well-thought through. He’s incapable of second-level thinking and always has been. That’s good news for us because - as in this case - it gives us a window to push back. A weakness to exploit. And this time, it worked.

Thanks to journalists and public backlash, we were able to stop this. It’s being reported that Gaetz withdrew within an hour of CNN calling him for comment on new revelations that there were TWO sexual encounters with the then-minor at the drug-fueled party in 2017. That presumably was the result of our push to release the report, leading part of it to make its way to an investigative journalist at CNN.

These idiot nominations expose a huge weakness that will plague his entire administration - that he’s dumb. We can fight dumb. These kinds of mistakes and miscalculations present opportunities to exploit. All that to say our voices matter. Pressure matters. Resistance matters. 

Let’s keep it up.

AG