Every member of the Republican Senate conference wants President-elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration to be successful.
Each and every Republican senator — all 53 of them, including the new majority leader, John Thune — wants it to be a resounding success because they want America to be a resounding success.
It’s a sad, but hard to ignore, fact that all four American presidents of this century so far have ended their time in office with the public repudiating their leadership. The last time the Gallup Organization recorded a majority of Americans saying that they were satisfied with the direction of the country was 20 years ago, in January 2004. An entire American generation has never lived to see a day in which their countrymen thought things were going well.
It would therefore be manifestly good for America if the public, at the end of 2028, saw a second Trump term to be an unambiguous, unmitigated success. Now, I’ve been open about my skepticism of the direction of the Republican Party under Trump, but if we get anything approaching the “best-case scenario” for Trump 2.0, as described by Jim Geraghty this week, I’ll be doing cartwheels up and down Route 66. And I’m sure most of you will join me.
But for me to get a chance at those cartwheels, the Senate has an important role to play in the next two months. If the United States Senate and indeed, most crucially, its 53 Republican members, wish to play their part in laying the foundation for this administration’s overall success, they ought not be shy about saying “No” to Trump’s ill-advised appointments.
And to be clear, not all — or even most — of Trump’s appointments so far have been bad. Doug Burgum at the Interior Department will be excellent. Lee Zeldin at EPA, John Ratcliffe at CIA, Marco Rubio at State, John Sauer as solicitor general, and Michael Waltz as the national security adviser are all fine choices, nominations that would have or could have been made by any Republican president. I’m sure there will be more such nominations of the caliber and experience Americans expect of those who would hold high executive office.
But there should be no mistake, by rejecting Matt Gaetz’s bid to run the Department of Justice and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to head the Department of Human Services, the Senate would be doing Donald Trump a major favor.
Stocking his administration with bomb throwers and cranks will not help Donald Trump. Yes, Trump wants to shake up Washington. He ran on that message. He believes in it. He was elected for it. But to that end, Trump should seek to nominate cold-eyed operators who know the ins and outs of the departments and agencies that he seeks to reform. There are plenty of pro-Trump conservatives who fit that description: well-respected men and women of vast experience who are willing to do battle with the administrative state but who have enough sense to build a strategy that goes beyond cable-news hits and shock-jock tweets.
As a purely political matter, Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election was the result of a critical mass of Americans being sick of the chaos and sense of instability that swirled around the president at that time. Indeed that sense of chaos overwhelmed the good work that the first Trump administration did on the border, in deregulation, and in critical foreign-policy endeavors.
Think about it. Did the average normie voter in the summer of 2020 living in, say, the suburbs of Milwaukee hear more about the Trump administration’s breakthrough on the Abraham Accords or about the petty infighting in Trump’s White House and the president’s press-conference musings about the utility of “ultraviolet or just very powerful light” and bleach against COVID if it could be brought “inside the body.” It was obviously the latter.
Scandal, chaos, and bad headlines are not merely distractions for a president who wants to get things done. They are the quicksand in which lame-duck, second-term administrations stall out and sink into the quagmire of Washington, D.C.
The American system, in its brilliance, has an already-scheduled election that will allow the public to render its judgment on the decision to give Trump a second chance. That election is 24 months away. Millions of voters simply want normalcy. They want stability. They want to not have to think about the White House or Congress unless something truly important is happening. Will the people who voted for Biden over Trump in 2020, but pulled the lever for Trump this time around as the superior alternative to Kamala Harris really be pleased by the constant sight of Matt Gaetz on the nightly news? Will they be pleased or alarmed by RFK Jr. opining about fluoride in the water as the news of his dozens of extramarital affairs and decades of quackery follows him around like flies follow a herd of bison?
The Kennedy and Gaetz appointments are not merely the conduits for bringing poor policy choices and maladministration to key departments of the executive branch; those choices are guaranteed to bring scandal and chaos and instability to government because those two men are lightning rods for personal scandal, chaos, and instability.
The Senate should therefore have no qualms whatsoever about exercising its constitutional role to advise and consent to a president’s appointments. A refusal to confirm Trump’s poor personnel decisions would not be an attack on the president per se — even though many of his too-online partisans would characterize it as such — instead, it would be a profound help to the president and his administration.
Trump’s best chance to be viewed highly by the American people is to deliver four years of prosperity and sober, conservative government. The Senate can help the president-elect deliver that stability by saying the greatest word in the English language: “No.”