Transcript: Matt Gaetz Implosion Reveals Trump’s Power Isn’t Limitless

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 22 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

By now, you’ve heard that Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration to be Donald Trump’s attorney general, apparently after Republican senators basically told him that the jig was up, he wasn’t going to get the job. At the time of this recording, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, was also meeting with GOP senators and his fate appeared uncertain. Why did Republican senators make a stand on Gaetz, and what does that tell us about how aggressive they will be in checking Trump’s excesses once he takes over?

Today, we’re talking about this with one of the most knowledgeable observers of Congress out there, Norman Ornstein, who also co-hosts the Words Matter podcast on the DSR network. Really great to have you back on, Norm.

Norman Ornstein: Great to be with you, Greg.

Sargent: So Matt Gaetz is done. He faced a ton of scrutiny over allegations of sex trafficking and drug use and all that. By all indications, Republican senators had been privately informing Trump and his advisors that Gaetz wasn’t going to get confirmed and Gaetz himself reportedly had included he didn’t have the votes. What do you make of this? What does it mean?

Ornstein: I don’t make a lot of it, Greg, in this sense: The evidence against Gates was building even without the report from the House Ethics Committee, which we know is pretty damning. We know from what we had from federal authorities that we had thousands of transactions on Venmo, often laundered through his “foster son” that went to paying women and girls to travel to drug-fueled sex parties, including two women who swore that they had witnessed him having sex with a 17-year-old. That was going to end up coming down, burning and crashing no matter what.

I couldn’t resist commenting as soon as I heard this. The good news for Trump is that the pool of Republican sex predators is large enough that he’ll be able to find a replacement pretty easily. But what we also know, Greg, is that Trump has flooded the nomination zone with a group of unqualified, often cringe-worthy people. Some, like Pete Hagseth, with their own checkered history of sexual misbehavior, the nicest term we can use for it.

Sargent: Alleged, Norm, alleged.

Ornstein: Yeah, alleged. Knowing that Trump was going to be dealing with a Republican Senate that might block one or two, but would let the rest go through. They are not going to be a body which says, We’re holding these nominees to a standard that we normally would or have in the past for cabinet nominees or other top officials. So he’s going to win most of these. Hegseth, we can’t be sure because we don’t know what else might emerge. Most of the rest are probably going to make it.

Sargent: One thing that strikes me about all this as well, Norm, is that Trump had really gone quiet about Gaetz. When Trump wants Republicans in Congress to do something for him and he senses they’re slipping away from him, he’s really not shy about cracking the whip. Remember how he blasted Republicans to get them to kill the bipartisan border security bill? In this case, Trump had put Republicans on notice that he would use recess appointments to get his nominees through if needed. He went quiet on that too. Why did he suddenly go quiet on all this? What happened here, do you think, really?

Ornstein: If I had to guess, my guess is that somebody—probably Susie Wiles, his incoming chief of staff—came to him with the FBI report on Matt Gaetz, and with an annotated copy of the House Ethics report because, of course, he’s not going to read this stuff, and basically said, You are in for a festering, burning pile of excrement if you continue forward with this guy. Don’t keep pushing him. There are plenty of others. Let him get out now before it keeps going on and on and endangers other nominees.

Sargent: I got to say, supporting this idea, the only thing that motivates Trump ever is self-interest. And it’s pretty clear that what’s going to develop here is people like Susie Wiles are going to develop techniques for appealing to his self-interest. One good example is this, right? Here’s what the FBI report says. This is going to pile down on you, Mr. President. It’s going to be a disaster for you. You are going to get beaten up. You, you, you.

Ornstein: You’ve raised an interesting point, Greg, which is that this may strengthen Susie Wiles a little bit. Remember that this nomination was cooked up on Trump’s plane when he sat with Boris Epshteyn, and Susie Wiles was in another part of the plane. It was announced before she had any input. She didn’t say anything afterward, smartly so, and watched as this fell apart. So Trump has to know that maybe he should take a little advice from her.

Having said that, however, I’m not sure how long that relationship can last. Susie Wiles, who’s a pragmatic person, certainly a movement conservative but more in the traditional vein, took this job with a promise that she could control access to the Oval Office, keep out people who are going to whisper bad things in Trump’s ear. The problem with that is he’s rarely going to be in the Oval Office.

He is going to be on his phone up in the residence, or he’s going to be holding court at the dining room table at Mar-a-Lago. She’s not going to be up there in the bedroom watching him and his phone or standing with the busboys at the table at Mar-a-Lago. So Trump’s going to say and do a lot of stuff that’s going to make her job much more difficult. He will rely on people who will find ways to go around her to make sure that anything that tries to normalize Trump or keep this from becoming a really bad problem is just not going to happen.

Sargent: We are getting a glimpse of who’s really emerging as influential here, Susie Wiles obviously being one. There’s also these four GOP senators who had reportedly drawn a hard line against Gaetz in private conversations with him: Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, and John Curtis of Utah, who will be in the chamber next year. Does this suggest to you that McConnell is still wielding considerable power, at least internally in the Republican caucus? Does that change when Senator John Thune presumably takes over as majority leader next year? How do you see this playing out?

Ornstein: Mitch McConnell decided to step down from the leadership in part because of his own health issues, but also because he’d lost the conference. I don’t think he has the power anymore to convince others, but his vote may matter and there may be one or two instances when a chastened—hard to say it—Mitch McConnell decides that he will go against the Trump grain.

But I am skeptical, to tell you the truth, Greg, that we’re going to see a regular occurrence of four senators, four Republicans—which is all it takes; they’ll have 53—that will block nominations or keep bad legislation from moving forward. What happened in the last time that Trump was president is that Murkowski and Collins had a-wink-and-a-nod deal with Leader McConnell, which was they could both vote against a nomination or a bill when it was clear that they still had 50 votes to make it go through. If, and the best example is Brett Kavanaugh, they didn’t have the votes, then it was a no go. And that’s what Susan Collins showed with the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation.

Other than Collins and Murkowski, I have a hard time seeing others who more than once or twice along the way when it is really awful stuff will go against Trump. Trump controls this process and he will use the recess appointment if necessary for somebody who doesn’t quite have the immense baggage that Matt Gaetz has.

Sargent: It sounds like what you’re saying here is that Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins may do a repeat of what happened during Trump’s first term, at least to some degree. They’ll show a lot of “independence” on certain matters where their votes don’t actually settle anything. But when it really comes down to it, they won’t be there when their votes would actually stop something.

Ornstein: Remember, Collins is up in the midterm elections and assuming we have them. I’m expecting there’ll be a significant backlash. Now, having said that, the Republicans, even though they have more seats up in the Senate in 2026, there are not very many where you could see a serious challenge from a Democrat. Maybe Dan Sullivan, who’s up in Alaska.

One of the interesting things of development today: They had a referendum to remove their ranked-choice voting, which is how Mary Peltola, a Democrat, got elected to the House in the first instance. She’s now in a tight race, although may well lose. But Dan Sullivan, with a ranked-choice voting opportunity, may find that he’s going to have some rough moments ahead if we do see this serious backlash coming over the next couple of years. Not necessarily over these nominees in particular, but over what they’ll do and what the policies will be that could result in a lot of people who voted for Trump finding out that they’re not getting what they banked on.

Sargent: Beyond nominations, there are going to be these moments where the Republican Senate is our last line of defense, and I shudder to say this, against Trump’s authoritarian excesses. We’re talking about things like really ramped up mass deportations, which is going to require an explosion of new resources from Congress; we’re talking about things like slashing legal immigration in all kinds of ways—not illegal, legal—which Trump and Stephen Miller will try to do; then on Ukraine, we’ll see some flash points. It’s not your sense that there will be four Republican senators at some of these key moments. Where do you think their battles will be? Where will they pick their shots? What do you anticipate?

Ornstein: I would issue one caveat to this, which is the House may be our last line of defense in some instances. It looks now as if we may have a breakdown of 220 Republicans to 215 Democrats with at least two and maybe three vacancies for several months as we see Elise Stefanik and Waltz. Even though Matt Gaetz has said he’s not coming back to the House, he may be convinced to violate his pledge and come back for this next Congress. If they’re down at 217 and a couple of them get sick, Democrats can have a majority for a while. So we’ve got that to think about.

But there’s something else that I’ve seen today that gives me a chill, which is that we may see a challenge to the Budget and Impoundment Control Act enacted in 1974, after Richard Nixon had abused the spending power, going to the Supreme Court. If the Court says it’s unconstitutional, we could see Donald Trump bypassing congressional appropriation power and reprogramming funds, just taking them and using them for his border deportation and detention program or for other purposes.

That would be a complete end run around the Constitution. It would be outrageous. With this Supreme Court—I can’t say definitively that, despite a law that has been in place since 1974 for 50 years, that this Supreme Court won’t give Trump more authority over spending. But if the Court doesn’t, then the spending plans that Trump has are still going to have a hard time moving through the House and the Senate. Remember, at least for now, there is still a filibuster in place in the Senate.

If we see outrageous budgets that, for example, take money away from food stamps and school lunches and Head Start and Medicaid and try and program them into giving them to the geo group and other private prisons to house the ones picked up for detention, we’re not going to see Democrats and probably some Republicans willing to go along with that.

We’ve got some serious battles ahead, but the big thing that only requires 50 votes in both houses is that reconciliation package. To extend the Trump tax cuts from 2017, we are talking about a four- to five-trillion dollar additional hit on the debt over the next 10 years, plus the additional tax cuts that it’ll do. So we got a lot of mayhem ahead, along with the reality that he can do these tariffs on his own.

Sargent: Can I just ask you though, Norm, I want to be sure I understand you correctly: You do think that there’s going to be a sizable enough body of Republicans both in the Senate and the House that will rise up against certain extreme excesses such as dramatically ramping up the spending for mass deportations—you see that happening? If he doesn’t get to do his end run around the Constitution budgetarily, if the Supreme Court doesn’t bless that, you do think that he’s going to run into resistance on some of the high ticket MAGA items?

Ornstein: It’s going to be very difficult for them to do these things through the normal appropriations and budget process. Now, can they find ways around it? Very possibly. The biggest thing to keep in mind though is we’re still dealing with a cult, Greg, and with Republicans in the House and Senate who are going to be very, very reluctant to go against Trump, even at least for now, until there’s an enormous public backlash.

When Trump is in charge, and Trump has wielded several times privately and semi-publicly that with Elon Musk by his side, we’ll see how long that lasts, that Republicans who defy him are going to have a Musk-financed primary challenge. The idea that you’re going to go against Trump and face the wrath of your own constituents who are very much in the cult and along with that may face then that primary challenge—it’s going to keep most of them in line. Now, how long that lasts, and that includes how long his marriage with Elon Musk lasts when Musk is determined to be the alpha figure in this relationship, those are questions we can’t answer quite yet. But I’m not expecting a lot of resistance from congressional Republicans to much of what Trump wants to do. He’ll do an end run as much as he can, even if it’s illegal because he’s got immunity.

Sargent: Right. There’s that little problem too. Let’s talk about Pete Hegseth for a second. As of now, his fate is uncertain. Maybe by the time people listen to this, he’ll be gone. But on the other hand, some senators are now sounding optimistic that he’ll be confirmed. This comes after a police report revealed some graphic details about the charges of sexual assault against him, which we won’t go into on this family podcast, but we should stress he denies it all vehemently. But still, why would these senators who are willing to block Gaetz let Hegseth go through? He’s completely unfit for the job. What’s the calculation that they’re making?

Ornstein: If let’s say that Matt Gates had never come along, Hegseth would be a DOA, dead on arrival. They do not want to go against him twice. That’s one thing. But let’s even put the allegations of rape to the side with Hegseth, but let’s also put aside the fact that he has tattoos suggesting ties to white nationalist and Christian nationalist groups—let’s look at the fact that this guy is utterly unqualified to be heading up the military and has already promised to pull women out of combat, which almost every experienced military figure says now would be a deep blow to our national security,; that he is going to purge LBGTQ people from the military; that he is willing to use the military for Trump’s political purposes, including for rounding up people that Trump wants to put into detention before deporting.

This is not somebody who under any other circumstance would ever see the light of day as a nominee for the Defense Department. It’s telling that he has a strong chance of being confirmed, even without the sexual allegations being a burden.

Sargent: Norm, how is it possible—all these Republicans know that he’s unqualified to run the Pentagon. It can’t simply be that they’re just going to roll over for Trump because they stopped him on Gaetz and they only want to stop him once, right? There has to be some more subtle calculation going on here. I can’t seem to suss it out.

Ornstein: Well, I will tell you, Greg, I’ve been around the Senate for more than 50 years. I’ve known a whole lot of them. I’ve worked with a lot of Republicans in the past. There are significant number of these Republican senators who, you put them in the hot tub time machine and took them back 30 years, would behave as normal conservative or even centrist Republicans.

What I’ve seen over the last number of years is that almost none of them have any spine anymore. They are fearful. Not just of losing their seats, that’s only one part of it. I’ve seen the same behavior from those who are retiring, the Rob Portmans of the world, for example, that they don’t want to be shunned or excommunicated. And Trump has a hold on the Republican Party. This is their friends, their relatives, their neighbors, as well as their political supporters.

They are just not willing to put themselves out on a limb and face potential death threats, much less just being shunned. And if you had a dozen of them who stood up, it might be different. But it just doesn’t happen anymore. They are just swallowing hard and hoping that somehow this either works out for the best, or that if there’s a backlash, it won’t affect them and that maybe at that point, they’ll be able to assert themselves a little bit more.

I just don’t see a lot of backbone here. Frankly, the fact that Trump, even by very narrow margins, won more of the popular vote—appears not a majority of the country—won all of these swing states by narrow margins, they see him and his voters see him as having a mandate. For them at this point, shortly after an election where he was a victor, where they won the Senate, to go against that grain, it’s just not in their DNA.

Sargent: Let’s just talk about, to close this out, a more optimistic scenario. The fact that they stood up and blocked Gaetz has to mean at least something. Do you see some scenarios in which they do rein him in from time to time on important matters?

Ornstein: Let’s hope that not every one of these nominees who remains makes it through. They’ve got an opportunity to knock off one more. Possibly that could be RFK Jr. if he has a disaster of confirmation hearing. Maybe it could be a Linda McMahon, although I doubt it. Or it could and should be Tulsi Gabbard.

Sargent: Norm, there’s one that you would really think that they’d want to bring down.

Ornstein: If you’re looking at this from a cold, hard perspective of knowing that you’ve got one card that you can play: You look at Hegseth and you look at Gabbard, and you know that Gabbard, in charge of our nation’s secrets, is likely to give many of them to our adversaries—even though you could see the damage that Hegseth could do, you still might go for knocking off Gabbard.

Sargent: I got to say, there are a number of Republicans in the Senate and even in the House who really do not want the Republican Party to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Vladimir Putin, right?

Ornstein: There are, whether they have the spine and the backbone or whatever body parts you want to choose that are stiffened enough to be able to resist Trump. This is going to be a real test of integrity because there are plenty of these people, including many who’ve served on the Intelligence Committee, who know what happens, what the consequences are if some of these people go through, and they know what it means for the security and stability of the United States. Will they still subordinate that to their own narrow personal comfort and interests? That will be a very interesting test ahead. Unfortunately, we’re all going to pay the price if it turns out that they fail it.

Sargent: It sure looks like there’s a reasonable chance they’ll fail, although I feel a little more optimistic today than I did yesterday.

Ornstein: We got one down. Let’s hope there are more to go.

Sargent: Let’s hope. Norm Ornstein, thanks so much for all your insights. Really appreciate it.

Ornstein: Always, Greg.

Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some great new content we have up at tnr.com: Parker Molloy arguing that Nancy Pace’s anti-trans crusade is really only the latest in the GOP’s endless outrage machine, and Will Royce explaining Elon Musk’s stealth war against the poor.

And if you enjoyed this episode, can listen to more Norm Ornstein alongside co-host Kavita Patel on his podcast, Words Matter, on the DSR network. Also be sure to check out the latest episode of Above Average Intelligence featuring Jeremy Hurewitz
to discuss his latest book, Sell Like a Spy. We’ll see you all Monday.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.