Trump wants his criminal lawyers at DOJ, RFK Jr. at HHS, and no one holding him back

Republican senators are going to have to think hard about their role.

It is becoming increasingly clear that, to the extent Donald Trump ever took the presidency seriously, he is not doing so this time around — tossing out nominations and appointments to friends and allies (for now) like a very bad mayor.

First, Thursday afternoon brought us the news that Matt Gaetz and Boris Epshteyn apparently convinced Donald Trump to nominate Gaetz as attorney general on a flight back to Florida on Wednesday.

Having put an unqualified loyalist hack (with all of his other problems) at the top of his Justice Department picks, what followed, in its way, made sense. Gaetz was not some senior figure in a position to fight over Trump’s other picks for key DOJ roles, and Trump couldn’t get top-tier talent to join a potential Matt Gaetz DOJ.

So, in quick succession soon on Thursday evening, Trump announced that three of his criminal defense lawyers would be taking some of the top roles at DOJ.

Todd Blanche, Trump announced, was his choice for deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at DOJ. Emil Bove, Trump stated, will be principal deputy associate attorney general and act as the No. 2 while Blanche’s nomination is being considered by the Senate. Blanche and Bove were among Trump’s lawyers in his Manhattan criminal case and the federal documents-related case in Florida.

An hour later, Trump announced that John Sauer — who argued Trump’s immunity case for him at the U.S. Supreme Court — will be his nominee for solicitor general, the administration’s top lawyer in the Supreme Court.

All three have qualifications, unlike Gaetz, but their common strand — and the reason they matter to Trump — shades the announcements to a worrying degree.

This means a lot to and for the Justice Department, to be sure, but — as other nominees show as well — this is also a question of what government looks like more broadly and whether it functions. And whether Trump cares.

As The New York Times noted in discussing Trump’s nomination of Doug Collins to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, four of Trump’s nominees thus far “defended him during the impeachment inquiry” — the first one.

Then, Trump announces a name like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

He’s bad news, as NPR laid out last year and

Robert Reich

laid out in April.

Many more concerning stories followed. Kennedy also repeatedly tried to play convenient and contradictory roles in his questionable run at the presidency after endorsing Trump — unsuccessfully seeking both ballot access and ballot removal efforts in different states.

Now Trump wants to put him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, a sprawling, essential agency.

This would all be horrifying enough, but Trump has made clear he will not just be nominating or appointing unqualified friends and allies (for now) to key roles. He also will have other allies (for now) working to hollow out the rest of the federal government.

In a normal administration, although a bad department or agency head could cause great harm, bureaucracy helps. This is not a partisan thing, either, although Trump obviously has worked to make it partisan. In reality, a big advantage of having career civil servants working across the government is that, although administration changes can lead to different priorities and some scrapped programs, the basic work of government should be able to continue unimpeded.

Here, though, Trump has announced the Elon Musk-Vivek Ramaswamy mandate “to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

As others have noted, despite the meme name, it’s not actually a department and who knows what will come of it. Nonetheless, it is important to see Trump’s aims.

Less than 10 days from having been elected to return to the White House, Donald Trump has made it clear that he wants to hobble, if not destroy, significant parts of the federal government.

That could cause widespread harm. That, in turn, could lead Trump to seek to use those harms that he causes as excuses to invoke emergency powers — granting even more authority to himself and his cronies. It only gets darker from there.

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All of this leads to another area where those wobbly, failed-us-in-the-past guardrails need to be highlighted right now — as I discussed Sunday night regarding the Supreme Court. Sure, they very well might fail us again. But, I believe that makes it all the more important to lay out their place in the system and show the ways they can be used to rein in Trump.

If they fail us, even if expected, they must — and we must — be aware of their failure.

Right now, the big guardrail for these nominations is the United States Senate. Not all of the positions Trump is naming require Senate confirmation, but many do. And Sen. John Thune, the incoming Senate majority leader, is going to have a very difficult job.

On Sunday afternoon, before Thune was elected by his caucus, Trump tweeted, “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner. Sometimes the votes can take two years, or more. This is what they did four years ago, and we cannot let it happen again. We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!”

Thus, Trump set in motion his first “here’s a part of the Constitution you never thought you’d need to think about” moment, as Matt Glassman, by way of example, discussed on X. These were regular occurrences in his first term, and, it appears, this second term will be no different. This one has to do with a constitutional provision, never previously invoked, that allows the president to adjourn Congress “in Case of Disagreement between them (the two chambers).” The theory goes that once Trump adjourned the Senate, he could issue recess appointments of any nominees, at which point they could serve in their roles through the end of the next session of Congress.

Although I think it’s unlikely to come to that — Trump trying it, the Senate reacting to any such attempt, and/or the Supreme Court being asked to weigh in — we are going into a second Trump administration and we must always remember that, while Trump is unfocused and undisciplined, he also appears to be eager to see what he can get away with as he regains power.

With several truly unqualified and potentially dangerous nominees and a president with that mindset, then, Republican senators are going to have to think hard about their role. (Much more than Sen. Lindsey Graham is doing.)

To that end, there are not only bad signs.

Although the Gaetz nomination truly is an exceptionally reckless one, even by Trump standards, it has quickly hit the rocks — as close to a sign that the Senate is going to show the capacity to act responsibly when necessary in this era as we’re likely to see this early.

As such, we should encourage this skeptical response if we want the guardrails to exist — let alone hold.

There are 67 days until Trump takes office.