Trump drops a cabinet-level clusterbomb with Gaetz, Gabbard as latest picks
Surprising choices lead to immediate speculation: Will he bypass the Senate to install them?
The gasps echoing across Washington on Wednesday proved that Donald Trump retains the capacity to shock. That's just what he did with some boundary-busting cabinet picks.
Members of his own party expressed astonishment at news of the president-elect's choices to oversee law enforcement and national intelligence: Matt Gaetz for attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
The question is whether he will bypass standard procedures to install them in office, in an early test of the incoming president's power over the country's institutions.
A string of congressional Republicans expressed bewilderment, in particular, over news that the Justice Department could be entrusted to Gaetz, their firebrand colleague from Florida.
Gaetz did practise law before politics but is now best known as an ardent political pitbull for Trump. He has recently called for investigating Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted Trump.
He has also been investigated for sex-trafficking involving a minor, illicit drug use, and accepting improper gifts, allegations he has denied. The Justice Department dropped its probe, but the House Ethics Committee continued its inquiries.
Gaetz resigned from Congress just hours after getting the nomination, allowing a speedy replacement by special election in Florida. This is also reportedly a few days before the Ethics Committee was scheduled to release a report into his behaviour.
Republicans who heard the news during a meeting said there were audible murmurs of surprise.
"Everybody was saying, 'Oh my God,'" Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho said, according to The Associated Press. "That was about as big a surprise as I've had in a long time."
The choice now heads to the Senate. There, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski called this an unserious nomination: "This one was not on my bingo card."
North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis predicted a rough ride for Gaetz in the confirmation process, according to the congressional newsletter Punchbowl News.
However, the appointment was celebrated by hard-right Trump allies who expressed hope Gaetz would, in fact, crack down on the officials who investigated Trump. House Speaker Mike Johnson also credited Gaetz as extremely smart, and the kind of disrupter the Justice Department needs.
Trump seeking to bypass the normal process
It's now abundantly clear why the incoming president is pressing allies to shut down the Senate in early January and let him install them through so-called recess appointments. Lawmakers would have to co-operate with an extended recess.
Because under normal circumstances, it is highly uncertain, to put it mildly, that the Senate would give Gaetz control of the nation's justice system and Gabbard its national secrets.
The standard rules would see them both undergo a memorable grilling in early January, in an attempt to get votes from the required 60 per cent of the Senate.
It's part of the advise-and-consent role granted to the U.S. Senate over appointments as one of the very first articles of the U.S. Constitution over two centuries ago.
Now Trump has delivered the first major loyalty test of his second term. He's already begun asking his party to shut down the Senate for a few days.
This would let him deploy a tactic used hundreds of times over the generations, with some caveats: It's supposed to be used in emergencies, and has fallen into disuse, after the Supreme Court rebuked Barack Obama for abusing the process.
Acting while the Senate is out of session appears central to Trump's strategy. It explains why one Republican lawmaker expressed certainty Gaetz will lead the Justice Department.
"Recess appointments," Republican congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky told reporters Wednesday.
"He's the attorney general. Suck it up!"
Gabbard another surprising pick
The appointment was considered so bizarre that few people were talking about Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii whom Hillary Clinton once referred to as a Russian asset; Gabbard reacted angrily, suing Clinton, but later dropped the suit.
Dating back to the civil war in Syria, through the war in Ukraine, Gabbard has echoed positions supportive of Russia, and has been critical of what she calls the U.S. deep state.
If confirmed, Gabbard would now lead that so-called deep state. Her career before politics included two decades in the military as a decorated combat veteran, where she served in Iraq.
These nominations swiftly stifled chatter about an earlier unorthodox pick: Veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth for secretary of defence.
He is the author of a recent book that has one entire chapter on how women should not serve in combat, and another chapter arguing vehemently against the rationale for rules of war including the Geneva Conventions.
By the end of Wednesday, almost nobody was talking about Hegseth.
The Gaetz and Gabbard news upended an already unusual day in Washington. The day began with Trump meeting congressional Republicans, accompanied by the world's richest man, Elon Musk.
During that meeting Trump joked, as he has before, about running for a third term, currently outlawed under the U.S. Constitution: "I suspect I won't be running again," Trump told them. "Unless you say, 'He's so good, we've got to figure something else out.'"
Changing that rule would require a near-impossible constitutional amendment.
Also on Wednesday, Trump returned to the White House for a meeting with President Joe Biden that, at least in public view, seemed positively warm.
The Democratic president congratulated his onetime Republican opponent and said he looks forward to a smooth transition. Trump said he appreciated the welcome in a world where "politics is tough."
The White House press secretary later called the meeting cordial, gracious and substantive.
When asked how Biden could possibly sit cordially with a man he's called a menace to democracy, Karine Jean-Pierre said he was doing the right thing.
In meeting Trump, Biden performed the democratic rituals denied to him four years earlier. After the 2020 election, Trump denied the results, sent a crowd to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and mused to friends for many months that he might, somehow, be restored to power.
"What we are showing the American people is how you do this," Jean-Pierre said. "We are leading by example. That is quintessential Joe Biden."
She said Biden respects the will of American voters. And, she said, of last week's election: "The American people spoke."
In other news Wednesday, the American people will get Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state. He's one of multiple more traditional Trump picks, hawkish in philosophy, someone who would have fit right into a Bush cabinet.
But Rubio isn't the pick that sent shockwaves across the U.S. capital, not like the ones that could provoke a historic showdown in the weeks ahead.
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With files from Reuters and The Associated Press