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House Ethics Committee

Trump’s First Defeat

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 11 › trumps-first-defeat › 680748

Well, that was fast.

Last Wednesday, President-Elect Donald Trump shocked even his allies by nominating Representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Today, Gaetz has pulled out of consideration, one day after meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.

“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” the Florida man wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I'll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”

For at least one presidential nominee to withdraw at some point in the process is very common. What is unusual is how quickly Gaetz’s nomination fell apart. Eight days is not the record, but it’s close. (Recall that White House Physician Ronny Jackson’s nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs took nearly a month to collapse.) Just two days ago, Trump was insisting he had no second thoughts about picking Gaetz.

[Listen: What Pete Hegseth’s nomination is all about]

The reason why Gaetz withdrew is no secret and no surprise. He’s been shadowed for years by allegations of sex trafficking, paying for sex, drug use, and sex with an underage girl. Trump doesn’t appear to have bothered to vet Gaetz in any serious way before nominating him, but all of this was known. The Justice Department investigated Gaetz for years but in 2023 decided against bringing charges; the House Ethics Committee was still probing him. Gaetz himself denies any wrongdoing. The fact that Gaetz, like Trump, has a personal vendetta against the Justice Department seemed to be his main credential for the job.

When Gaetz was nominated, he also resigned from Congress. That froze the House Ethics Committee investigation, since he was no longer a member. Speaker Mike Johnson, a Gaetz ally though he is primly conservative where Gaetz is a libertine, opposed releasing the committee’s work, and the committee deadlocked in a vote. But Gaetz’s victory was hardly complete. His nomination dislodged lots of damaging new information, including testimony about him twice having sex with a 17-year-old, though witnesses believed Gaetz did not know she was underage. A lawyer for two women said they testified to the House that Gaetz paid them for sex. The New York Times published an impossibly elaborate diagram outlining payment schemes. Gaetz fooled around, and the public found out; by accepting the scrutiny that comes with a nomination, he also fooled around and found out.

But don’t cry too much for Gaetz, and not only because of his record as a scoundrel. (He’s detested by House colleagues, and many reports indicate he shared naked videos of paramours on the House floor.) His infamy hasn’t prevented his rise so far, and he is believed to have designs on running for governor of Florida when Ron DeSantis’s term ends.

The question now is what this defeat portends for the rest of Trump’s slate of outrageous nominees. The president-elect likes to take a gamble, even if he sometimes loses, but as I argued last week, the presence of so many unqualified picks might perversely make it easier for some of them to get through—after all, the Senate couldn’t reject them all, right?

[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]

Gaetz’s quick exit shows that Senate Republicans aren’t willing to accept literally anyone who Trump throws their way, and the fact that they were able to send that message so quickly suggests just how deep their reservations were. If the rejection is a sign of weakness for Trump, it is also one for his vice president-elect, Senator J. D. Vance. Vance was given the tough job of squiring Gaetz around Senate offices yesterday to drum up support, which obviously did not go well.

The Gaetz failure doesn’t mean that senators will reject any other picks, but with Gaetz out of the way, the troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon will be able to get more attention. A police report about a sexual-assault allegation against Hegseth from 2017 was released today, and it’s a stomach-churning read. Alternatively, Gaetz could end up looking like a sacrificial pick to save the others, or like a stalking horse for Trump to appoint someone else at DOJ. It seems unlikely that Trump intended either of these—he doesn’t usually play to lose—but that could be the effect.

Before Trump chose Gaetz, he reportedly concluded that other contenders simply didn’t have what he wanted in an attorney general, according to The New York Times. Now he’ll have to go back his lists to choose someone who has one thing that Gaetz conspicuously lacked: the ability to get confirmed.

Why Oz Is the Doctor Trump Ordered

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 11 › why-oz-is-the-doctor-trump-ordered › 680727

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump appears to experience the world through the glow of a television screen. He has long placed a premium on those who look the part in front of the camera. Paging Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Trump has picked Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS, as the agency is known, falls under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Last week, Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as HHS secretary. As you may have guessed, Kennedy and Oz are not only friends but kindred spirits. Oz is a global adviser at iHerb, a for-profit company that offers “Earth’s best-curated selection of health and wellness products at the best possible value.” He and Kennedy, two relative outsiders, are now positioned to enjoy a symbiotic relationship within Trump’s chaotic ecosystem.

Oz was last seen running for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022. He lost to John Fetterman, who, despite dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke, carried the state by five points. Throughout that race, Oz struggled to combat the perception that he was a charlatan and carpetbagger who primarily lived in New Jersey. (Fetterman’s team repeatedly tagged Oz as an out-of-touch elitist, trolling him, for example, when he went grocery shopping for crudités and lamented high prices.) After that electoral defeat, Oz’s political dreams seemed all but dashed. But he wisely remained loyal to Trump—a person who has the ability to change trajectories on a whim.

In the pre-Trump era, it might have been a stretch to describe CMS administrator as an overtly political position. But Oz’s objective under Trump couldn’t be clearer. In a statement, Trump, using his reliably perplexing capitalization, telegraphed that Oz will bring a certain ethos to the job—a little MAGA, a little MAHA. Oz, Trump promised, will “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.” And, because he’s Trump, he mentioned Oz’s nine daytime Emmy Awards.

Some 150 million Americans currently rely on the agency’s insurance programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare. Oz has been a proponent of Medicare Advantage for All. Though that sounds like the Medicare for All initiative championed by progressives such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the two programs are quite different. At its core, Medicare for All would set the U.S. on a path toward nationalizing health care. Trump would never go for that. But Medicare Advantage already exists within America’s patchwork private/public system, and Oz might push to strengthen it. He could also face budgetary pressure to weaken it. Oz’s own health-care views haven’t remained consistent. Though he once praised the mandatory universal models of Germany and Switzerland, as a Republican politician he threw his support behind privatized Medicare.

When asked about Oz’s nomination, Fetterman, his former opponent, told CNN: “As long as he’s willing to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m voting for the dude.” Some people were pissed. Victoria Perrone, who served as the director of operations on Fetterman’s Senate campaign, called out her old boss on social media: “Dr. Oz broke his pledge to ‘do no harm’ when he said red onions prevent ovarian cancer. My sis died of OC in 6/2022. This is a huge personal betrayal to me. We know he won’t protect the Medicaid that paid for her treatments,” Perrone posted on X. “I feel like I’ve been duped and 2 years of working on your campaign was a waste,” she added.

The above argument is illustrative of another reality Trump acknowledged in announcing his pick: “Make America Healthy Again” keeps growing. Oz, Trump declared, “will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” He went a step further, promising that Oz will bring “a strong voice to the key pillars of the MAHA Movement.” Oz holds degrees from Harvard and Penn, and he worked as a professor of surgery at Columbia. In spite of that pedigree, Oz has spent years facing credible accusations of medical quackery for his endorsement of dietary supplements. In 2014, he received a dramatic dressing-down on Capitol Hill. Senator Claire McCaskill read three statements that Oz had made on his eponymous show:

“You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type: It’s green coffee extract.”

“I’ve got the No. 1 miracle in a bottle to burn your fat: It’s raspberry ketone.”

“Garcinia cambogia: It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”

Oz’s defense that day was that his job was to be a “cheerleader” for the Dr. Oz audience. “I actually do personally believe in the items I talk about in the show. I passionately study them. I recognize oftentimes they don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact, but nevertheless, I would give my audience the advice I give my family,” he testified.

He emerged from that hearing largely unscathed. Two years later, Oz would go on to read what he claimed were Trump’s medical records on that same show. He famously praised Trump’s testosterone levels and supposed all-around health. Four years after that, once Trump was president, Oz sent emails to White House officials, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, pushing them to rush patient trials for hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for COVID.

In the next Trump administration, those are the sorts of exchanges Oz could be having with Kennedy—or with Trump himself. How did we get here? Oz landed this gig because he’s good on TV, yes, but also because, when he entered the political arena, he fully aligned himself with Trump. The 47th president rewards loyalty. If there’s one thing that’s become clear from his administration nominations so far, it’s that.

Some of Trump’s appointments will be less consequential than others. Anything involving the health and well-being of tens of millions of Americans is inarguably serious. Oz’s confirmation is not guaranteed, but his selection has already confirmed that nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.

Related:

Trump is coming for Obamacare again. (From January) Why is Dr. Oz so bad at Twitter? (From 2022)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Another theory of the Trump movement What the men of the internet are trying to prove Arash Azizi: The problem with boycotting Israel

Today’s News

Republican members of the House Ethics Committee blocked the release of the investigation into the sexual-misconduct and drug-use allegations against former Representative Matt Gaetz. Jose Ibarra, who was found guilty of killing Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus, was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Trump tapped former WWE CEO Linda McMahon, who previously led the U.S. Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, to be the secretary of education.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Drought is an immigration issue, and Trump’s climate policies are designed to ignore that, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Video by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Archive Films / Getty; Internet Archive; Prelinger Associates / Getty.

Put Down the Vacuum

By Annie Lowrey

The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.

I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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