Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

Matt Gaetz has withdrawn from consideration for attorney general but many of Donald Trump’s other nominees continue to draw controversy. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss Trump’s other equally improbable Cabinet choices, and what could come next for these nominees.

With the announcement of Gaetz’s withdrawal, much attention has now turned to Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who, like Gaetz, also faces allegations of sexual assault. “The senators to watch on this nomination are going to be not just the national-security hawks but female Republican senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who are always the wild cards, but also someone like Senator Joni Ernst,” Andrew Desiderio said last night. Although Ernst has been complimentary thus far about Hegseth’s nomination, Desiderio explained, she has also been open about her support for women in combat roles, something that Hegseth has spoken out against.

As for longtime Republican lawmakers, questions still remain over how their reactions to Trump’s Cabinet picks will play out in the confirmation process. Are we going to see Mitch McConnell “lead an insurgent faction now that he’s not going to be the Senate leader?” Goldberg asked panelists last night.

“There might be a story of what he does behind closed doors compared to what you see publicly,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs said. No longer serving as the leader of his party, “he now does not need to worry about managing the factions of the Senate” and, given his past criticism of Trump, McConnell “now has the leeway to be more outspoken.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Andrew Desiderio, a senior congressional reporter at Punchbowl News; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Ashley Parker, a senior national political correspondent for The Washington Post.

Watch the full episode here.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Joe Biden entered office promising to “beat” the coronavirus pandemic, cure cancer, and get more people health care. Arguably no one on Earth can talk more passionately about funding cancer research than Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 and who, in 2022, announced an initiative to halve U.S. cancer deaths in the next 25 years. Robert Califf, Biden’s FDA commissioner, has been particularly stalwart in arguing that the agency must play a role in reversing a “catastrophic decline” in Americans’ life expectancy, and has repeatedly warned of “an ever-growing epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases,” such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. A 2019 study found that just 12 percent of Americans are considered metabolically healthy, based on their waist circumference, blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol.

Of course Biden’s White House was never going to end cancer or obesity in four years. But many of its policies barely scratched the surface of America’s wide-ranging health problems. Despite Califf’s dramatic language about the country’s diet problems, for example, the FDA’s efforts to improve the situation have mostly revolved around giving Americans more information about healthy foods.

The public-health bureaucracy that the Trump administration will inherit is more focused on and skilled at treating America’s health problems than preventing them. That shortcoming—despite the billions of dollars spent every year at these agencies—has damaged the credibility of the public-health establishment enough that Kennedy is now Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services. Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, has similarly risen in prominence by second-guessing "medical dogma" in the U.S. and beyond. And Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, former Representative Dave Weldon, has criticized the agency’s vaccine policies and once attempted to block its vaccine-safety research because of what he claimed were conflicts of interest. A set of men who have made careers of distrusting our existing health-care agencies may soon be empowered to try to blow them up.

The Biden administration, to be fair, had less time to deal with America’s deeper health issues, because it was forced to deal with at least a few calamities. Much of Biden’s term was spent navigating the country out of the pandemic. On the whole, his administration achieved most of its COVID goals. The Biden White House provided Americans with free COVID tests and mounted a vaccination campaign that resulted in more than three-quarters of the country getting a shot. Still, the pandemic left the CDC beleaguered by claims that it was simultaneously too slow and too aggressive in its efforts to fight the virus. During Biden’s presidency, the agency promised to “share science and data faster” and “translate science into practical policy,” but it has struggled to respond to the continued spread of bird flu. Public-health experts have slammed the CDC for not sharing enough information about the virus’s spread, including a human case in Missouri earlier this year, and farmers have been reluctant to implement the agency’s recommendations for preventing transmission of the virus from sick cattle to humans.

Some of those calamities were self-inflicted. The FDA is entrusted with ensuring that our food and medicines are safe, and it generally does spot issues quickly after they occur. But for months, the FDA failed to act on a whistleblower complaint alerting regulators to deplorable conditions at an infant-formula factory that eventually caused nationwide formula shortages and two infant deaths. The FDA is also supposed to decide what tobacco products can be sold, but it has failed to police the illegal market for vapes and nicotine pouches, such as Zyn. And for all the administration’s talk of being guided by “science and truth,” the White House seemingly bowed to political pressure and abandoned a plan to ban menthol cigarettes at the very end of a long rule-making process. The past four years have revealed that crucial parts of the agency’s remit—most notably its oversight of tobacco and the food system—have been neglected by agency leadership; in 2022, independent reviews of the FDA’s food and tobacco centers found that both lacked clarity on mission and goals.

At the same time, the administration has failed to deliver on its loftier ambitions. Biden quietly dropped some of his bolder ideas, such as his campaign promise to create a public-option insurance plan. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a new government agency that funds high-risk, high-reward research and is essential to Biden’s cancer goals, is in its infancy, and Republicans in Congress are already eager to cut its budget. And some promises, such as Biden’s grand goal to help change America’s diet, have been approached more like trivial pursuits.

The administration branded its 2022 hunger and nutrition conference, for instance, as the largest and most important gathering on nutrition policy since the Nixon administration. That 1960s conference led to millions of children gaining access to school lunch and to the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (or WIC), which provides food to about 6 million Americans each month. The Biden administration’s summit ended with a pledge to end hunger and improve America’s diet by 2030, but the steps taken toward tackling those goals—such as developing a plan to add warning labels to unhealthy foods—have been modest. And all the agency has done so far on that project is conduct research on the labels’ potential design. The FDA has also pledged to lower the sodium in foods, but the targets it’s set for the food industry are entirely voluntary.

These efforts are understandably careful and bureaucratic. The agency’s caution over warning-label design comes amid threats from the food industry to sue over any label deemed unjustified. Indeed, in the U.S. legal system, regulators have trouble mandating that companies do much of anything without it being branded as unconstitutional. But the Biden administration’s efforts look comically inadequate given the scope of America’s health problems.

RFK Jr. is promising a break from the status quo. This is not to say that he, should he be confirmed as health secretary, has a better plan. Most of his ideas amount to little more than pronouncements that he will take sweeping actions immediately once Trump is sworn in as president. The reality is that many of those efforts would take months, if not years, to implement—and some might not be feasible at all. He has signaled, for example, that he will clear house at the FDA’s food center, despite rules that prevent government bureaucrats from being fired willy-nilly. He also has pledged to ban certain chemicals from food, which he’s argued are contributing to American’s lower life expectancy. But for every chemical the FDA bans, it will have to go through a lengthy regulatory process, which would likely be challenged by food companies in court. Kennedy’s notion of significantly altering the system of fees that drug makers pay the FDA to review their products would likely send the agency into a budgetary crisis.

If Kennedy gets confirmed to lead HHS, he will quickly be confronted with the reality that governing is a slow and tedious process that doesn’t take kindly to big, bold ideas, even with an impatient leader like Trump calling the shots. At the outset of his first term, Trump declared war on drug companies, which he claimed were “getting away with murder” due to their high prices. Trump’s then–health secretary, Alex Azar, in turn spent the next four years trying radical fixes that included requiring drug makers to post their prices in TV ads, importing drugs from Canada, tying American drug prices to other countries’, and eliminating the rebates that middlemen negotiate for insurance companies. But each idea got bogged down in bureaucracy and lawsuits. Trump’s early attempts to contain COVID by blocking international air travel similarly did little to keep the virus out of America, despite his claims at the time that the policy “saved us” from widespread outbreaks.

Biden benefited from Operation Warp Speed's rapid push to create vaccines, but it was his team of technocrats that finally got them distributed. And they eventually lowered drug prices too, in a much simpler way than Trump was proposing. But technocracy has also failed to address our most pressing—and most visible—health problems. Trump’s picks have little experience navigating the Rube Goldberg puzzle that is American bureaucracy. They certainly aren’t afraid of trying something new, but we’re about to find out how far that will get them.

Donald Trump will never face federal criminal charges for trying to corrupt the 2020 presidential election, the fundamental democratic procedure. Nor will he ever face consequences for brazenly removing highly sensitive documents from the White House, refusing to hand them back, and attempting to hide them from the government.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, representing the Justice Department, today filed to dismiss charges in the two federal cases he was overseeing against Trump. Smith effectively had no choice. Trump had promised to fire him and end the cases as soon as he took office on January 20. (The president-elect reportedly plans to fire not only Smith but also career attorneys who were assigned to his team.)

In both cases, these were crimes that only a president could commit: No one else could have attempted to remain in office by the same means, and few people could have made off with boxes full of these documents. And only a president-elect with nearly unlimited resources could have gotten away with them.

[Read: The Trump-Trumpist divide]

Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.

The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority.

The strategy was not without risks. His claims of presidential immunity drew scoffs from many legal scholars, as well as judges on the first two levels of the federal court system. But the Supreme Court took as long as possible before issuing a ruling substantially agreeing with Trump—the majority included three Trump-appointed justices plus a fourth whose wife was deeply involved in the election-subversion effort.

Even then, the strategy relied on Trump winning the presidential election, which was not a sure bet. Had he lost, the cases would likely have continued, and he might well have lost those. The documents case, though not as grave as Trump’s attack on the basic fabric of the Constitution, was clear-cut in its facts. And in the only criminal case against Trump that did go to a jury—widely viewed as the most tenuous case against him—he was quickly convicted. (Sentencing in that case is now indefinitely paused, also because of Trump’s election.)

But in Attorney General Merrick Garland, Trump drew the ideal foil. The man overseeing the two cases against Trump is obsessive about proceduralism. His view was that the best way to restore the justice system, and the Justice Department, after the first Trump presidency was to do everything precisely by the book, no matter how long it took. It took quite a while—Smith was not appointed until November 2022, two months after the paperwork coup began and three months after the FBI seized documents at Mar-a-Lago. By the time Smith brought charges, in summer 2023, the timeline was tight, either for verdicts soon enough to inform voters or to avoid dismissal if a Republican won the presidential election.

This was the problem with Garland’s calculation: It may have temporarily restored the proper function of the Justice Department, but it didn’t win back public approval, nor did it really benefit the Justice Department in court. Garland appointed Smith as special counsel after Trump entered the presidential race, so as to create an appearance of insulation from politics. Little good that did: The Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon delivered a blatantly political ruling throwing the case out because she deemed the appointment unconstitutional.

[David Frum: A good country’s bad choice]

Most important, Garland’s attention to detail meant the system failed to do the basic work of holding accountable someone who had committed serious crimes in plain sight. And partly because of that, Trump will soon return to the White House with the power and intention to destroy all the independence and careful procedures that Garland took such pains to protect.

Not only that, but the Justice Department will be led by the lawyers who developed Trump’s strategy. His new nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, spoke outside his trial in New York and defended him in his impeachments. His appointees for deputy attorney general and principal associate deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, represented him as defense lawyers. D. John Sauer, who argued the immunity case at the Supreme Court, will be solicitor general, the fourth-ranking post at DOJ.

The lack of accountability for January 6 is an affront to the Constitution. But the lesson that Trump will take from charges being dropped, along with the immunity ruling, is that the system is not capable of holding him accountable for most rules that he violates. The affronts will continue.

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In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Jill Biden, accompanied by her grandson Beau, welcomed the arrival of the festive fir hailing from North Carolina.