Contrary to his customary bragging that he won the election in an unprecedented landslide, President Donald Trump's percentage of the popular vote has fallen below 50% and it drops a little bit lower every day as the final votes are tallied up. According to the Cook Report, as of Tuesday, Trump was at 49.94 percent, and Harris was at 48.26, a difference of a mere 1.68%. He won fair and square but to call it an overwhelming mandate to dismantle the government is ridiculous.
Obviously, Trump will always maintain that his victory was the greatest in history and that nobody's ever seen anything like it. But in Washington, it's become clear that Trump's win was not the overwhelming validation of his agenda that we were told in the days after Nov. 5. Over 50% of the people voted against it, just as they did in 2020 and in 2016. Perhaps some Republicans waking up from their stupors and realizing this accounts for the fact that the fever broke yesterday for the first time since Election Day. Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for Attorney General proving, as my colleague Amanda Marcotte writes, resistance is not futile.
As Marcotte points out, the pressure was mounting from the public and press over Gaetz's egregious ethics violations and details from the House ethics committee were starting to leak out. Gaetz withdrew after being informed that a new accusation that he had sex with an underage girl at one of his raucous drug-fueled parties was about to drop. But as the Bulwark's Marc A. Caputo reported, it was Trump calling him to say that he didn't have the votes in the Senate and wouldn't be confirmed that finally forced Gaetz to throw in the towel.
Ever since Elon Musk and the rest of Trump's crack transition team gathered at Mar-a-Lago to plot his triumphant return to the White House in January, they've been throwing around threats and intimidating members of the House and Senate. Many of them, like Rep. Roy Nehls, R-Tx., seem to positively love it:
Rep. Troy Nehls (R., Texas): "If Donald Trump says, 'Jump three feet high and scratch your head,' we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That's it." That's it.pic.twitter.com/F3Vsco9ld3
— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) November 17, 2024
Considering how often Republicans have done just that, anyone could be forgiven for thinking that's exactly what they all intend to do. But a funny thing happened when Trump weighed in on the Senate majority leadership vote to replace Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., shortly after the election. Top adviser Elon Musk along with others such as RFK Jr., Tucker Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy and Charlie Kirk all endorsed Florida senator Rick Scott, tacitly letting it be known that Trump himself would be happy with his election.
Trump only intervened with an edict before the vote, demanding on his Truth Social platform that “Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments... We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY!"
All three contenders, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., John Cornyn, R-Tx., and Rick Scott R-Fla, agreed to allow Trump the ability to make recess appointments if necessary, a constitutional but rarely used gambit which had been obstructed by both parties over the last decade through a series of parliamentary maneuvers. The question everyone was asking was, why would he need it? He had a Senate majority of at least 52 votes (now 53.) Why wouldn't his own party be able to muster the necessary votes to confirm his Cabinet?
In the end, John Thune was elected (by a secret ballot) which was the first clue that Trump's iron grip may not be as strong as assumed. Thune is a Mitch McConnell protégé, looked at with suspicion by the MAGA crowd, and considered more establishment institutionalist than Trump loyalist. Scott, the choice of Trump's firebrand advisers, only got 13 votes.
We soon found out why Trump was signaling that he needed recess appointments when — on the same day Thune was elected — Trump named Gaetz followed by a succession of hacks, weirdos, extremists and kooks, none of whom are remotely qualified for the massively important jobs they're nominated for. For a time it seemed as though Trump had arrogantly decided to bypass the advice and consent role of the Senate altogether and simply force the House and Senate to recess during which time he would just appoint his entire cabinet. It was a strongarm move meant to let the Senate know that they are merely there to do his bidding and nothing more.
Then last Sunday night, renowned New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer tweeted that Mitch McConnell had told a gathering, "Message to Trump Team: There will be no recess appointments." She deleted the tweet not long after, apparently due to a misunderstanding about the meeting being off the record, but MAGA world was incensed, obviously because it was true. McConnell will not be the majority leader next year but that doesn't mean he doesn't know things.
Philip Bump at the Washington Post reported that the House is digging in its heels on their part of the recess appointment gambit as well:
Similarly, it’s been reported without denial that enough House Republicans are unwilling to adjourn the House to give House Speaker Mike Johnson a pretext for claiming the House and Senate are in disagreement, which might give the president the power to adjourn Congress.
Somewhere along the line Congress decided that it's not going to entirely give up its constitutional prerogatives so that Trump can install his cavalcade of carnival sideshow acts into the most powerful jobs in the world. And that was in spite of the fact that a Trump adviser told ABC News that they'd done some serious arm twisting telling the GOP senators that "anyone on the wrong side of the vote is buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there is a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.” (Nice little Congress you have there, be a shame if anything happened to it...)
There's a decent chance the Senate will reject Hegseth, Gabbard and RFK Jr. as well. As Bump notes, "their confirmations were never going to be easy, but Gaetz’s withdrawal both increases the amount of scrutiny that they face and establishes a precedent under which scandal-marred candidates step aside."
It's always safe to bet on the ultimate cowardice of Republicans in the face of Donald Trump so I won't get my hopes up. But this episode shows one thing: Trump lost. Bigly. Within a little over two weeks, he's already blown the appearance of invincibility, demonstrating once again that he is an incompetent egomaniac whose psychological unfitness creates nothing but chaos. As we all know, there aren't many guardrails left but Trumpian dysfunction is actually one of them and it's still fully operational.
