AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Donald Trump is filling his Cabinet, but the Senate is jangling the keys. That's where we'll begin this hour, and we'll do it with NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Good morning, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Good morning, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So, Mara, at this time last week, it looked like former Congressman Matt Gaetz was headed to the Department of Justice. What derailed that nomination?
LIASSON: Well, the short answer is that Gaetz didn't have the votes. And what's surprising about that is that Donald Trump had started the week out pretty defiant, daring the Senate to reject Gaetz. And if they couldn't have the votes for Gaetz, he said he was just going to push Gaetz through as a recess appointment, which would have undercut the Senate's constitutional role as a coequal branch of government that - whose job it is to give advice and consent to presidential appointments.
But it turns out that the laws of political gravity have not been abolished completely. Gaetz didn't have the votes, and instead of pushing him through as a recess appointment, Donald Trump decided to accept the will of the Senate. What we don't know is whether Gaetz will get another job in the new administration that doesn't need Senate confirmation, but he is not going to be the attorney general.
RASCOE: Well, tell us what we need to know about Trump's fallback nominee.
LIASSON: That's right. He's already nominated someone else to be attorney general - Pam Bondi. She is the former Florida state attorney general. She led a group of Republican attorneys general who tried to get the courts to overturn the Affordable Care Act. She worked at a lobbying firm with close ties to many Republicans. She was on Trump's legal team in his first impeachment. She backed him after the 2020 election and claimed falsely that there was widespread fraud and that Trump was the true winner. And when Trump was indicted, Bondi said famously that the prosecutors will be prosecuted.
RASCOE: Well, I mean, with this being the case, assuming that she's confirmed, will a Bondi DOJ actually look much different than a Gaetz DOJ would have looked? Like, what's the practical impact here?
LIASSON: Well, I don't think there's much difference. Trump has made it very clear what he wants the Department of Justice to do. He wants them to go after his political enemies. He's talked very specifically about prosecuting Jack Smith, the special counsel who was appointed to look into Trump's handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
He said at one point he wanted Jack Smith to be kicked out of the country. I don't really understand what that means, but I do think the fact that he had to withdraw the Gaetz nomination is politically significant. Most new presidents don't get everyone through that they nominate, but the reason this was unusual, and you could say even surprising, was because Trump had such complete control over his party.
So few Republicans were daring to cross him, and the fact that previously he had made it clear he was going to insist that the Senate either go into recess so he could - if they didn't have the vote, so he could push his appointments through without any kind of vetting, but that didn't happen. So this was a political retreat for Trump - maybe a small one in the grand scheme of things, but still a political loss.
RASCOE: So do you think that this means - this concession may mean that it'll be easier for him to get other controversial appointments through?
LIASSON: That's a really good question. There are two theories on that. One is that if the Senate has rejected one of the nominees, they're going to be less inclined to push back hard, for instance, on Pete Hegseth, who's the nominee to run the Defense Department, and who, according to The Washington Post, was the subject of a sexual assault investigation - Hegseth denies the allegations - or Tulsi Gabbard, who's the nominee to be the Director of National Intelligence. And in the past, she has repeated Russian talking points. She's blamed NATO and Ukraine for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Then there's another theory that now the Senate is more willing to push back against some of Trump's more extreme nominees. So it's unclear whether this makes his other nominees easier to confirm or less.
RASCOE: Well, it could be that the Senate is looking at this and saying, we got six-year terms, and Trump only has four...
LIASSON: That's right.
RASCOE: ...Theoretically. Trump has tapped Brooke Rollins, who was director of the Domestic Policy Council in Trump's first term, to head the Agriculture Department and a hedge fund manager for Treasury. Tell us about that.
LIASSON: That's right. Scott Bessent, who is Trump's nominee to run the Treasury Department, is a Wall Street veteran. He's an investment banker, and in the past, he has worked for, of all people, George Soros, who is a real bogeyman for the right. But Bessent is someone who is very sympathetic to Trump's tariff policies. He's also seen as someone who could perhaps quiet Wall Street's fears about the inflationary potential of a lot of Trump's economic plans.
Economists have looked at these plans - the tariffs, the big tax cuts that won't be paid for with balancing budget cuts - and they think that that could cause inflation. So Wall Street has a lot of questions about Trump's economic policies. They're looking forward to the tax cuts and deregulations, but they're not so happy about big tariffs. Trump has also nominated Russell Vought to be the chairman - the head of the Office of Management and Budget. This is the same job he had in the first Trump administration. And Vought is one of the main authors of Project 2025, that conservative blueprint for governing that was so controversial during the campaign and Trump said that he didn't know anything about. But Vought has pushed for Trump to unilaterally reject spending that Congress has passed. That's called impoundment. He's also advocated for firing tens of thousands of federal workers, deprofessionalizing the civil service, making them political appointees who can be fired at will.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Mara Liasson. Mara, thank you so much.
LIASSON: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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