Trump may tap Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem for cabinet positions
President-elect Donald Trump is expected to tap Marco Rubio for Secretary of Defense and Kristi Noem for Homeland Security Secretary.
This online-only column is part of a series of shorter opinion essays by USA Today Network-Florida columnist Nate Monroe on the constant flow of outrageousness and shadiness in the Sunshine State.
It’s not often one encounters a politician so universally reviled, who so widely inspires a feeling of ick, whose pompadoured profile so much resembles a kind of Johnny Bravo-like cartoon, and it’s rarer still to find that person elevated to a position of grave import: Yet such is the case with one U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz. What more can be said that hasn’t been said before? Gaetz is a miscreant who better resembles a barking Pensacola used car salesman than he does the figure singularly responsible for the sober and fair administration of justice in the United States.
Donald J. Trump announced on Wednesday that he was nominating the impish Gaetz as U.S. attorney general, a stunning choice even in this funhouse timeline that reflects how truly unrestrained the former-and-incoming president will be, his choices of purportedly more normal or moderate allies for other roles notwithstanding. That Republicans in Congress find Gaetz as repulsive as their Democratic colleagues is evidence enough of the absurdity of this choice. That those Republicans — each more eager than the last to become Trump’s most favored supplicant — were almost immediately voicing concerns about the nomination Wednesday afternoon is proof-positive we’ve flown over the cuckoo’s nest.
But those concerns are hardly a meaningful indication Senate Republicans will buck their new master.
The list of Gaetz’s disqualifying traits and past controversies would be impractical to list to exhaustion, but at nearly every turn in his public life he has disgraced himself and inspired feelings of nausea in those around him. He owes much of his early rise to his father, a wealthy former president of the state Senate from Okaloosa.
Gaetz is loud and loud-mouthed. He craves attention. His close calls with the law go back more than a decade to a 2008 DUI arrest — the charges were dropped but the episode has come up repeatedly in Gaetz’s public career, most recently when he mocked President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, for substance abuse in his past. He might be the first AG nominee to have had his home-state Bar chide him for exhibiting “unprofessional, reckless, insensitive” behavior. He’d certainly be the first who begged a president for a pardon.
If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because Gaetz, to an eerie degree, is truly a devoted Trump padawan, aping and refining his mentor’s lowest aspects.
It’s dubious all those voters across America with their deeply professed concerns about the economy fully understood what they were getting into when they cast a ballot for the addled huckster and his posse of rumpled conspiracy theorists, wannabe comedians and podcast intellectuals. Did they know they were turning America into Florida? Did they know what that truly meant — to be empowering some of the state’s empty-vessel politicians?
They’re certainly finding out now.
Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at [email protected].
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Publish date : 2024-11-13 10:24:00
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