‘Politically suicidal’: Conservative delivers stark warning to Republicans about Trump

A conservative writer with a prominent political magazine issued a stark warning Thursday to the Republican Party about President-elect Donald Trump.

National Review writer Noah Rothman warned Republicans to think very carefully about their own careers before confirming Trump's more controversial appointment picks, such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for attorney general.

“In the strictest constitutional terms, Trump does not, in fact, ‘run the show’ in the upper chamber of Congress,” Rotham wrote. “But even if the legislative GOP is eager to defer to the will of the voters and give Trump carte blanche to do as he pleases, there’s a difference between being eager and being politically suicidal."

Trump has also said he'd like former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (R-HI) to serve as director of national intelligence and Fox News personality Pete Hegseth to be his secretary of defense.

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“When it comes to saving Trump from his worst instincts," Rothman admitted, "the GOP only has so much bandwidth.”

But, he added that Congressional Republicans “will have to pick their battles,” and that bowing down to the incoming president’s whims “will do him, themselves, their party, and the country no favors."

Trump would be better served, he argued, if Gaetz was vetted as aggressively as possible – “an act of essential political hygiene,” Rothman added that would help unearth any damning information about the appointee.

The conservative writer concluded his piece by telling readers that the country is still evenly split as far as ideology and that the GOP won’t do itself any good by “letting the sycophants in his orbit, for whom no Trump idea is a bad idea."

GOP senators, he noted, "would be wise to lean into that boring institutionalism, even if it makes them a foil for Trump’s biggest boosters. The alternative is failure — his and theirs alike."