The Memo: Gaetz seen as Trump pick most in danger of failing

President-elect Trump has sparked a Washington guessing game by selecting several controversial nominees for high-level posts.

The question is whether one or more of his picks will be denied confirmation by the Senate.

Most insiders see four Trump picks in particular as being controversial. 

They are former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) as attorney general, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) as director of national intelligence, media personality Pete Hegseth as Defense secretary and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary.

There are, to be sure, other Trump picks that divide opinion, including former World Wrestling Entertainment Chief Executive Linda McMahon to be Education secretary, and TV personality and former Senate candidate Mehmet Oz to administer Medicare and Medicaid.

But it is the initial quartet that are in the vanguard of controversy.

The Washington consensus is that Gaetz is in the most danger.

The list of vulnerable nominees “starts with Gaetz,” said Douglas Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee. “He is on my TV screen right now, and it’s just expected, from what we already know, that the allegations about him are going to be very serious and very alarming.”

Specifically, allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior have swirled around Gaetz for some time.

A previous Justice Department probe produced no criminal charges, and Gaetz denies all wrongdoing. 

But there is enormous scrutiny over a House Ethics Committee investigation into Gaetz, which officially ended when he resigned his seat immediately upon being nominated by Trump.

The committee has no jurisdiction to investigate people who are no longer sitting members of Congress. But Democratic senators — and at least one Republican — have called for the committee’s report to be released.

Their quest had a setback Wednesday. 

“There is not an agreement by the committee to release the report,” Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters following a roughly two-hour meeting of the panel. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had previously expressed his opposition to the report being released.

But that’s unlikely to be the end of Gaetz’s troubles. 

Many in Washington expect the panel’s report to leak. Even if it does not, the past few days have added specificity to the damaging allegations. 

A lawyer representing two women who testified to the panel says his clients were paid for sex by Gaetz. Furthermore, one of those women, according to the lawyer, says she saw Gaetz having sex with a 17-year-old when Gaetz was in his mid-30s.

Furthermore, a handful of Republican senators have already expressed significant misgivings about Gaetz, including Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska). Republicans will have a 53-47 Senate majority once the new Congress convenes, meaning any Trump nominee can afford to lose no more than three votes, assuming all Democrats also vote against them.

Trump has so far stood behind his pick of Gaetz, and his team insists the former congressman will be confirmed in the end. In an additional show of support, Vice President-elect JD Vance accompanied Gaetz to private meetings with Republican senators Wednesday.

Republican sources nevertheless are consistent in the view that Gaetz is the most likely Trump nominee to fall. 

They also suggest that, if he does, a single rebuff might be as far as Republican senators are willing to go in defying a president-elect who has just won the White House comfortably. Trump is renowned for his willingness to go after people who cross him, including those within his own party.

“It feels to me like they may be able to reject one of his nominees, but maybe not more than one,” said Matt Mackowiak, a GOP strategist and the chair of the Travis County, Texas, Republican Party.

Mackowiak added, in terms of Trump’s most controversial quartet of nominees:

“I think the most likely scenario is that they are all confirmed, except Gaetz. I think the second most likely scenario is that they are just all confirmed. And I think the third most likely scenario is that two or three are not confirmed.”

Still, the Senate is sometimes reluctant to simply cede to the wishes of a president, and much could hinge on whether further damaging information emerges.

In the case of Hegseth, for example, The Washington Post revealed earlier this week that he had paid a woman who had accused him of sexually assaulting her as part of a nondisclosure agreement.

The incident was reported to police at the time, and no charges were pressed. Hegseth’s lawyer has adamantly denied any wrongdoing on his client’s behalf, asserting that the woman was in fact “the aggressor in initiating sexual activity," and contending that Hegseth paid her to protect his media career.

The mere existence of such a case is bad news for any nominee. But so far, few Republicans seem ready to predict it would lead to Hegseth’s downfall as a nominee.

Kennedy’s nomination is controversial, in a different way, among the wider world, especially within the medical community. Kennedy is a longtime vaccine skeptic with a whole host of provocative remarks, including suggesting a link between vaccines and autism — a claim that has been debunked.

But there are not many signs so far that Republican senators are willing to buck Trump to block Kennedy.

Gabbard, the Democratic-congresswoman-turned-Republican, is in a category all of her own. 

There are no personal peccadilloes around Gabbard akin to the allegations that dog Gaetz and Hegseth. But her history of remarks that are unusually sympathetic to Russia could cause heartburn, especially to Republicans with a more traditional, hawkish view of foreign policy.

None of the quartet can take their confirmation as assured.

But Gaetz seems, by some distance, to be out on the flimsiest limb.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.