Trump still picks front-runners despite criticism — and ‘Morning Joe’ rally

If you take a step back – take a few steps back – it’s easy to understand what Donald Trump is doing.

Why has he deliberately stoked media firestorms over controversial nominees like Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, and to a lesser extent Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.?

The short answer is that the president-elect will not run again and he wants these appointees to disrupt – or blow up the departments they will be in charge of. And if they don’t have the usual credentials, if they haven’t managed a big organization, he doesn’t give you anything.

But wouldn’t it serve his purposes better to appoint equally disturbing Cabinet members who don’t have the baggage of Matt Gaetz? But would they have unquestionable integrity?

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Even skeptical members of his inner circle have no choice but to let Trump be Trump.

If Gaetz were to become attorney general, for example, he would fire FBI director Chris Wray rather than Trump being a bad guy.

The thinking in Trump World is that the Senate cannot reject more than two nominees. So even if Gaetz, who doesn’t seem to have the votes, gets rejected, and maybe Hegseth too, everyone wins, including Kennedy and Gabbard.

And wouldn’t it be difficult for the Republican Senate, after such rejection, to be forced to accept the nominees, given the magnitude of Trump’s victory? Is this 4-dimensional chess?

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was on the plane, along with Gaetz, when Trump offered the former congressman the AG job. Whether Wiles, who ran a tightly organized campaign, knew it or not, he was powerless to stop it.

Privately, some of Trump’s advisers are opposed to more radioactive choices, but they also know the boss is getting what he wants.

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Incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a non-Trump supporter and former opponent of Trump, is considered unlikely to go along with the recess appointment, which would abrogate the chamber’s constitutional role of advisory and consent.

The new reporting confused things for Gaetz and Hegseth, a decorated military veteran and Fox weekend host who once held the Pentagon.

The Washington Post quoted Hegseth’s lawyer as saying that he paid the female accuser who said he raped her in 2017, as part of a non-disclosure agreement, to sink the nominee under any other president. Hegseth, apparently drunk, says the meeting in his hotel room was consensual; the 30-year-old woman was at the Conservative conference with her husband and young children.

Speaker Johnson backed down from pressure to release the Ethics Committee report on Gaetz. (Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In the case of Gaetz, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson does not want the ethics committee’s report released, since the man has resigned from his position. Does anyone doubt that if this were a Democrat, he would take the opposite position and accuse the nominee of being a traitor?

In any case, a lawyer for several women suing for sexual misconduct told ABC that two of his clients said Gaetz paid them for sex. And he plans more interviews.

Attorney Joel Leppard said in his testimony to the House, employees “put Venmo payments up on the screen and asked about them. And my clients repeatedly testified, ‘What was this payment?’ ‘That was sexual.'” .

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Leppard had previously said that one of his clients had also watched Gaetz have sex with a young child.

John Clune, another attorney for a woman who claims Gaetz slept with a minor while in high school, called Gaetz’s appointment “a perverse development in a really dark series of events.”

And as CNN noted, one of the teenage girls said she slept with Gaetz on the air hockey table, according to her testimony.

Reporting on Gaetz’s alleged past has further complicated what was already a lengthy attorney general nomination process. (Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

One thing is certain: Trump continues to support both nominees. He will not back down.

However, if Kamala Harris had won the election, I would have considered her nominees the same way. A number of Trump supporters on the internet have accused me of Trump Derangement Syndrome for bringing together highly conflicting candidates, which is funny because the president-elect gave me two interviews in 10 months, one a few weeks before the election, and he told me both were fine.

Meanwhile, Trump’s decision to meet with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who have embarrassed him for the past seven years, was a very good move. They both applied, and Trump was big enough to grant them an audience at Mar-a-Lago — a truly remarkable development.

As they explained yesterday on “Morning Joe:”

“We talked about a lot of things, including abortion, mass deportations, threats of political punishment against political opponents and the media. We talked about that very well,” Scarborough said.

“It will not surprise anyone who watches this show, who watched it in the last year or in the last ten years, that we did not see eye to eye on many issues and we told him that.”

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What they did agree on, Brzezinski said, was “restarting communication.”

He noted that his father, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, “used to talk to world leaders with whom he and the United States disagreed greatly. That’s a job shared by journalists and analysts alike. We haven’t spoken to Trump since March of 2020, other than his personal phone call that Joe made after the attempt on his life -Butler, Pennsylvania.”

Trump was “happy and cheerful” and “seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.”

“Morning Joe” co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough angered liberals on social media after meeting President-elect Donald Trump. (Getty Images)

As for the expected liberal backlash from meeting a man they described as a fascist, Mika replied: “Why don’t we do that?”

Trump later told Fox’s Brooke Singman: “There were a lot of things that were discussed, and I really appreciated the fact that they wanted to communicate openly. In many ways, it’s too bad it wasn’t done a long time ago…

“To Make America Great Again, it’s just as important, if not more important, to have a free, fair and open media or press.”

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Trump also said of his meeting with the MSNBC husband and wife that they “congratulated me on running a ‘great and flawless, history book’ campaign, which I believe it was, but it was also a campaign that I worked on long and hard – maybe longer and harder than any president in history.”

“We talked about different members of the Cabinet – both announced and to be announced. As expected, they liked a lot, but not all. The meeting ended in a positive way, and we agreed to talk in the future.” Here’s an olive branch: “I expect this will happen to others in the media, even those who have been very hostile.”

Trump said he “has an obligation to the American public, and to our country itself, to be open and available to the media.”

“If it’s not handled properly, that will end.”

President-elect Trump has quickly put the media in a carrot-and-stick situation – treat him well this time, otherwise, his openness to answering questions may quickly come to an end. (Jovanny Hernandez/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images)

So there you have it, a carrot and a stick.

The sentences came fast and furious.

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“Byron York – Annals of shameness: They called Trump a traitor, and more, and then, just 22 days after his ‘Nazi-like’ rally, they flew to Florida for an audience. Afterward, they said, ‘We. didn’t see eye to eye on many issues, ‘ but they want to ‘restart communication.’ What?”

Steve Cortes – “It’s hard to get over how dishonest these two are. Mika and Joe have been crying for months that Trump is a ‘fascist’ who will ‘end democracy.’ Now that he’s elected – and very popular – they visit him as if it’s just coffee with an opposition politician???”

I couldn’t deny much. The meeting, which may not be related to the ratings, means that they will be able to reach out to their former friend and, they say, criticize him when they think he is wrong.

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Who wants to hear four more years of Trump-bashing, which didn’t work? This way they can report what the next president says and take action. And with Trump vowing to reach out to some hostile outlets, I hope the deal will continue.

Footnote: Trump has nominated former Congressman Sean Duffy, producer of “Bottom Line” on FOX Business, as Secretary of Transportation.