Jonathan Chait writes:

If you had predicted before the election that Donald Trump’s second administration would seek to hand some of the most sensitive and powerful roles in government to a Fox News personality (Pete Hegseth, nominated for defense secretary), a recurring Fox News guest who is also featured frequently on Russian state-controlled media (Tulsi Gabbard, nominated for director of national intelligence), and the target of an ongoing House Ethics Committee sexual-misconduct investigation (Matt Gaetz, nominated for attorney general), you might have been accused of fearmongering. The notion would have sounded like a beyond-worst-case scenario cooked up to scare moderates out of voting for Trump. And yet that scenario is now upon us.

Following the announcement of Trump’s unconventional slate of Cabinet picks, serious Republicans attempted to make clear that they are still in charge and won’t let things get out of hand. The Gaetz pick, in particular, drew immediate derision. Gaetz “will never get confirmed,” an unnamed Republican senator told Fox News. Senator John Cornyn rolled his eyes and let out “an audible snort,” while Gaetz’s Republican House colleagues reportedly gasped when they heard the news.

Maybe the Senate caucus really will draw the line somewhere—perhaps at Gaetz, perhaps at one or both of Gabbard and Hegseth. But there is something disconcertingly familiar in the confident yet carefully hedged assertions that the old-line GOP will stop this madness. It is exactly what Republicans said would stop Trump from receiving the nomination in 2015, from winning the presidency in 2016, and from reclaiming the party’s leadership after the ignominy of January 6. “I don’t think he’s a serious candidate,” Senator Lisa Murkowski said yesterday, of Gaetz. That is almost a verbatim repetition of what elected Republicans once said about Trump.

At every step along the way, Republican elites have assumed that they could stop Trump later. But when the decisive moment arrived, they discovered that the cost of confrontation had gotten higher, not lower. Opening a breach with a man whom the base had come to admire, and then worship, would imperil their own ambitions, not just Trump’s. [Continue reading…]