The latest
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Elon Musk is getting a crash course in the world of President-elect Donald Trump.
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Trump worked to fill out his cabinet, after picking Florida’s Pam Bondi to replace Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general.
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The Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is staying strategically silent over Trump’s cabinet picks. “Why get in the middle of a food fight?” one Democrat said.
It seemed like a story that could unfold only on the eve of a second Trump era: A congressman, embattled by allegations of sex-trafficking a minor, was chosen to run the Department of Justice, the same agency that had once investigated him.
Its end, though, came a little more conventionally. When gravity exerted its pull on that now-former congressman, Matt Gaetz, he reached for a tried-and-true excuse that has softened the landing of many nominees who failed before him, albeit for less shocking reasons.
He used the D-word.
“While the momentum was strong,” Gaetz wrote on X, “it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.”
The reason for aborted cabinet nominations — as well as failed judicial nominations and the early departure of elected officials — is often not, according to the nominees themselves, explained directly by scandal, errors in judgment or personal failure. The problem is not them.
The issue, they say, is that the public has gotten distracted.
To call oneself a distraction is to acknowledge a problem — a bump in the cabinet-forming road — without quite admitting guilt or responsibility. It is a way of minimizing the drama by chalking a failed nomination up to the news media and the collective attention span. It’s a euphemism that covers all manner of sin in Washington, and one that Gaetz is now hoping will stretch to explain his problems, too.
“It’s like, ‘Mistakes were made,’” said James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, referring to another boilerplate explanation for political misfortune. “Oh, really? Tell me about it!”
