Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a judiciary committee member and lawyer who was sure to be one of Attorney General Matt Gaetz‘s most unforgiving interrogators, believes President-elect Donald Trump‘s cabinet picks have signaled his authoritarian aims.
To be a successful autocrat in a government system with checks and balances, the authoritarian leader must effectively subjugate the branches of government possessing the ability to counter his power — in the U.S., that is the legislative and judicial branches.
Trump’s picks are “designed,” Whitehouse asserts, to subjugate Republicans in the Senate, forcing them to neglect their standards in order to install officials whose chief qualification is fealty to Trump, rather than experience and merit.
Whitehouse uses the legend of a potentate who is said to have built a two-foot-tall door as the entry to his chamber, so that those who importuned him were made first to crawl on their knees to curry favor.
Trump’s nose-thumbing picks — Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard among them — are a test to see which and how many Republican Senators will “get on their knees” for Trump and vote to confirm them.
About Trump’s crawl test… pic.twitter.com/Eke1tVH6JW
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) November 21, 2024
From Matt Gaetz’s high-pressure withdrawal from consideration for Attorney General, Whitehouse concludes that “one way or another a significant contingent or Republican Senators refused to join the crawl cohort and stuck with the stand-up cohort.”
Whitehouse congratulates his Senate colleagues who stood up to a choice even some Republicans called “reckless.” Whitehouse believes the resistance to Gaetz signals a willingness among Republicans to confront Trump in the future also, which remains, of course, to be seen.