The GOP Establishment Is A Greater Threat To Trump’s Agenda Than Democrats

Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for attorney general on Thursday. It was an early setback for President-elect Donald Trump that confirms the greatest threat to his agenda isn’t Democrats, but establishment Republicans.

Apparently there were at least four GOP senators staunchly opposed to confirming Gaetz as attorney general: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and John Curtis of Utah. Assuming all Democrat senators voted against him, that would have put Gaetz one vote shy of confirmation.

The corporate media, along with a cadre of Never Trump commentators on the right, boasted about the defeat of Gaetz’s nomination, citing widely discredited sexual allegations against him as evidence that he was unfit to lead the Justice Department. Never mind that those allegations have always been comically thin.

Indeed, as my colleague Mollie Hemingway laid out in these pages recently, the entire campaign to smear Gaetz as a “child sex trafficker” was from the outset a giant psy-op and fraud. After an 18-month investigation by the Biden Justice Department, no charges were filed against Gaetz because the two central witnesses in the probe had serious credibility problems.

But that didn’t stop House Democrats from launching an ethics probe that relied on these same sources and their unsubstantiated claims about Gaetz. They dragged their probe out for more than a year as part of an ongoing effort to sideline and silence Gaetz, who had been one of the most effective voices in Congress calling out the corruption of the Justice Department. (Read more from “The GOP Establishment Is A Greater Threat To Trump’s Agenda Than Democrats” HERE)

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr