How Republicans can help save Trump’s presidency

It may already be too late.

It’s T minus 62 days until Donald Trump becomes president again and his presidency is already in trouble. A flurry of ill-advised and poorly conceived nominations threaten to undermine the new Trump Administration before it even starts.

Donald Trump famously claimed to hire the best people, but many of the nominations for his new Administration are unqualified and poorly vetted sycophants and hangers on. Robert F. Kennedy, the conspiracy minded Democrat is only the worst and most well known pick. Matt Gaetz’s appointment to attorney general seems to have been engineered in part to help him escape an upcoming House ethics report detailing his alleged sex with underage girls. Defense Department nominee Pete Hegspeth was also accused of sexual assault and was revealed to have paid his accuser to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The chief qualification for Trump’s solicitor general nominee seems to be that he served as Trump’s lawyer in the presidential immunity case.

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Trump is not draining the swamp. He’s installing his own swamp creatures, and apparently attempting to cover up possible actual crimes committed by some of them.

It’s going to get worse. Presidents typically appoint about 4,000 people to various positions. With Trump already placing dregs into high-profile jobs, I can only imagine how badly unqualified his appointees to lesser jobs will be.

And that’s not even considering the Project 2025 reinstatement of Schedule F government employees, which would allow Trump to fire large numbers of career bureaucrats and replace them with… who knows who he would replace them with? Recently pardoned January 6 convicts? VIP pass holders from campaign rallies? Random people off the street?

I think one thing is going to be true: The more jobs that Trump has to fill, the worse the overall quality of his appointees will be.

The poor quality of top cabinet appointments, which require Senate confirmations, is obviously why the Trump transition team wants to bypass the Senate with recess appointments. If we go far enough down the list, many lesser jobs don’t require confirmation at all.

The fact that the Trump team is skipping FBI vetting of some appointees makes the problem even worse. We literally don’t know how bad and dangerous some Trump officials will be.

Republicans have a chance to set the tone for the second Trump presidency by reining in Trump before he goes farther off the rails. There are a couple of reasons to draw the line here. First and most obvious, if Trump doesn’t have dependable and competent people, his government is not going to be dependable and competent. That’s especially true if he follows through with firing the careerist employees who make government agencies run smoothly.

The second reason is that Trump’s self-destructive tendencies are well known. Left to his own devices and impulses, Trump will turn his second term into an orgy of self-indulgence and corruption. This is not how we get good - or even acceptable - government.

Unfortunately, Republicans seem poised to knuckle under to Trump’s power grab. John Thune, the incoming Senate Majority Leader, recently told FoxNews that recess appointments were “on the table” if Democrats try to block Trump’s nominees.

Early indications are that some of Trump’s nominees, particularly Gaetz and Kennedy, will face a difficult confirmation process with Republicans as well as Democrats. In the past, however, Republicans have often clucked and grumbled about Trump’s behavior but then quietly backed him when the time came. It would not surprise me if that turned out to be the case here as no Republican will want to break ranks to oppose the popular-within-the GOP new president.

Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) was kidding on the square when he recently said, “If Donald Trump says, ‘jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our head.” The comment was reported by Punchbowl News and is uncomfortably accurate. Don’t expect congressional Republicans to be a check and balance on Trump.

Letting Trump run amok with no accountability isn’t doing him any favors. Keeping Trump focused and tethered to reality is the only way to salvage the next four years to any extent. If Trump gets his way, the likely result will be large Democratic gains and the end of any semblance of a conservative agenda. I’d be willing to wager that it would also mean another impeachment at some point.

Keeping Trump on course and out of trouble won’t be easy, and the Republicans who do it won’t be appreciated, Trump views anything less than full-throated Nehls-level adoration as a betrayal. That’s true even if Trump is being constrained for his own good. This is a man who thinks presidents can do “whatever I want.” And that was before the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.

There is already no chance that Trump’s second tenure will be the conservative utopia that some Republicans expect. Trump is already well on the way to turning his second term into a flaming train wreck, and left to his own devices, that’s exactly what he will do. The only chance of avoiding a disaster is for Republicans to stand up to Trump and keep him from wandering off into lawlessness and vengeance.

The problem with this strategy is that the next time Republicans hold Trump accountable will be the first.

Brace yourself.

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