OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Washington DC journalist Mark Halperin believes it is likely that President-elect Donald Trump will have even his most controversial picks confirmed, which will rankle the feathers of the Democrats and never-Trump Republicans who are furious with the picks.
He appeared on 2WayTV, where he said that Trump winning the popular vote may “change the calculation” of Republican senators who would be concerned about a backlash from their own voters if they stood in the way of his picks.
“No normal president” would have picked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be in charge of Health and Human Services after the DC temper tantrum that happened over his selecting Matt Gaetz for the role of U.S. attorney general, he said.
The journalist said that the president-elect knows that he ahs a mandate and is being shrewd in his picks.
“That’s not what we’re dealing with here. We’re dealing with almost five unfathomable choices for the normal rules,” the journalist said. “Tens of millions of Americans share Donald Trump’s beliefs about these departments and about what needs to be done.”
The president-elect has proposed the idea of “recess appointments” that can be approved when the Senate is not in session which would circumvent that traditional path that requires Senate approval for the picks.
“It now falls to John Thune (R-SD) and his fifty-two colleagues to decide what they want to do about this. There’s the prerogatives of the Senate to not be rolled by the executive branch. There’s individual senators’ views about the fitness of these five and others to serve in these jobs. But there’s also the reality that it’s an incoming Republican president who won the popular vote. You hear Democrats already saying Trump is forfeiting his mandate, he’s forfeiting his political capital, he’s dooming his term in the first one hundred days and any legislative progress by asking the senators to devote time to deciding up or down. I continue to put my finger on the side of, I think it’s more likely all five will be confirmed than most people do,” he said.
WATCH:
His most controversial pick may be the selection of Gaetz for attorney general.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has announced that Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has resigned effective immediately.
“I think out of deference to us, he issued his resignation letter effective immediately, of Congress. That caught us by surprise a little bit. But I asked him what the reasoning was, and he said, well, you can’t have too many absences. So under Florida State law, there’s about an eight-week period to select and fill in a vacancy,” Johnson told reporters.
“And so by doing so today, that allows me I’ve already placed a call to Governor DeSantis in Florida and said, let’s start the clock. He’s in Italy at the moment. And so we’re going to talk first thing in the morning about this. And if we start the clock now, if you do the math, we may be able to fill that seat as early as January 3rd when we take the new oath of office for the new Congress,” he added.
It came after President-elect Donald Trump nominated Gaetz for Attorney General of the United States.
“It is my Great Honor to announce that Congressman Matt Gaetz, of Florida, is hereby nominated to be The Attorney General of the United States,” Trump said in a statement.
“Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice.”
In response, Gaetz said on X; “It will be an honor to serve as President Trump’s Attorney General!”
