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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

Wait. Do I have to laugh if it’s not funny?

You don’t have to laugh, no.

Oh, OK.

This is not some Stalinist dictatorship.

[LAUGHS]:

This is not Mar-a-Lago. Express your true opinions.

From “New York Times” Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat, and this is “Matter of Opinion.”

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m joined this week by my colleague and fellow columnist, David French. Hey, David.

Ross, it’s great to be with you.

I’m so glad you could be with me because this is kind of a funny situation. We actually — yes, you can laugh.

Yeah, no, I’m already laughing, Ross. I’m already laughing.

God laughs at all podcasting plans. And so apparently does Donald Trump, because we actually taped an entire “Matter of Opinion” episode earlier this week talking about what a second Trump administration might look like, with a lot of discussion of what was then a rush of White House cabinet appointments and nominations.

But then no sooner had we finished taping the episode, then President-elect Trump announced two more really big ones — Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. And we thought we had to talk about this.

And unfortunately, Carlos and Michelle have escaped to a beach somewhere, I assume, so I was left alone. But I knew I could count on you, David, with your law and foreign policy background and your deep devotion to Matt Gaetz to talk about these picks in particular and what they say about how Trump intends to govern. So that’s what we’re going to talk about.

Well, I’m always warming up in the bullpen, Ross.

That’s right.

You just have to give the sign.

You’re the Dan Quisenberry of Trump era podcasting.

[LAUGHS]:

OK, that was a deep cut for our Kansas City audience. Hi, Kansas City.

I appreciate it.

Yeah. So and one final note — we are taping Thursday afternoon. This episode, God willing, through the administrations of our harried producers, will be out Friday morning. But God knows what will happen in the next five hours, so we apologize for any news we’ve missed.

So let’s start with the Gaetz appointment. David, he is notable, unsurprisingly, for an attorney general pick for being one of Donald Trump’s allies and fierce defenders. Is there anything else you would say that he’s known for?

[LAUGHS]: Well, yeah. You would say that he is known for being investigated for, allegedly, having sexual relations with an underage girl. He is known for allegedly speaking quite openly and proudly about his sexual exploits, including, allegedly, showing pictures of women that he slept with, nude pictures to colleagues.

He is definitely also known for disrupting the House rather dramatically, when he initiated the coup that toppled the House Speaker after the 2022 midterms, ultimately leading to Mike Johnson being the current Speaker of the House. And I guess the best way to describe him, Ross, is that he is a purely pugilistic political figure and a extraordinarily libertine personal figure who, by the way, has barely any legal experience at all.

Let’s just throw that in there.

He has a law degree — which is more than I have, right?

Yes, came out of law school, practiced for around two years before he then entered the Florida legislature. So he may be one of the least qualified attorney general nominees ever, just on the basis of his experience, or lack thereof, in addition to these other things that I talked about.

Yes, yes. The other things are notable.

Bad, gross. Yes.

Yeah, no, I think it’s fair to say that he’s known for being a gross figure.

Mm-hmm.

There is a House Ethics investigation involving him, which the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on Friday on whether to release their report. But now that release is suspended because Gaetz has resigned from the House, which has led to various complicated theories about how he isn’t really trying to be attorney general, that this was some sort of favor from Trump to him that let him leave the House to set himself up for his next political act.

But that sort of six-dimensional chess theory runs aground on a certain amount of reporting just in the last 24 hours from people saying, no, look, obviously, it’s an open question whether he can be confirmed, but Trump definitely wants him to be confirmed.

And that reporting includes, I think, a particularly striking quote from Marc Caputo, a Floridian reporter, who now reports for The Bulwark. He had a quote basically from a Trump advisor, an anonymous quote, saying, “None of the other candidates, none of the attorneys had what Trump wants. And they didn’t talk like Gaetz,” the advisor said.

“Everyone else looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit”— pardon my language. “Gaetz was the only one who said, yeah, I’ll go over there and start cutting, F-word, deleted, heads.” So clearly, that’s what Donald Trump wants from this appointment. What do you think’s going to happen next?

[LAUGHS]: That’s a great question, Ross, because it’s very clear from some of the early reporting that a number of senators are, shall we say, skeptical of this appointment. But there is also another factor looming in the background, which is, OK, wait a minute. If it’s not Matt Gaetz, who is it? Is it Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who’s under investigation himself?

So there is a lot of concern that what this pick is, is signal of, this is the kind of person Trump wants as an attorney general pick. And he’s just going to keep volleying up to us the same kind of person.

However, if the Senate is going to exercise a true advise and consent — not just consent, but advise and consent — role here, it should be able to stand up and say, this person is grotesquely unqualified. We need to see — the American people need to see this House Ethics report before there’s a single vote in the Senate.

But Ross, this is going to be a big test for Senate Republicans. The question is how much are they going to view themselves as team Trump versus how much are they going to adopt the role envisioned for them in the process by the founders as an independent check on Trump? And that’s the question. And right now, I’m not that optimistic that they’re going to act as a check, as opposed to act as team members.

And so the other thing that I want to mention about him, just real briefly, there’s no indication from Matt Gaetz’s career that he is just even competent enough to run an organization like this. One of the reasons the American people are so negative about American institutions is because of a sheer lack of competence that is consistently displayed in American institutions.

And the last name that I would think of to, say, right the ship on a massive, complex organization, to just make it competent and good at its job, that last name that comes to my mind is Matt Gaetz.

Yeah, so let me put a couple points to you on those questions. So I agree that Gaetz has no, as far as I can tell, relevant managerial experience that would be relevant to running the Department of Justice.

I do think that Gaetz is smart. I think that he is a sort of savvy, tactical politician who is different categorically, in certain ways, from some of his MAGA-esque allies in the House. I think he has more savvy and more of a sense of what he’s actually doing, for better or worse.

I do think he has somewhat of a kind of principled issue profile, interestingly, that is kind of — he is a libertine, obviously, and it’s sort of a libertarian issue profile. He’s a libertarian in his voting record on everything from drug policy to surveillance, these kinds of things. It’s sort of an interesting mix.

So I just wanted to mention those two things because they are, I think, part of the Gaetz package and relevant to thinking about what he might be thinking here. But then I think from the start, from the point of view of people worried about abuses of power in a second Trump term, the attorney general office has obviously been kind of a reasonable locus of anxiety, right? Like —

Yes.

— Trump campaigned on the premise that the Department of Justice was politicized and weaponized against him and that he was going to act against it, that there would be purges, and heads would roll and so on, with the sort of further implication, I think that a lot of people drew, that the DOJ would be used against his political enemies as he felt it was used against him.

Now, if that is your major concern about what might happen with the DOJ, obviously, there is a sort of high-minded institutionalist case that Matt Gaetz should not be attorney general. I do wonder, though — maybe I’m being perverse here — but I do wonder if that is your worry, in a way, are you maybe not better off with a sort of lightning rod, performative showman bound really tightly to Trump without significant institutional experience in that role, as opposed to a more conventional figure, who we can assume could only get the job if he’d promised certain things to Trump, but might actually be a little bit more effective at using the DOJ inappropriately for Trump’s ends?

Like, can you see from a point of view of not wanting a successfully politicized DOJ? I can almost see a case for just, like, yeah, this is the kind of person Trump is sending up. He campaigned on this. Let’s see how it goes.

So in other words, the incompetence is a feature, not a bug.

Incompetence, but also like, there is no tissue of neutrality around Gaetz, right? I mean, there’s always a certain illusion around the neutrality of the DOJ. Attorney generals are always, to some extent, creatures of the presidency. Janet Reno was not actually independent of Bill Clinton and so on, right?

Right.

So Trump wants to go further even maybe than the president’s brother as attorney general era that the Kennedys gave us, right? He wants a true creature. OK, don’t you want that to be sort of naked and overt so that the public can judge it fully, rather than, again, someone who’s draping it in some kind of constitutional theorizing?

Ross, you’re getting to, I think, which is going to be one of the key questions of the Trump administration, which is, how much should people try to throw their bodies in front of, obviously, terrible decisions? And so you had 2017, 2018, 2019, you had a culture in the White House and in the larger government where people were throwing their bodies in front of what they viewed to be impulsive or catastrophic or terrible Trump decisions.

And then by 2020, a lot of those people had been kind of cleared out. And then you’re beginning to get a lot of the same kind of conversation now. OK, should the Senate just go ahead and confirm him so that the American people can see what the Trump vision is for the DOJ? Isn’t that what they should do? Should they stop throwing their bodies in front of bad decisions?

And my bias is, you throw your body in front of the bad decision because the bad decision can have terrible consequences. The counterargument to that is, well, it’s the consequences of the bad decision that move us through this moment.

I don’t know that there’s a perfect answer to that, but I do think wherever the line is of when the Senate should say Trump gets his way versus we’re going to assert our independent judgment, wherever that line is, it’s far removed from this guy, from Matt Gaetz. This is the kind of pick that I don’t even know why the Senate has an advising role if it’s just going to roll over for this person.

Right, and one of the things — I mean, you’ve had a lot of commentary on this from people saying Trump is — he’s owning the libs. It’s started. The lib owning has begun. And in the case of Gaetz, as far as I can tell, the people being owned are all of the Republicans who hate him.

Yeah.

Liberals, obviously, don’t like Matt Gaetz, but I think he’s more of a hate figure inside the Republican caucus than he is on MSNBC. I think right now, you have Trump is giving Senate Republicans, in an odd way, an out, right? Like John Cornyn, I think just before we recorded this, said something to the effect of, well, we need to at least see what’s in the ethics report, right? So they may not. I think it’s totally possible Gaetz gets confirmed, but they can just reject him and say, we’re protecting President Trump from Gaetz’s own bad character.

Right.

So that may be where this goes, which, again, leaves open the underlying question of how beholden an AG should be to the president. All right, speaking of areas where Trump appointees have tended to, if not throw their bodies in front of the president, at least steer the president in the past, when we come back, we’re going to talk first about the Tulsi Gabbard appointment, but more generally, about the array of foreign policy picks Trump has made and what they tell us. So stay with us. We’ll be right back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And we’re back. So we’re going to turn from President-elect Trump’s attorney general pick to his foreign policy pick. Along with Matt Gaetz for attorney general, the big pick at the same time was former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence. I think clearly a kind of gesture to what you might call the anti-CIA wing of the Republican Party, also sort of anti-interventionist, paleoconservative, isolationist — you can choose your term.

Gabbard is only one of a number of foreign policy picks that Trump has made. And these include Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, Florida Representative Mike Waltz for national security advisor, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik for UN ambassador, and maybe, most notably, in terms of it being a Trumpian surprise, the Fox News host and combat veteran Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense.

Right.

So, David, before the Hegseth pick, certainly, and before the Gabbard pick as well, the foreign policy picks struck me as essentially a reprise of Trump’s first term, where what he did in foreign policy was not pick figures associated with Trumpian populism directly.

Obviously, all of the figures involved have adapted themselves to Trumpism, but on foreign policy, Rubio, Walz, and Stefanik are all what I would refer to — and maybe you disagree — as kind of mainstream Republican foreign policy hawks.

And in his first term, Trump basically worked his own kind of amoral realist calculations through a foreign policy team that was more conventional in its views. And it seems like that could be happening again. Now, Hegseth is a different case, and Gabbard is a different case. But I wanted to give that reaction and see what you thought about it.

Yeah, I would agree with that. So I live in this neighborhood. My neighborhood is 85 percent Republican, so I’m living in a very, very red part of America. And so I talk to Trump supporters just all the time in the course of my daily life. And what’s really interesting is seeing the dichotomy between MAGA and what you might call normie Republican.

And normie Republican basically takes the view that the real Donald Trump is the Donald Trump of 2017, 2018, 2019. That’s with Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State at the start — Mattis, McMaster, Kelly. And they look back at that time, and they’re nostalgic for it.

And so they looked at the 2024 election where Trump was saying pretty radical things about foreign policy, pretty radical things on a lot of fronts, and saying, he doesn’t mean that. That’s just Trump being Trump. That’s Trump’s bluster.

And those folks who believe that looked at the pick of Rubio, in particular — Stefanik as well — and said, look, these are........

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