Was the Matt Gaetz pick Trump playing ‘4-D chess’?

Barely a week after he was announced as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for U.S. attorney general, MAGA firebrand Matt Gaetz has withdrawn himself from contention for the post. Officially, Gaetz said on X (formerly Twitter) that his “confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.” Unofficially, The New York Times reported that the votes in the Senate simply were not there: Republicans are set to hold a 53-47 Senate majority come January, but there were at least four implacable “no” votes from Republicans. Interestingly, one of the widely reported “no” votes apparently was outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., an inveterate MAGA foe.

Many of my fellow conservative lawyers panned the Gaetz pick on the grounds of his lacking the relevant “credentials” or not being “qualified” for the post of the nation’s top law enforcement official. I was not necessarily one of them, although Gaetz was not anywhere my own list of best attorney general picks. Given the sexual misconduct ethics controversy surrounding Gaetz and the fact that he is known to have many enemies on both sides of the aisle, Gaetz’s confirmation fight was always going to be an uphill slog. The political capital the transition team and incoming administration would have needed to expend to get Gaetz across the finish line in the Senate was an obvious distraction from the substantive “America First” agenda, which must hit the ground running come January.

In fact, Gaetz may have played his hand perfectly. By immediately resigning from Congress after being tapped for attorney general, Gaetz has effectively stopped the House Ethics Committee from releasing its much-anticipated report on his alleged sexual misconduct and drug use. If he runs for governor of Florida in 2026, as he is widely believed to be considering, he can credibly say he was Trump’s first pick to be attorney general of the United States. And he gets a good excuse to resign from being a U.S. congressman, a job he apparently disliked. If the consummate “Florida man” wants to come home to Florida, where his father is a former president of the state Senate and is once again a reelected state senator, Gaetz the younger now has a good reason to do so.

Later on Thursday, after Gaetz announced his withdrawal from contention for attorney general, Trump announced he is now selecting Pam Bondi, the former two-term Florida attorney general, as his pick for U.S. attorney general. Bondi was not necessarily on many legal eagles’ shortlist for the post – but then again, neither was Gaetz. And Bondi, like Gaetz, adds yet another Floridian to the still-growing tally of Floridians tapped by the Trump-Vance transition team to high-profile posts.

But the rapidity with which Trump announced Bondi after Gaetz withdrew his own nomination does add further cause for speculation: Was all this planned all along? Was this elaborate exercise in musical chairs an actual instance of Trumpian “4-D chess”?

Maybe. The reality was that there was little to no chance that Gaetz was ever going to get confirmed. He is too controversial, has made too many enemies, has too many alleged skeletons in his closet and was always going to lack any GOP establishment support. It really does seem likelier than not that Trump named Gaetz for attorney general to give him a viable off-ramp from the House, allowing him to salvage his reputation from the menacing House Ethics Committee report and permitting him to more freely seek his next post – quite possibly governor of Florida.

From Trump’s perspective, he has thus killed two birds with one stone. First, he has demonstrated reciprocal loyalty to an arch-MAGA loyalist, Gaetz, and permitted him the ability to play his difficult political hand as well as he could possibly have played it. Second, Bondi’s confirmation fight now looks like a genuine breeze. The Gaetz announcement caught so many off-guard, ruffled so many feathers and was vociferously opposed by so many that anyone – literally anyone – who Trump picked next, after the Gaetz nomination inevitably failed, would have looked calm, cool and sober by comparison.

That is certainly the case now for Bondi, a former two-term attorney general from the nation’s third-largest state. Perhaps it will also be the case for some of Trump’s other more controversial nominees besides attorney general, such as Pete Hegseth (secretary of defense), Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (secretary of health and human services). After all, from this perspective: “At least they aren’t Matt Gaetz!”

Many have made fun of Trump and his fans, going all the way back to the 2016 campaign, by mocking the notion that he could be savvy enough to play “4-D chess.” But the maestro of Mar-a-Lago might have actually done it for real this time.