The Trumpian Attitude at the Heart of the Gaetz Report

There is so much repellently sleazy behavior documented in the House Ethics Committee report about Matt Gaetz that a reader has to stop every few pages to look away and focus on what still seems astounding: This is the man that Donald Trump wanted to be the attorney general of the United States, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the land, the leader of the Department of Justice.

Trump wanted to give that position to a man who paid at least half a dozen women for sex, according to the report, which was made public on Monday. And the violation of Florida’s prostitution law isn’t even the real depravity; the committee took pains to spell out the underlying implication of his actions: “Representative Gaetz took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity for which they received an average of a few hundred dollars after each encounter.”

Trump wanted to give the Justice Department to a man the committee says committed the statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl. A man who is accused of setting up a phony email account at his office in the House to buy illegal drugs, and who then used the drugs to facilitate sexual misconduct. A man who accepted impermissible gifts and plane trips, according to the report, and who used the power of his office to help a woman with whom he was having sex. A man whose conduct, according to his own colleagues of both parties, “reflects discreditably upon the House.”

And of course, on Trump himself.

Nonetheless, when you read through the details, you can see the commonality between the two men, and the reasons Trump held Gaetz in high esteem. It’s not just the contempt for women as disposable commodities for hire or plunder; it’s the contempt for the law.

Gaetz fought the committee’s investigation at every turn, and the report’s appendices are full of letters from him dripping with disdain at the process, completely indignant that he should even be asked to account for his actions. He blames his enemies in Washington for his plight, he blames the press, he says Democrats have done much worse, and he just lies and lies, denying allegations that are fully documented elsewhere in the text.

The report says Gaetz refused to supply the committee with the exculpatory evidence that he claimed he had, and refused to respond to subpoenas. His assertions “were nothing more than attempts to delay the Committee’s investigation,” the report said. And then there was his attempts to bully witnesses against him. “The committee had serious concerns that Representative Gaetz might retaliate against individuals who cooperated with the Committee,” the report said.

Does that sound familiar? It’s a summary of the conduct we’ve seen from the president-elect for years, whenever the law tries to make him responsible for his conduct. In many ways, these two men think the same way about authority, and in that sense, Gaetz would have been an ideal attorney general for the next administration.

Donald Trump’s private lawsuits against ABC News, CBS News and most recently The Des Moines Register are only the first phase of his promised battle to “straighten out the press.” Once he gets back in office next month, a far more troubling phase will begin: his promised effort to use government power to force reporters to reveal their sources for national security articles he doesn’t like.

Trump hasn’t been the least bit reticent about his plans. He has repeatedly said that reporters whose work relies on confidential government sources should simply be tossed in jail until they reveal the names of their contacts. The threat of prison rape, he says, will end journalistic stubbornness once and for all. The crudeness of that particular fantasy says a lot about Trump’s cast of mind, and it also shows how little he understands about the importance that reporters place on confidentiality. But the fights he is promising are real, and the financial costs could be ruinous for small or nonprofit news organizations.

Most important, the threats that federal agents will dig through phone records and use surveillance and brutality to find leakers will make it far more difficult for whistle-blowers to tell the truth about government abuses. Trump has already made it clear that fear will be one of the principal tools he uses to reshape Washington in his image. In particular, the fear of prosecution and investigation will be explicitly used to prevent exposure of corruption, incompetence or improper use of power.

That’s why the Senate should have passed the Press Act, a bill that would protect reporters from being forced by a court to reveal their sources of information. The measure had already unanimously passed the House, but on Nov. 20, Trump issued a social media edict demanding that “Republicans must kill this bill!”

When the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, tried to pass it by unanimous consent on Dec. 10, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, blocked it. Senate Democrats say that because of Trump’s demand, they could not get the Republican votes needed to attach the bill to the spending bill that has to be passed by Friday to avert a government shutdown.

For extreme partisans like Cotton, pursuing confidential sources is a right-wing priority, since in his mind all reporters are leftists with a grudge against Republicans. “The Press Act would undermine our national security and turn liberal reporters into a protected class,” he wrote on social media last week. In fact, the bill would protect all news organizations, regardless of whether they have a political ideology. Both Fox News and The New York Times were among 108 news organizations that signed a letter urging passage of the act that was written by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press. And the bill would allow aggressive reporting on the federal government no matter which party is in power.

If Republican senators were more concerned about the First Amendment than Trump’s dictates, they could still help Democrats pass the bill this year. But if not, and if reporters start going to jail next year, Congress will have more opportunities to stand up for the principles of the nation’s founders and prevent that abuse.

Sometimes it feels like white Christians are the only religious voting bloc with true sway in America. Conservative evangelicals in particular have a great deal of power in the Republican Party, thanks to their tight embrace of Donald Trump. I often hear people talk about how Democrats can win back some white Christian support, as if that should be the party’s priority in the coming years.

But with Democrats searching for their future, they’d be foolish to ignore a large and growing religious group that is already in their corner: the Nones.

Now nearly 30 percent of the population, the Nones include atheists, agnostics and people who say they’re no faith in particular. According to new data from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, 72 percent of the religiously unaffiliated voted for Kamala Harris. Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of P.R.R.I., shared a more granular breakdown of unaffiliated voters with me over email: 82 percent of atheists, 80 percent of agnostics and 64 percent of those who said they had no particular faith voted for Harris.

“When placed into context with our other findings from the 2024 post-election survey,” Deckman wrote, “we can see how distinct the unaffiliated are. They are almost three times as likely to report voting for Harris than Trump, and only Black Protestants reported voting for Harris at higher rates.”

Atheists and agnostics are not just Harris voters, they are also highly politically engaged. Last year, Ryan Burge, a political scientist and the author of the Graphs About Religion newsletter, put it plainly in a post called “Nobody Participates in Politics More Than Atheists”:

Here’s what I believe to be the emerging narrative of the next several decades: the rise of atheism and their unbelievably high level of political engagement in recent electoral politics. Let me put it plainly: Atheists are the most politically active group in American politics today and the Democrats (and some Republicans) ignore them at their own peril.

I think it would be pretty easy to galvanize these voters without alienating Democrats of faith: The party should focus on religious freedom as a bedrock of American society, and highlight the unpopular ways in which conservative Christians are trying to push their faith on everybody else, like bringing the Bible into public schools. Younger Americans are markedly less religious than older ones and it would be shortsighted for Democrats to dismiss that.

It may be that Chrystia Freeland could have resigned even more dramatically from Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada, though it would have taken something akin to kneeing him in public. But after the humiliation the prime minister visited on one of his most loyal and talented cabinet ministers, he should have seen it coming.

The bare bones are these: Freeland (whose husband is a reporter on the culture desk at The Times) was the deputy prime minister and finance minister in Canada. She was working on two critical projects: the fall economic statement to Parliament, which is a sort of midyear mini-budget, and the transition to a new president down south, who is threatening 25 percent tariffs on Canada, enough to throw her country into a recession.

Trudeau, meanwhile, was struggling to survive. After nine years in office, his popularity ratings were so low that one poll had him below Donald Trump, which in Canada says a lot. In an apparent effort to boost his ratings, he proposed a holiday from sales taxes and modest checks to lower-income taxpayers, measures that ran directly contrary to Freeland’s pledge to keep the deficit down. Then he made things worse by calling her on Friday and asking her to step down as finance minister to make room for a buddy of his — but only after she presented the economic statement. And he wanted her to continue working on the Trump transition.

Freeland was a brilliant journalist and author when Trudeau recruited her for the Liberal Party in 2013, and she served under him as minister of foreign affairs and of international trade before taking on finance. Throughout her stint in government, she remained staunchly loyal to Trudeau, even as his halo dimmed and controversies struck one after another. Until that call on Friday. Then it all came out.

In a resignation letter also posted on X, Freeland fumed that this was not the time for “costly political gimmicks,” when Canada needed all its reserves for a possible tariff war. Canadians, she declared, “know when we are working for them, and they equally know when we are focused on ourselves.” The current government, she said, would come to an end, but it would be defined for a generation by how it deals with what she called the “aggressive economic nationalism” looming in the United States, which she clearly wanted to counter more forcefully than Trudeau did.

It’s hard to see how Trudeau can weather this storm. Freeland’s accusations were just what the opposition Conservatives, currently way ahead of Trudeau’s Liberals in national polls, have been saying: that the prime minister is focused only on political survival. Liberals know they cannot win with Trudeau. The New Democratic Party, on whose support the Liberals rely for a majority in Parliament, is not saying whether it will support Trudeau in a no-confidence vote.

Trudeau, however, has insisted that he will stay on and lead his party in elections that must be held no later than October. As he later told a group of supporters, “It has not been an easy day.”

A friend of mine told me recently that her teenage daughter had been carried home from a party by friends after she slumped over abruptly. One minute, she was talking. The next minute, she’d passed out.

My friend had no doubt about what had happened: Someone had slipped a “roofie” in her daughter’s drink.

As the mother of a young girl, the story terrified me. You can teach your child right from wrong, but how do you protect her from a predator who is willing to poison her?

Druggings are far from new — remember Bill Cosby’s routine about Spanish fly? — but they seem to be more common now than ever, so much so that California enacted a law this summer that requires bars to offer test strips to make sure that drinks haven’t been spiked.

That’s why the allegations against Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, are so disturbing. It’s not just that he paid a woman he met at a California Federation of Republican Women’s convention in Monterey in 2017 an undisclosed sum for a nondisclosure agreement after she filed a police report alleging that he sexually assaulted her. It’s that she said she doesn’t remember much about it and told the police that she thinks she was drugged.

Hegseth insists the encounter was consensual and claims he paid her to keep her from going public with false accusations. But she reportedly traveled to the convention with her husband and two young kids, hardly the ideal circumstances for a voluntary tryst.

That’s the terrifying thing about these drugs. Rohypnol leaves the body within 36 to 72 hours. GHB is gone within 10 to 12 hours. If she had indeed been drugged with a substance like that, how could she prove it?

Hegseth told Senator Lindsey Graham last week that he would release his accuser from a confidential settlement agreement and allow her to testify, and I hope she has the courage to do so. She would have to undergo a battery of unfriendly questions from Hegseth’s partisans in the Senate, and it doesn’t help that Hegseth’s attorney is threatening to sue her if he is not confirmed.

But on behalf of all the parents who fear this happening to their daughters, the Senate cannot confirm Hegseth without getting to the bottom of what happened that night.

After more than a year of twisting in the wind, it is official: Adeel Mangi, President Biden’s nominee to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, will not become the nation’s first Muslim federal appellate judge. This was perhaps inevitable. Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, cut a deal with Republicans last month to abandon four appeals court nominees who didn’t have the votes to win in exchange for not obstructing the confirmation of about a dozen circuit court justices.

It was not surprising that Mangi, a Pakistani American corporate litigator with a strong record of community service, was the subject of anti-Muslim smears by Republicans. What really doomed his candidacy, however, was opposition from frontline Senate Democrats.

They claimed that their opposition was motivated not by anti-Muslim prejudice but by a second line of attack Republicans tried after numerous Jewish groups rushed to his defense, citing his extensive pro bono work on religious freedom cases. Mangi, Republicans claimed, with zero credible evidence, supported releasing prisoners convicted of killing police officers.

These attacks were without merit, and it is shameful that two Democratic senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both of Nevada, gave them any credence. The failure to confirm Mangi before Democrats lose their majority is yet another preview of the way capitulation, not courage, in the face of Trumpist forces will be the order of the day for some time to come.

Failed nominees to such offices often shuffle off pretty quietly. Mangi made a different and more courageous choice: He sent a blistering letter to Biden, thanking him for the nomination and support but decrying the process as a farce and excoriating the Democrats who abandoned his nomination:

I will not assume the worst possible motivation for their embrace of this attack. But to me that leaves two possibilities: that these Senators lack the wisdom to discern the truth, which exposes a catastrophic lack of judgment; or they used my nomination to court conservative voters in an election year, which exposes a catastrophic lack of principle.

The letter continues:

Our country faces an incoming tsunami of bigotry, hatred and discrimination. It targets Muslims, Arabs, Jews, Black people, the LGBTQ+ community and many others. And it always pretends to be something other than what it is. These forces are fueled not only by their proponents, but equally by the collaboration and silence of the spineless.

Reading this passionate letter made me think that Mangi would have made an excellent appellate judge, one much needed in this cruel new era. It is a shame he won’t get the chance.

New York City’s campaign finance system is one of the best of its kind in the nation at reducing the influence of big money in local politics, and the best way to ensure it stays that way is to keep Mayor Eric Adams and other shady politicians as far from it as possible. The Campaign Finance Board did just that on Monday when it barred Adams from receiving any public matching funds for his re-election campaign, after he was accused of blatantly abusing the system in a federal indictment in September.

But Adams never should have received matching funds for his initial campaign in 2021, and the city still has a few steps to take to prevent that kind of mistake from happening again.

The board’s action on Monday — which it attributed to “conduct detrimental to the matching funds program” by Adams — deprives the Adams campaign of as much as $4.3 million in matching funds, which could be a crippling blow in a race in which competitors are already lining up to challenge the mayor. In 2021, he received $10 million in public funds, and the federal indictment said some portion of that was improper, because Adams solicited illegal foreign campaign donations that were falsely attributed to local straw donors to get the city’s match.

If the finance board had agreed to Adams’s request for a match this year, it would have sent a pretty clear message to other politicians that there are no consequences for straw-donor fraud and that the city’s treasury is open for looting. “Access to public dollars is not an automatic privilege,” said Joanna Zdanys, who works on campaign finance issues at the Brennan Center for Justice, in a statement. “It must be earned through compliance with strict standards of accountability and transparency.”

But the board needs to improve its own accountability. In 2021, it spotted some questionable donations to the Adams campaign and asked the campaign for documentation. Adams ignored the request but got the matching funds anyway. City Councilman Lincoln Restler has proposed a new law that would cut off matching funds for politicians who ignore requests and would require the board to look more closely at money raised through intermediaries. The Council should make that a priority, even if it has to override a veto by Adams.

The mayor, meanwhile, is more occupied with bending the knee before Donald Trump than he is with leading the city, seemingly in the hopes that Trump will pardon him. On Monday, perhaps sensing a kinship with someone with a similar contempt for good governance, Trump said he would consider such a pardon. That may leave Adams free to run again without legal encumbrances, but at least the taxpayers won’t have to foot the bill for it.

One of the more moving stories in The Times this week is an account of the life of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare chief executive who was gunned down on Dec. 4 outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel.

Thompson “grew up in a working-class family in Jewell, Iowa,” a tiny farming community north of Des Moines, Amy Julia Harris and Ernesto Londoño report. “His mother was a beautician, according to family friends, and his father worked at a facility to store grain.” Thompson’s childhood was spent “going row by row through the fields to kill weeds with a knife, or working manual labor at turkey and hog farms.”

Those details are worth bearing in mind as some people seek to cast his killing as a tale of justified, or at least understandable, fury against faceless corporate greed. One ex-Times reporter, Taylor Lorenz, said she felt “joy” at the killing. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, offered that “violence is never the answer” but “people can only be pushed so far.” Pictures of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the murder of Thompson, have also elicited a fair amount of oohing and ahhing on social media over his toned physique and bright smile.

But if Mangione’s personal story (at least what we know of it so far) is supposed to serve as some sort of parable, it isn’t one that progressives should take comfort in. He is the scion of a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, was educated at an elite private school and the University of Pennsylvania and worked remotely from a nice apartment in Hawaii. And while Mangione, like millions of people, apparently suffered from debilitating back pain, excellent health care is not generally an issue for Americans of great wealth.

All this suggests that Mangione may prove to be a figure out of a Dostoyevsky novel — Raskolnikov with a silver spoon. It’s a familiar type. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, was a lawyer’s son whose mother moved him to London before he went on to become an international terrorist. Osama bin Laden came from immense wealth. Angry rich kids jacked up on radical, nihilistic philosophies can cause a lot of harm, not least to the working-class folks whose interests they pretend to champion.

As for the suggestion that Thompson’s murder should be an occasion to discuss America’s supposed rage at private health insurers, it’s worth pointing out that a 2023 survey from the nonpartisan health policy research institute KFF found that 81 percent of insured adults gave their health insurance plans a rating of “excellent” or “good.” Even a majority of those who said their health was “fair” or “poor” still broadly liked their health insurance. No industry is perfect — nor is any health care model — and insurance companies make terrible calls all the time in the interest of cost savings. But the idea that those companies represent a unique evil in American life is divorced from the experience of most of their customers.

Thompson’s life might have been cut brutally short, but it will remain a model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life without the benefit of rich parents and an Ivy League degree. As for the killer, John Fetterman had the choicest words: He’s “going to die in prison,” the peerless Pennsylvania senator told HuffPost. “Congratulations if you want to celebrate that.”