WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump opened his transition back to the White House this week with a flurry of personnel announcements that sent forceful messages to major constituent groups, potential political rivals and the country at large.
Two choices that generated immediate controversy — former Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida for attorney general and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii for director of national intelligence — set up an early test for Senate Republicans: Will they rubber-stamp Trump’s orders or serve as a check on his impulses?
Either way could be a win for Trump.
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Meanwhile, another pair of appointments, of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Steven Witkoff, a real estate investor and Trump fundraiser, as special envoy to the Mideast, signaled the president-elect’s desire to build on the alliance between evangelical U.S. Christians and right-wing Israeli leaders.
That move represents bad news for those American Muslims and others who voted for Trump out of anger at the Biden administration’s support for Israel.
It also could deepen the political isolation of a large majority of American Jews, a group that has already been deeply unsettled by the last year of war in the Middle East.
The Mideast and American politics
Republicans made a major effort to woo Jewish voters with advertisements about rising antisemitism and accusations that the Biden administration wasn’t supportive enough of Israel.
Despite that, about 7 in 10 American Jews voted for Vice President Kamala Harris this year, according to a postelection survey conducted for the Jewish Electorate Institute. That margin, which is similar to the findings of network exit polling and a separate voter survey by the Associated Press, represents a slight erosion in Jewish support for Democrats, but not the major shift some Republicans predicted.
Orthodox Jews voted heavily for Trump, much as religious traditionalists in other faiths did, but Harris won large majorities among more religiously liberal Jews and those who are religiously unaffiliated, the poll found.
Despite the attention they get, Jewish voters are too small a group — about 2% of the electorate nationwide — to swing presidential elections. That’s a major reason why Israeli leaders have spent years carefully cultivating ties with a much larger American voting bloc — evangelical Christians.
Building connections between Israel and evangelicals has been a particular emphasis for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Now, with the appointment of Huckabee, that alliance will have the U.S. government’s imprimatur, as well.
Ironically, that could be a bitter pill both for Arab Americans and for many American Jews.
How many Arab American voters cast ballots for Trump is hard to know — the group remains too small to be accurately measured by exit polls. Democrats did suffer notable losses, however, in some heavily Arab communities, such as Dearborn, Mich.
In 2020, Biden beat Trump by nearly 3 to 1 in Dearborn, where more than half the population is of Arab descent. This year, Trump won with 43%, compared with 36% for Harris. Green Party nominee Jill Stein got 18% in Dearborn, although she took less than 1% statewide.
Arab opposition to Harris wasn’t nearly enough to account for Trump’s victory in Michigan, but it did mark a big switch in their votes.
Some of those voters harbored hopes that Trump would have more sympathy for their position than President Biden had. The selections of Huckabee and Witkoff, along with Rep. Elise Stefanik for ambassador to the U.N. and Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of State, signaled that they will be badly disappointed.
In his 2008 presidential campaign, Huckabee said in a conversation with voters that “there really is no such thing as a Palestinian” and suggested that if Arab residents of the region wanted a state of their own, it should be carved out of territory controlled by Egypt, Jordan or Syria, rather than the territories Israel has controlled since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
Annexing the occupied territories and eliminating the possibility of an independent Palestinian state has been the prime goal of the Israeli right wing. Huckabee has supported that.
Witkoff, for his part, raised millions of dollars for Trump from donors who thought Biden was unfairly restraining Israel’s military campaign.
Deeper ties between the GOP and the Israeli right may also be problematic for American Jews. A large majority have unfavorable views of both Trump and Netanyahu and have supported the idea of Jews and Arabs dividing the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, with each group having a state of its own.
They now face the prospect that their views may be discounted by both the Israeli and U.S. governments.
Longtime Democratic strategist Mark Mellman, who heads the group Democratic Majority for Israel and whose firm conducted the Jewish Electorate Institute’s survey, contends that liberal Jews and conservative evangelicals can form alliances despite their differences.
“There’s a political and ideological conflict between the vast majority of evangelicals and the vast majority of American Jews,” he said. “But we can work together.”
The last year has shown how important it is for Israel to have strong support from American Jews, Mellman said, adding that he thinks Netanyahu understands that.
“Giving up on the American Jewish community would be a terrible mistake on the part of any Israeli administration.”
An early test for Senate Republicans
The Gaetz and Gabbard picks signaled Trump’s willingness to challenge what’s left of the Republican establishment as well as his desire for retribution against Justice Department prosecutors.
“We ought to have a full-court press against this WEAPONIZED government that has been turned against our people,” Gaetz wrote in a social media post shortly after Trump made the announcements. “And if that means abolishing every one of the three letter agencies, from the FBI to the ATF, I’m ready to get going!”
Several senators quickly indicated discomfort with Gaetz’s nomination. Others have signaled unhappiness about Gabbard, a former Democrat who has publicly defended Syrian President Bashar Assad and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
That could lead to contentious nomination battles, which Trump might lose.
The math is simple: Nominations require a majority vote in the Senate. Since JD Vance as vice president will be able to break a tie, Trump will need to round up support from 50 senators.
Currently, Republicans are looking at having 53 members of their caucus, although Pennsylvania’s extremely tight Senate race is headed for a recount, with Republican Dave McCormick leading incumbent Democrat Bob Casey by just over 25,000 votes out of more than 3.7 million cast.
If the tentative GOP victory in Pennsylvania holds up, Trump will be able to lose the confirmation votes of three senators, but a fourth defection would scuttle a nomination, assuming no Democrats break ranks. If Casey prevails, Trump would only be able to lose two senators.
Confirmation battle over ethics
Typically, Senate confirmation battles end up turning on something other than what they’re really about.
In Gaetz’s case, the real stakes would be whether the president should have personal control over federal law enforcement — including the ability to squelch investigations of his allies and pursue his enemies — or whether the Justice Department should maintain an arms-length distance from politics.
Under the Biden administration, federal prosecutors have brought charges against Trump and won convictions of several of his allies, including his onetime political advisor Stephen. K. Bannon and his former trade representative Peter Navarro.
But the current Justice Department has also gotten two convictions of the president’s son Hunter Biden, won a corruption case against then-Sen. Robert Menendez, who was the powerful Democratic head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and brought an indictment against the Democratic mayor of New York, Eric Adams.
But a majority of Republican voters mistrust the Justice Department and federal law enforcement generally. So GOP senators may not want to make the case that the department’s record under Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland has been evenhanded and that Trump should strive for something similar.
Instead, if the past is any guide, Republican senators will be looking for signs of scandal that could give them cover to vote against Gaetz without overly provoking conservative voters.
They may not have to look far. Gaetz has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations that he “engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use” and “sought to obstruct government investigations of his conduct,” according to the committee’s official statements.
Gaetz has denied he did anything wrong, and has insisted that the Ethics Committee — as well as Justice Department prosecutors who previously investigated whether he had been sexually involved with an underage girl — are inappropriately prying into his private life.
The committee held off on issuing its report before the election and had planned to release it Friday. Officials with knowledge of the contents have said is highly critical of Gaetz.
Gaetz forestalled its release by preemptively resigning from Congress on Wednesday, hours after Trump announced his nomination as attorney general. Under House rules, that put an end to the Ethics Committee’s investigation.
Whether the committee’s report will be officially released is now uncertain. Senators have begun to demand to see it. One way or another, its findings almost surely will be featured in Gaetz’s confirmation hearings.
For Trump, a win on these nominations would cement his dominance over the Senate. A loss would allow him to play one of his favorite roles — the victim of unfair treatment by political enemies.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who lost his speakership in large part because of Gaetz, suggested Thursday that the latter scenario may be what Trump wants.
“Gaetz won’t get confirmed — everybody knows that,” the Bakersfield Republican said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “Doesn’t matter,” he added. “It’s a good deflection.”
By the numbers
How the vote went: Overall, voter turnout in this election fell slightly from 2020, which saw the highest turnout in U.S. history, both in raw numbers and as a share of the adult population. Once all the votes are counted, including about 1 million still left to tally in California, about 156 million people will have voted this year, according to estimates by voting analyst Nate Silver. That’s down from just over 158 million in 2020. Harris will end up just short of 76 million votes, about 5 million fewer than the 81 million Biden won in 2020. On social media, many posts have suggested a much larger gap because they’ve been citing incomplete vote counts. Trump will garner about 78 million, up almost 4 million from his 2020 total. Third-party candidates altogether are on track to get just under 2% of the vote, which is about the same as four years ago. Trump’s margin in the popular vote will end up at about 1.6%, Silver estimates. Some other estimates have had a slightly smaller margin. Either way, 2024 is shaping up to have been the fourth-closest election in the last 100 years.
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