Tag: Matt Gaetz

Playing Poker with the Senate: The Art of the Deal with Pam Bondi

I think what we have going on with Trump is a lot of The Art of the Deal and a good sign of how he’s going to handle things in this next term.  This is the difference between a successful business guy and a bunch of people who sought political life because they couldn’t do anything else.  Over the years, this has been a real problem. Our current Senate has a lot of new people who lean toward the MAGA view of the world, but there are still RINO holdovers, and when J.D. Vance walked the proposed Matt Gaetz around to interview all the senators ahead of confirmation, it was like playing poker and walking around the table to see what kind of hands the other players had.  I thought Matt Gaetz was an excellent pick for Attorney General.  Probably the best pick.  But immediately after touring the Senate, Matt Gaetz mysteriously withdrew his name, and Trump announced that Pam Bondi would be the new pick, almost as if that were Trump’s plans all along.  He had talked to Pam about it, and a plan was playing out.  And what Trump learned was that there were 4 or 5 senators like Mitch McConnell who were hard no’s on Matt Gaetz and would not be convinced otherwise.  So rather than fight that uphill battle with great media fanfare, Trump just changed tactics and put a woman in that place to take off the edge for the more progressive senators and Democrats on the confirmation vote. 

Pam Bondi has done the Attorney General job in Florida during the Rick Scott as governor years.  Before that, Florida politics was a lot different as Jeb Bush set the standard, so these days, with Ron DeSantis, it’s a much different place, a much more conservative state.  When Pam Bondi was Attorney General there, she was pretty good.  My opinion is that she was more talk than action.  However, she has been loyal to President Trump and stood by an America First agenda, no matter what happened.  Is she the person who will kick down doors and drag the bad guys out for a hanging? I don’t think so.  But I think she will take on Trump’s personality in his administration, and I think that was always the gig.  I think Trump and Matt Gaetz have other plans looming in the background since he so quickly announced that he was leaving Congress during the next term.  His district is conservative, so that shouldn’t hurt during a special election.  But what we have going on here is a lot of poker playing that is not normal.  And the media doesn’t know how to report it.  And the political machines are not smart enough to understand what is happening.  Trump has a lot of senator confirmations that are going to be tough, but essentially, he put forth his most controversial pick, making all the rest seem very normal by comparison, and paraded him around to see how the Beltway would bet.  And he got his answer and gave the rest of his picks the ammunition they needed to pass confirmation in the Senate.  Although I was looking to Gaetz, Pam Bondi is about as good as we can get for a position like that, but it comes down to the Art of Making a Deal, which has always been Trump’s thing.  We will see a lot of deal-making that will come out very good for all of us.  Trump and the private sector are beating down the political machines of K-Street in a way they have never experienced before.

And that’s the name of the game in most things in life, especially poker.  I think it’s a great game, especially Texas Hold Em’ because it teaches players how to make a good hand win and how to recognize a good hand from a bad one.  Or, how to play a bad hand and still win.  Poker is about strengths and weaknesses and making the most out of personal circumstances.  It’s not about luck as much as manipulating the other players.  A player at the table could have the best hand in the world, and the person holding the bad hand can still beat them by coaxing them to fold.  And I think that’s what Trump did to the entire Senate, now led by John Thune, and appeasing the Mitch McConnell holdovers.  Trump looked at their hands and saw what he needed to do.  Matt Gaetz will be involved in something that does not require Senate confirmation but that won’t be announced until all the confirmations happen.  Once the Senate angers Trump, he’ll pull out Matt Gaetz and get things moving again.  If you are a fan of The Art of the Deal books or Poker, this is shaping up to be an exciting four years, and the established order of things is not ready.  The many media members who have learned to report political news a certain way are about to have the tops ripped off their business; there will be so much every day that nobody will understand how to process it all.  But this Matt Gaetz situation is just a hint of things to come.

You don’t always get things the way you want them.  But what’s important is that you turn unfortunate circumstances into victories however you can.  Seldom does anything work out the way you envision them.  And putting Matt Gaetz up for an AG nomination was an over-the-top bold move.  But not for the reasons people thought.  Rather than place him in a very contentious position as Attorney General, he used him to discover what the other players at the table were holding as cards.  Once J.D. Vance and Matt Gaetz learned who had what at the table, Trump put down his hand to blow them all out of the water.  And that was Pam Bondi, a pick just as good as Matt Gaetz, but she appears much more reasonable because of her polished personality after years of working in established administrations under challenging conditions.  She is the kind of person even RINO members of the Senate can vote for, if not for her politics, but because she’s a strong woman, and nobody wants to be on record going against that.  So Trump played the hand he had to best effect once he knew what the other players had.  And that’s how you win in these games, whether with a more substantial hand or a bluff.  Winning is the goal, and when it comes to getting Pam Bondi confirmed by the Senate in a way that will not harm his other picks, Trump just showed why we voted for him as the best option to Make America Great Again and why he was so successful throughout his life.  This is how business is done, and the world of useless politicians won’t be able to compete with him.  This is only the start of a lot of deals that will be made, and as Trump has shown over and over again in the past, making deals is his favorite thing to do in the world.  And he’s good at it.  And this nomination of Pam Bondi for Attorney General is just the beginning of many great things to come. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Matt Gaetz is an Excellent Pick for Attorney General: People can have their faces melt all they want, but justice is coming–it has to

First of all, I think Matt Gaetz is an excellent pick for Attorney General.  He has proven to be one of the few in elected office who is fearless and ready to do the right thing for the sake of it in Washington, D.C.  To many, that makes him a joke, because he is an uncompromising figure.  This sex scandal talk is just an attempt to paint him with some controversy in having a relationship with an underaged girl; we are dealing with a Biden administration where gay people had sex and filmed it in government buildings.  Outrage is a false alarm with that Beltway culture.  First of all, I don’t believe the accusation; it is similar to the kind of high school politics that Trump has been a victim of, where witnesses lie entirely about the content in an attempt to drive a national narrative.  People have seen enough now to know how to distinguish that kind of thing.  People lost faith in politicians upholding some moral standards a long time ago; what they want now is people who will at least do the job they were elected for, and Matt Gaetz has certainly shown that he is.  Because of Gaetz, Speaker McCarthy was removed, and Speaker Johnson is there now.  But how would Matt Gaetz be any less severe than the radical Eric Holder and the more recent lunatic Merrick Garland?  The humor is that there are some standards to apply that would make Matt Gaetz appear like a fringe candidate for the highest office of the Department of Justice.  To my eyes, Matt Gaetz is one of the few who have committed to the rule of law, which is why many of those Beltway types have been trying to get rid of him from the start.  No, I think Matt Gaetz is a great pick and shows a deep commitment to fixing the Department of Justice from its present state, a weaponized organization that is one of America’s greatest present domestic enemies.  People have arrived at that conclusion based on what they have seen. 

I think picking Matt Gaetz is a negotiating move.  That doesn’t mean that Trump doesn’t want him, but he might want to use Gaetz to draw fire while some of his other picks benefit from less scrutiny.   As Attorney General, Matt Gaetz is the most controversial of all Trump’s picks for his cabinet.  So I could see trading Gaetz out later for a more conventional or less controversial pick, such as Mike Davis of The Article III Project. The message here is that a member of the WarRoom podcast will be the Attorney General because many wrongs must be corrected.  The Department of Justice has been very disreputable, and it’s time for all that to change.  Don’t forget what the Department of Justice under Biden did to their political enemies.  Much of that wrath was thrown in the direction of Trump’s most trusted supporters, his former White House members, who formed the WarRoom during his last year in office to help with his re-election.  Several of them were thrown in jail by Merrick Garland, and Trump himself was harassed ruthlessly.  Incredibly, he survived, given the amount of power and unchecked menace that the Merrick Garland Department of Justice utilized even up to this last election.  And what’s worse, so many Republicans sat by and allowed it all to happen, hoping that Trump and his team would be gone for good.  We still have the utterly unconstitutional holding of the January 6th prisoners from 2021 to deal with.  There is quite a mess to clean up; it will take a personality like Gaetz.  And perhaps, the way Trump thinks, people will be so outraged by Gaetz that they’d be happy to get Mike Allen, who may not be as controversial on paper because fewer people know him, but he’s every bit as committed to the rule of law and the protection of that standard under the Constitution.

But there is no going back to normal for the Beltway culture, where they commit significant crimes and then sweep them under the rug to be protected by favors and nonsense. An Attorney General who keeps the investigations out of Washington D.C. and then will act to destroy any challengers to their easy money shake and bake system of international extortion and sinful enterprise.  It’s not a matter of revenge for Trump, but what did anybody expect?  Trump was let down by Jeff Sessions during his first term and then later by Bill Barr toward the end.  Trump has had a lot of time to think things over, eight years, and he will make this Attorney General position count.  It’s one of his most essential picks, and he won’t waste it on a typical Beltway politician.  So even if it turned out not to be Matt Gaetz, there are plenty of names just as good that Trump will put in that job.  The expectation is going to be complete reform because Trump and the people loyal most to him have suffered terribly under previous corrupt AGs.  People voted for this kind of change; they want control of the Department of Justice, not what they have seen from that position over the last several decades of vast disappointment. 

Yes, Matt Gaetz is a firebrand who runs a podcast by that same name.  His political brand is all fire and brimstone, the way that the WarRoom audience expects it.  And knowing the situation the way I do, Matt Gaetz would never trade away his ability to use that firebrand to do good in exchange for some sexual temptation.  Many other people in Washington, D.C., would, but that isn’t the kind of person that Matt Gaetz is. Instead, people hate him because they know what they have done themselves and are guilty of.  And they know they won’t survive if Matt Gaetz is the Attorney General.  Few people will, and that’s the way things need to be.  Actually, for those who have been counting, there are a lot of Democrats in Trump’s picks, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy, the kind of people that many people would squawk at previously as “liberals.”  And that would include Trump himself.  But Matt Gaetz is the red meat that makes putting up with all those liberals worth it and is part of the deal Trump has with his voters.  Trump might have softened up the Republican party with a bunch of converted Democrats to make the tent bigger and much more challenging to beat, winning the black and Latino voters.  But he is doing all that to get to this election cycle’s real meat and potatoes: controlling the Department of Justice and making the rule of law Great Again.  On that front, we have a target rich environment where corruption has been ruling the day.  And Trump has been a victim of it for more than eight years now.  And now it’s his time to fix it for good, and he won’t waste that pick again knowing what he does now.  And people can have their faces melt all they want.  But, they brought all this on themselves.  Having Matt Gaetz or another WarRoom personnel heading the Department of Justice is the point of winning the presidency, and people gave Trump a mandate that he will not throw away to preserve a system that is obviously out of control.  And there is no way to reform them now, only to get rid of them and prosecute them ruthlessly, as they have shown themselves to be if left unchecked. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707