Gabbard and RFK Jr. head closer to confirmation

For the past month, the tone among Washington insiders was dour as it related to the confirmation prospects of Donald Trump’s edgier nominees. Sure, the argument went, Marco Rubio is a slam dunk, and no one takes issue with Doug Burgum or Sean Duffy. But the attitude toward Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health and human services secretary and Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as director of national intelligence were grim. More than a dozen Republican insiders in the past week assured me that one or both nominations were doomed, citing the opposition from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, legacy newspaper columnists such as David French and Marc Thiessen and the editors of National Review, who took a particularly aggressive stance against Gabbard.

All of them lost. All of them were wrong. And it’s another indication that this time around, the Trump 2.0 machine is working much better than the first time. The representation on Capitol Hill has changed and woken up to the fact that their refusal to approve nominees consistent with what the president promised and what his supporters expect will have serious consequences. In the old dynamic, it was a question of, “What will the donors/the New York Times/my neocon friends think of me?” Now the evaluation is: would you like your next primary to be ten times as expensive and feature a well-funded opponent? The choice is yours.

For RFK, the key component was Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a doctor whose skepticism about Kennedy’s answers was obvious in the recent HELP committee hearing. But Cassidy came around after pressure from Kennedy’s supporters, including a deluge of phone calls and commitments from the nominee behind the scenes. For Gabbard, the distrust was palpable in her hearing, where Todd Young of Indiana and James Lankford of Oklahoma — the latter of whom had already endorsed her for the job — added their names to the skeptic list alongside Maine’s Susan Collins. But when Collins moved in Gabbard’s direction after her hearing, it was a sign of more to come: Lankford and Young came in line, and now her confirmation on the Senate floor is virtually assured.

There is a long list of people who exercised power over the Republican coalition for a very long time without necessarily earning it or having the experience to justify a position where they pass judgment on cabinet nominees, policy choices and the like. The days where those old-fashioned internal leaders held sway are now over. A new cadre of rainmakers and sidekicks is taking their place, lifted up by social media presence and their own brand of modern gravitas. It will be interesting to see what they do differently now that they hold the reins — or if they just choose to emulate those who came before whose time is now firmly in the past.