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Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for attorney general on Thursday. It was an early setback for President-elect Donald Trump that confirms the greatest threat to his agenda isn’t Democrats, but establishment Republicans.

Apparently there were at least four GOP senators staunchly opposed to confirming Gaetz as attorney general: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and John Curtis of Utah. Assuming all Democrat senators voted against him, that would have put Gaetz one vote shy of confirmation.

The corporate media, along with a cadre of Never Trump commentators on the right, boasted about the defeat of Gaetz’s nomination, citing widely discredited sexual allegations against him as evidence that he was unfit to lead the Justice Department. Never mind that those allegations have always been comically thin. 

Indeed, as my colleague Mollie Hemingway laid out in these pages recently, the entire campaign to smear Gaetz as a “child sex trafficker” was from the outset a giant psy-op and fraud. After an 18-month investigation by the Biden Justice Department, no charges were filed against Gaetz because the two central witnesses in the probe had serious credibility problems.

But that didn’t stop House Democrats from launching an ethics probe that relied on these same sources and their unsubstantiated claims about Gaetz. They dragged their probe out for more than a year as part of an ongoing effort to sideline and silence Gaetz, who had been one of the most effective voices in Congress calling out the corruption of the Justice Department.  

And sure enough, a handful of establishment Republican senators latched onto these allegations in the Democrats’ ridiculous ethics probe as justification for opposing Trump’s nomination of Gaetz.

This tells you everything you need to know about what Trump is facing in Washington right now. He was elected with a mandate from the American people to clean up the corruption in Washington and dismantle the deep state. Ground zero for that fight is the DOJ, which has been at the center of every effort to undermine, imprison, bankrupt, and remove Trump from office since 2016. In his second term, Trump’s number one goal should be to fix the Justice Department and the FBI, which have become inimical to our constitutional system of government and a threat to the republic.

That’s why he nominated Gaetz for the role of attorney general. Gaetz stood out in Congress not for being a hard-partying playboy, which is common enough in Washington, but as one of only a handful of GOP lawmakers who spoke out against the Russia collusion hoax, the politicized Jan. 6 prosecutions, the lawfare against Trump, and the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

That’s the real reason for the Washington establishment’s opposition to Gaetz. The idea that it’s because lawmakers have scruples about Gaetz’s sex life, about salacious allegations that he’s a “child sex trafficker,” is just laughable. A bunch of swamp creatures in D.C. didn’t suddenly start caring about sexual morality overnight.

No, they opposed Gaetz for the same reason they worked to undermine Trump’s agenda throughout his first term in office. From border security to foreign relations, the permanent uniparty in Washington resisted Trump in every way they could. His political appointees were slow-walked through the Senate, with Democrats delaying and obstructing every step of the way. The top brass of the military routinely undermined, ignored, or lied to Trump about what they were doing. A handful of Never Trump Republican lawmakers obstructed or opposed him at every turn.

Contrast that with how GOP lawmakers behaved with the Biden administration. Every Democrat senator uniformly supported all 21 of Biden’s cabinet picks. Not one defected. Sen. Tommy Tuberville pointed this out recently, saying, “Panic has set in at the DOJ, the intelligence community, and the entire D.C. swamp. They’re finding out, as Barack Obama once said, that elections have consequences.”

Well let’s hope they do. The defeat of Gaetz’s nomination is a prelude to the kind of fights Trump is going to have to engage in and win if he wants to dismantle the deep state and enact his MAGA agenda. He needs to make it clear to establishment Republicans that if they stand in the way of his administration they will pay a heavy political price, that it won’t be like last time. If he doesn’t, they’re going to be a greater obstacle to his second term than the Democrats.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.