For a few hours last week, Matt Gaetz was both a sitting congressman and the president-elect’s pick to serve as the next attorney general. Now he’s just another schmo outside the 7-Eleven with stories to tell. The welcome news here is that the system, which has been getting a little rickety, appeared to work. Gaetz was probably the most ludicrous Cabinet pick ever made: a troll loathed by nearly everyone he’s worked with, someone whose past couple of professional years have been organized around trying to kill an ethics investigation and report into his misdeeds. At least a handful of Republican senators were looking like pretty hard noes on Gaetz’s nomination, while dozens more weren’t looking forward to the vote. Trump, had he wanted, could have spent significant capital to pressure those senators further, or to push the Constitution to its limits by attempting a forced adjournment of Congress and a recess appointment of Gaetz. Instead, Trump—who has an awful lot he wants to get done in a short period of time—chose to pull the plug. The question now is whether Senate Republicans will show a similar resistance to Trump’s other most vexing nominees, or whether they draw the line only at Just don’t pick the single worst person in the building. The Surge wishes Matt Gaetz all the best!

Just hours after Gaetz withdrew his nomination, Trump announced former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as his replacement pick. At the risk of saying something we’ll regret in a couple of years when we’re smashing rocks at the Media Prison Camp, this pick works out all right for everyone. Trump gets a longtime loyalist. Senate Republicans need only the slightest of excuses to rally behind Trump’s nominees, and her having the relevant job experience gives them that. For Democrats, they avoided another worst-case-scenario pick, like oft-indicted Texas AG Ken Paxton. And while Democrats may not be able to stop Bondi’s ascent, she has plenty of baggage for them to work with in confirmation hearings. She dropped an investigation into Trump University in 2013 after getting a $25,000 donation from Trump. She once got an execution rescheduled because the timing conflicted with a fundraiser. She became a lobbyist after leaving the Florida AG’s office, where her clients included Qatar. She has dog drama. Let’s go.

Fox News host Pete Hegseth was the first of the four Problem Appointees to be announced. Given that the selections of Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. followed Hegseth’s in rapid succession, he started to look better by comparison. We’re no longer so sure about that. This week, the police department in Monterey, California, released records of a sexual assault allegation against Hegseth in 2017, following a conference of Republican women at which Hegseth was speaking. The report is quite graphic, but Hegseth’s lawyers argued that the sex was consensual. The case was dropped, with the Monterey DA saying in a statement this week, “No charges were supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Hegseth later reached a private settlement with the woman because, according to his lawyer, he was worried about the allegation going public at the height of the #MeToo movement. We’re not sure about Hegseth’s fate, but this could be another case where Trump is asked to consider how much capital he wants to spend on a guy who already wasn’t qualified to run a department of 3 million people and a nearly trillion-dollar budget.

The South Carolina congresswoman went on an absolute blitz this week being mean-spirited and bullying toward the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, Rep.-elect Sarah McBride of Delaware. Mace introduced a resolution at the beginning of the week prohibiting House members and employees from “using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex” and a bill applying the same rule to any bathroom on federal property. She has tweeted literally hundreds of times about it in a matter of days and appeared before any camera in her vicinity to brag about it and talk shit. Her crusade was successful in getting Speaker Mike Johnson to agree to put the rule for House members and staff in the House rules package for the next Congress. She was also successful in securing attention for herself, the only thing that motivates her. McBride handled the targeted assault on her dignity with aplomb, calling the effort a distraction. We’ve said before that Democrats, after having hundreds of millions of dollars in effective culture-war ads dumped on them over transgender rights in the election, have some serious work to do on the issue. But the targeted harassment of an individual trans person, with a name and a face, who’s just trying to live her life, might not make Republicans come across so well.

Last week we asked how Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump appointed to run a made-up thing called the “Department of Government Efficiency,” were actually going to slash the federal personnel and spending without any sort of official authorization or any power of the purse. They did, at least, lay out the sort of work that they’ll be doing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week. Much of it is that they’ll recommend reams of regulations for the executive branch and Congress to rescind, which will necessitate reductions in the federal workforce. The cost-saving aspect of the plan we’d like to emphasize, though, is reintroducing the use of impoundment, in which a president refuses to spend money appropriated by Congress. We say reintroducing, because this practice has been illegal since 1974. The president can request that Congress rescind certain funds, then Congress can vote on it (or ignore it), but he can’t unilaterally refuse to allocate it. Or can he? “Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional,” Ramaswamy and Musk write, “and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.” Do not be surprised if that question is moving through federal courts in the next couple of years. And if they’re right about the way this SCOTUS would side—that it would let Trump decide which funds get released and which don’t—it could break the back of Congress.

Here was a name that we had completely forgotten—was DROPPED from our BRAIN—for two years until this week, when Trump nominated the former doctor, television show doctor, and Pennsylvania Senate candidate to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Once again, Slate must ask: Why not just enjoy being rich? Instead, Oz will take over one of the most sprawling bureaucracies within HHS, administrating Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. This is a job for a seasoned administrator, but sure, might as well give it to the TV host hawking magic potions. Whatever. Whatever! We do think that Oz might regret leaving the retired mansion life, though, if he’s turned into the administration’s spokesperson for the need to slash Medicaid, a big pool of money Republicans tried and failed to raid in 2017 and may be eyeing again. The things people will do for a government car and a driver …

Rough week at ye olde MSNBC. The muckety-mucks at Comcast plan to spin the channel off into a new company. Viewership is grim. Rachel Maddow’s going to have to put a roof over her head on a $25 million salary instead of $30 million. And then there was the intra-Resistance drama regarding Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are a married couple who have a morning chat show about the news, and they’ve been very rude, very disrespectful to Mr. Trump in recent years. The two announced this week, though, that they had visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, in one of the more surreal television clips we’ve seen recently. They spoke as if they’d just returned from a covert mission to meet with Kim Jong-un, and said that they had agreed to “restart communications” with Trump. “In this meeting, President Trump was cheerful, he was upbeat, he seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues," Brzezinski said. “And for those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, ‘Why wouldn't we?’ ” The Surge, personally, did not feel that the chat show hosts' visit to the president-elect needed an explanation. Do whatever you want! Others took it quite seriously, though, and Morning Joe’s ratings took a nosedive the next couple of days. Perhaps Joe and Mika will return to being unyieldingly harsh on Trump, and soon, we’ll all be in Media Prison Camp together. The Surge looks forward to joining as a guest on the show, with the glistening morning sheen of Guantánamo Bay in the background.