JD Vance has said Donald Trump “deserves a cabinet that is loyal” as he pleaded with senators on Wednesday to support the incoming president’s most controversial nominee, the former representative Matt Gaetz, who faces allegations of sexual misconduct and doubts over his qualifications to be attorney general.
Vance, the vice-president-elect and Republican senator for Ohio, met up with Gaetz on Capitol Hill as the House of Representatives’ ethics committee met to decide whether to release a report that could make or break his chances of confirmation in Senate hearings.
The pair also met a procession of Republican senators in the Strom Thurmond Room in the Capitol rotunda as Vance took on the role of selling Trump’s case to fellow senators that Gaetz is a fit and proper person to be America’s top law enforcement official.
Amid mounting scepticism, including among some Republican lawmakers, Vance made the case on social media beforehand, telling senators that they owed Trump their support regardless of their reservations about Gaetz.
“Donald J Trump just won a major electoral victory. His coattails turned a 49-51 senate to a 53-47 senate,” he wrote.
“He deserves a cabinet that is loyal to the agenda he was elected to implement.”
The post amounted to a bold-faced effort to cast the Republicans’ newly-acquired Senate majority as attributable to the political smarts of Trump, who endorsed several GOP candidates who subsequently went on to unseat vulnerable sitting Democrats.
Despite a GOP Senate majority that would normally ensure nominees a safe passage through hearings, hostility toward Gaetz among Republican senators is wide enough to deny him confirmation unless enough of them can be persuaded to change their minds.
While some Republican senators are wary of facing a backlash from Trump if they resist Gaetz, others are believed to by buoyed by the fact that they have just been elected to six-year terms, and so cannot face a primary challenge in the near term.
Trump nominated Gaetz, a far-right representative from Florida, as his attorney general after being persuaded that he would purge the Department of Justice and the FBI, against whom the president-elect has vowed retribution as payback for criminal prosecutions they pressed against him.
But Gaetz is a controversial choice among senators and fellow congressmembers because of his hardline political views, abrasive character and the fact that he himself has been subjected to an FBI investigation, over sex-trafficking allegations.
The inquiry was dropped, but the House of Representatives’ ethics committee conducted its own investigation into the allegations, which included suspicions of him having had sex with a 17-year-old and taking illegal drugs.
The committee had been due to publish its report last week but Gaetz threw that into suspension by resigning his seat after Trump nominated him.
Vance has been given the task of shepherding at least one of Trump’s other controversial picks, Pete Hegseth as defence secretary, through the Senate. Hegseth, until recently a host on Fox News, also faces a difficult Senate passage over misgivings that he has no qualifying experience to run the Pentagon and previously faced a police investigation over a sexual assault allegation.
Following several other questionable picks, Trump has in the past 24 hours nominated Linda McMahon – who gained prominence running World Wrestling Entertainment – as secretary of the Department of Education, which he has vowed to abolish. McMahon, a former head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first presidency, has no prior experience running educational institutions or departments.
The president-elect also chose Mehmet Oz, a television celebrity, to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees health insurance for 155 million people.
Oz, who has a reputation for supporting theories unsupported by scientific evidence and has no experience in running a government department, has been tasked by Trump to “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency”.
