Jonathan Chait: “For a few hours, Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense was the most disturbing act of Donald Trump’s presidential transition. Surely the Senate wouldn’t confirm an angry Fox News talking head with no serious managerial experience, best known for publicly defending war criminals, to run the largest department in the federal government. Then, in rapid succession, Trump announced appointments for Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The appearance of these newer and even more aberrant characters, like a television show introducing a more villainous heel in its second season, muted the indignation over Hegseth.”

“Obscured in this flurry of shocking appointments is the fact that Hegseth’s drawbacks are not limited to his light résumé or to the sexual-assault allegation made against him. Inexperienced though he may be at managing bureaucracies, Hegseth has devoted a great deal of time to documenting his worldview, including three books published in the past four years.”

“I spent the previous week reading them: The man who emerges from the page appears to have sunk deeply into conspiracy theories that are bizarre even by contemporary Republican standards but that have attracted strangely little attention. He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.”

Adam Serwer: “Members of Donald Trump’s inner circle understandably wish to interpret the election results as a mandate for the most extreme right-wing policies, which include conducting mass deportations and crushing their political enemies.”

“But how many Trump supporters think that’s what they voted for?”

“Many seem not to—persisting in their denial of not only Trump’s negative qualities and the extremism of his advisers, but the idea that he would implement policies they disagreed with.”

Axios: “Trump won’t be inaugurated for another two months, but MAGA mayhem is already dominating the news cycle in the same ways it did throughout his first term…”

“If past is prologue, the pace of chaos is unlikely to relent even after Trump gets his Cabinet in place.”

Semafor: “On top of their small majority, Republicans may also have two troublesome tasks to handle next year: funding the government for the rest of the fiscal year and raising the debt limit.”

“President-elect Donald Trump has floated selecting the financier Kevin Warsh as his Treasury secretary with the understanding that he could later be nominated to lead the Federal Reserve when Jerome Powell’s term as chair ends in 2026,“ the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Trump discussed the potential arrangement with Warsh during a meeting Wednesday at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s private club in Florida.”

“Warsh is a front-runner to lead the Treasury Department… Trump is thinking about appointing the investor Scott Bessent to lead the National Economic Council with an eye toward nominating him as Treasury secretary later in his term if Warsh becomes Fed chair.”

“Ben Carson — the former neurosurgeon who helmed the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Trump administration — is a favorite to return to the role if he wants it,” Politico reports.

Politico: “Rather than showcasing Trump’s absolute power over his GOP allies, it revealed his limits. The doomed nomination lasted just eight days — and its failure is an unwelcome lesson for the president-elect, who has been projecting invincibility and claiming a historic mandate despite his reed-thin popular vote victory.”

Playbook: “Gaetz’s path to helm the DOJ was based on one calculation: That, yes, his nomination would be painful for Senate Republicans to swallow, but that they would ultimately capitulate to Trump. Sure, they might trash Gaetz to reporters on background, but they’d either hold their nose and vote for him, or skip town and allow Trump to make a recess appointment.”

“That calculation was incorrect.”

Wall Street Journal: Botched Gaetz nomination shows limits of Trump’s hold over GOP.