Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence (Wiknedia Commons)

There was a time when Donald Trump actually had to withdraw some of his nominations for cabinet posts over objections by members of his own party, not to mention Democrats. No longer – as the nominations of Matt Gaetz, John Ratcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard to run three of the government's top national security agencies in a second Trump administration show.

We'll have a lot more to say about these nominations in the coming days, but suffice it for now to note some of the hurdles all of them face.

Gaetz, for example, Trump’s pick to be attorney general, was not so long ago at the center of a sex trafficking investigation by the Justice Department.

“How did Representative Matt Gaetz get into so much trouble?” Amy Davidson Sorkin wrote in The New Yorker back in April 2021. “There are so many allegations surrounding the Florida Republican and the carnival-like crowd of characters around him that it’s hard to know where to begin.”

The randy Floridian was ultimately never charged with a crime but remains the subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation regarding, among other claims, allegations he had sex with a minor. In September, he emphatically denied the accusation in an angry ”final” letter to the panel, adding that he never used “illicit” drugs as well. A new MAGA-led Congress could make that probe go away come January, but Senate Democrats can be expected to regurgitate all this stuff in his confirmation hearing—should he get one. The president-elect is striving to do an end-around with so-called “recess appointments.”

UPDATE LATE WEDNESDAY: Gaetz resigned from Congress today, effective immediately, bringing an end to the Ethics investigation.)

Same for any ongoing “deep state” investigations against him. Gaetz frequently railed against the FBI, CIA and Justice Department as a “deep state” combine that sought to bring Trump down. It’s no wonder, then, that he won Trump’s favor, not only considering the outstanding criminal cases against him personally, but as a soldier willing to carry out the president-elect’s campaign vows to arrest and prosecute his enemies in the FBI, Justice Department, Democratic Party and the media.