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IF you don't think the #deepstate and Democrats and RINOs are just going to "settle" with stopping #mattgaetz then you are so very wrong! They are gunning for #petehegseth and #tulsigabbard now! Straight from #politicoplaybook - AS GOOD AS IT GAETZ — That great whooshing sound you heard yesterday around 12:24 p.m. was the collective sigh of relief coming from Senate Republicans. Eight days after his shock nomination for attorney general, MATT GAETZ withdrew his name from consideration for the post. Within hours, President-elect DONALD TRUMP named a new AG nominee from the same state — albeit one with a much greater likelihood of confirmation than Gaetz ever had: former Florida AG PAM BONDI, a longtime Trump loyalist who defended him during his first impeachment in 2019. As the smoke begins to clear from Gaetz’s crash-and-burn nomination, we’re left with a few discrete thoughts about what it all means and where things head from here. — FIRST, even Trump has his limits on drama. For years, the conventional wisdom around Trump is that he has a sweet tooth for chaos and that his appetite is bottomless as long as he ultimately gets the outcome he desires. But Gaetz-gate suggests that when that chaos becomes a distraction — or worse in his eyes, when it makes him look bad — he’s willing to cut bait and head home. Trump’s flood-the-zone approach often works when it comes to the public: overwhelm people with news and it becomes difficult to prioritize what matters and what doesn’t. But that strategy doesn’t really work when you’re dealing with the Senate, which is built to move at a tortoise’s pace in the best of times. As our Kyle Cheney put it: “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.” — SECOND, Senate Republicans might have some gumption after all. 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. Senate Republicans were the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back here. They back-channeled to Trump and his advisers about their concerns. They made clear that Gaetz was unlikely to get confirmed, and that even if he went down, he might consume a fair amount of Trump’s political capital. It shows that the Senate GOP might actually be a soft check on the leader of their party when they feel like he is going too far. Granted, it’s entirely possible — even likely — that this is a one-off, and that Trump will abide this behavior only once. But it hints that Trump might have a completely different relationship with Republican Leader JOHN THUNE’s Senate conference than he did with then-Leader MITCH McCONNELL’s — one where he trusts, or at least entertains, their advice. — THIRD, Trump’s other nominees are about to face real scrutiny. For the last week, Gaetz’s nomination — and the allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor that have dogged him for years despite his denials — has been at center stage. Now that Gaetz has been stage-hooked back to Florida, other controversial Trump nominees are going to face heightened attention — especially DOD nominee PETE HEGSETH, DNI nominee TULSI GABBARD and HHS nominee ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. Any one of them could become the transition’s next problem child — whether it’s Gabbard, with her lack of foreign policy experience and her puzzling affinity for Syria’s Assad regime, or RFK Jr., with his controversial and extreme opinions on a litany of health topics and, for Senate Republicans, his support of abortion rights. And then there’s Hegseth, who stands accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2017 — which he denies — and paying her to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Speaking to reporters on the Hill yesterday, he maintained that he was clear of all charges stemming from the allegations. But it’s one thing to brush aside those questions when they come from reporters in a scrum, and it’s quite another thing to face questions from senators in individual one-on-one meetings. True, there are plenty of Senate Republicans who have a bit of affinity for him. But he hasn’t really ventured out beyond senators from the MAGA-adjacent right. At some point soon, he’s going to have to meet with those members who have privately pooh-poohed his nomination. And, just like with Gaetz, that might hasten his downfall.