Shortly after former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., announced that he was taking himself out of the running for attorney general in President-elect Donald Trump’s second term, Republican strategist and Capitol Hill veteran Brendan Buck shared an image on X of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy pumping his fist. The image was old and had no caption, but anyone who had been following the news got the message: Gaetz, who had engineered McCarthy’s ouster as speaker, was finally getting his just deserts. 

You remember the House mess, don’t you? It may seem like a century ago, but it was only 2023. After 15 rounds of voting, House Republicans elected McCarthy as speaker, the job he had long sought. Why did it take so long? Because Gaetz and a few other hard-liners wanted… Well, it’s not clear what they wanted, other than to disrupt the way things had been done. Things got so heated that Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., had to be physically restrained from attacking Gaetz.

The concessions McCarthy made to Gaetz included a measure that would make it much easier to remove the House speaker. Last fall, Gaetz moved to do just that after McCarthy made a deal with Democrats to avert a government shutdown. Hard-liners aligned with Gaetz gave him the boot, and the House plunged into chaos again.

Maybe you’re starting to grasp why Republicans did not see Gaetz dropping out as a crushing defeat. Back in their Capitol Hill offices, away from the press, they collectively exhaled — and may have hoped that embattled defense secretary prospective nominee Pete Hegseth would soon follow suit and take the express train out of Washington. 

Gaetz was good at chaos. Once, he showed up in the House floor in a gas mask, presumably to protest pandemic regulations. Another time, in 2021, he told me he might nominate Trump as House speaker (you don’t need to be a member of the chamber to hold that title, in case you’re looking to apply for the most unpleasant job imaginable). And many times, he either downplayed or peddled conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, which he darkly (and falsely) insinuated had been a “fedsurrection.”

Perhaps legislators did not want the U.S. law enforcement apparatus run by a guy who saw the rampage through their workplace as a good idea. After all, there is only so much chaos Washington can take. 

Say what you will about his politics, the Republicans’ new leader in the Senate, John Thune of South Dakota, is no MAGA diehard. Thune is an understudy of Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the outgoing leader, who according to a new book once called Trump “despicable.”

For all the talk of how MAGA the GOP has become, there are few genuine Trumpists in the Senate. Oh, they will go along with most of what Trump says, but only because they are afraid of his supporters and Fox News. Most of them would be as out of place at a Trump rally as a Boston Red Sox jersey in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium — and would probably get a similar reception. Their great hope was a Nikki Haley presidency, with its promise of a return to Bush-era conservative values. 

For all their obeisance, mainstream Republicans want Trump 2.0 about as much as your average socialist. They just want lower taxes and fewer regulations — policies that will, to be sure, hurt the average American, but without terribly upsetting the status quo.

Instead, they have four more years of reporters asking if they’ve “read the tweets,” or whatever we’re supposed to call Trump’s social media posts these days. Four more years of fearing that the likes of Roy Moore, the disastrous Alabama candidate for the U.S. Senate, will be foisted on them by Trump and allies like Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk, who seem to care a lot more about fighting battles than winning wars. 

But whereas there is little they can do to affect how Trump runs the White House, U.S. senators do have the power to minimize what goes at the federal agency buildings that line Pennsylvania Avenue and surrounding streets. They can also remind Trump that they have “advice and consent” powers they don’t intend to hand over just yet. It will be smart for Thune to hold the line in the weeks to come. He will emerge a stronger leader for it.

I want to say that principled Republicans were turned off by allegations of Gaetz having sex with minors, which he has denied. A report from the House Ethics Committee, which has not yet been made public (and may never be), reportedly includes allegations of Gaetz paying two young women for sex and engaging in drug use. But those allegations are not new. I don’t remember many Republicans saying much after Gaetz spoke on the third night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee; do you?

Hegseth, the Fox News host Trump has nominated to head the Department of Defense, faces hardly less disturbing allegations of having sexually assaulted a woman in 2017. Although no charges were brought, Hegseth paid the woman a settlement — and the Trump team was reportedly “blindsided” by the allegations. The police report of the incident raises serious questions about Hegseth’s character.  (An attorney for Hegseth says he was falsely accused.)

Yet after he did his obligatory tour on Capitol Hill, just as Gaetz did, Republican senators came quickly to his defense. His confirmation hearings may indeed be a circus, but then it will be over, and Hegseth will, if he is confirmed, retreat to the Pentagon, on the other side of the Potomac. He won’t make trouble on Capitol Hill, they figure. He gets a pass.

It is good for the country that Gaetz will not serve as its attorney general, but I am not prepared to say that the GOP has fully found its backbone. Trump certainly knows they haven’t, given the two impeachments against him in which the overwhelming majority of Republicans stayed on his side. He lost on Gaetz, a bad pick to begin with, but will win on other fronts. The chaos is coming, whether Republicans like it or not.