Nov. 14: The Gaetz of Hell

Trump to restore sanity in Middle East; RFK for HHS; Why did Kamala skip Rogan?

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The Big Story

On Wednesday afternoon, shortly before The Scroll went out, Donald Trump announced Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as his pick for attorney general. 

To say the pick was a shock would be an understatement: Our first reaction was to assume that the announcement was literally fake news, like the photoshopped Truth Social post from Wednesday announcing Tucker Carlson as White House Press Secretary. Gaetz is “polarizing” even among Republicans, which is a polite way of saying widely despised, both for his leading role in the campaign to oust then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy in 2023—regarded on the Hill as a self-serving stunt that divided and weakened the GOP—and for his unsavory character. The conservative pundit Ben Domenech wrote on Thursday morning that Gaetz is a “sex trafficking drug addicted piece of shit,” which certainly captures the private view of many who may now be wary of stating their views publicly.

The characters issues, in particular, became a liability for Gaetz in 2021, when anonymous sources leaked to The New York Times that he was the target in a Department of Justice probe over whether the congressman had engaged in the “sex trafficking” of an underage prostitute. The case was bizarre and at least partly entangled with what turned out to be an attempt by a former DOJ prosecutor and an Air Force intelligence officer to extort Gaetz’s father for a $25 million loan, ostensibly to rescue former FBI agent Mark Levinson from Iran. Eighteen months later, the DOJ dropped the investigation after prosecutors recommended against bringing charges, reportedly due to problems with the credibility of the witnesses. 

So, Gaetz—at the time a leading pro-Trump voice on the House Judiciary Committee—was, at minimum, the subject of a coordinated leak campaign tied to a suspicious prosecution in which charges were never brought, and which succeeded in sidelining him politically and shredding his reputation. That is, not coincidentally, exactly the sort of abuse of government power that we’ve seen normalized by the Obama faction over the past decade, and the bizarre sequence of events has made Gaetz something of a MAGA martyr. At the same time, Gaetz was not exactly exonerated, and the accusations sounded true even to other Republicans based on what they knew about the man. As Trump ally Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin told CNN in October 2023, amid the McCarthy leadership fight:

You gotta think about this guy. This is a guy that the media didn’t give the time of day to after he was accused of sleeping with an underage girl. There’s a reason why no one in the [Republican] conference came and defended [Gaetz], because we had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor … of the girls that he had slept with. He’d brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night. 

In a subsequent interview, Mullin said that the first time he ever met Gaetz, Gaetz had described Kristi Noem—a friend of Mullin’s and now Trump’s nominee for Homeland Security Secretary—as a “fine bitch.” Neither of those actions are illegal, but nor are they indicative of good judgment. And prior to being nominated as AG, Gaetz was the subject of a bipartisan House Committee on Ethics investigation into the allegations raised by the DOJ, with the committee set to release a “highly damaging” report on Gaetz this Friday. That report is now blocked since Gaetz resigned from his House seat and thus removed the committee’s jurisdiction over him. On Thursday, however, John Clune, the lawyer for the minor Gaetz was accused of having sex with, posted the following on X:

That’s a statement from an interested party, so take it for what you will. We’d note, however, that (a) Gaetz being unjustly blackmailed and smeared by leaks and (b) Gaetz engaging in criminal or discreditable behavior are not mutually exclusive. A man with skeletons in his closet is a natural target.

We have heard a bull case for Gaetz from people we know and trust, which goes something like this: The DOJ has become thoroughly corrupted and politicized over roughly the past decade and can only be fixed by someone who is willing to act as a wrecking ball. A more conventional pick—such as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) or former Acting AG Matthew Whitaker—would be excessively deferential to the institution and thus would be vulnerable to getting rolled by internal DOJ “Resistance,” much in the way that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was in Trump’s first term. According to this theory, Gaetz will be tasked with cleaning house at DOJ, while responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the department will be entrusted to a more conventional, and conventionally qualified, deputy attorney general. Put alongside some of Trump’s other nominations—including Phil Hegseth for secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard for director of National Intelligence, Marco Rubio for secretary of state, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services (announced shortly before our publication today)—the Gaetz pick would suggest a general strategy of appointing as leaders of various agencies people who want to burn their agency down. The historian Robert Conquest posited a law that “the behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” As X user @EndingBigly joked, Trump appears to be turning that into his governing philosophy.

In other words, the argument is that, yes, he may be an asshole, but we need an asshole, and he’s our asshole. That’s the theory. It’s a fine theory, and it’s a perfectly good argument for, say, putting Hegseth at the Pentagon. With Gaetz, though, we wouldn’t trust the man as far as we could throw him. Take, as just one small example, the following interview that Gaetz did with Tucker Carlson on Fox back in 2021, immediately after The New York Times published a story on the allegations against him:

 

Put aside your feelings about Carlson and simply consider the stunt that Gaetz attempted to pull here. After describing—accurately, it turned out—the extortion scheme targeting him and his father, Gaetz immediately pivots to attempting to dirty up Carlson with innuendos about unnamed sex crimes, in what can only be described as an attempt at blackmail on live television. “I’m not the only person on screen right now who’s been falsely accused of a terrible sex act,” Gaetz said. “You were accused of something you did not do and so you know what this feels like.” Asked by Carlson what the underlying allegations were, Gaetz then brought up a private dinner he’d had with Carlson, Carlson’s wife, and a female “friend” who he said was being pressured to serve as a government witness in the case. “You’ll remember her,” Gaetz says, in a particularly bizarre exchange. Carlson responds, “I don’t remember the woman you’re speaking of or the context at all, honestly.” Carlson ends the interview by stating the obvious: “That was one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted.” He never had Gaetz on again. 

In other words, that’s how this supposed “loyalist” treats his friends when his back is against the wall: by threatening to dirty them up and bring them down with him. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: Hillel Kuttler on the IDF’s new Haredi recruits

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The Rest

→At least there’s good news in the Middle East. The New York Times reported Thursday on how Trump’s “emerging team in the Middle East appears poised to push U.S. foreign policy into even tighter accord with Israel’s far-right government,” which is Obama-Biden speak for the president-elect’s impending plans to abandon the Obama-Biden realignment policy. The article namechecks Rubio, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Ambassador to the United Nations Elise Stefanik, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe as portending a hawkish tilt in U.S. Middle East policy: Rubio, for instance, compared the idea of Israel not invading Rafah to Allied forces stopping short of Berlin in 1945, while Ratcliffe recently appeared on Fox to declare that Washington should be “assisting Israel” in pummeling Iran and its proxies. Israeli journalist Amit Segal reported Thursday on Trump’s “first promise” to the Israelis: “On the first day of my term, I will cancel all restrictions and delays on the transfer of armaments and combat equipment.”

→As we mentioned briefly in The Big Story, Trump announced on Thursday afternoon that he was nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, has some unconventional ideas about health, which we’d be more inclined to dismiss if we hadn’t just lived through a global pandemic engineered in a lab by allegedly more responsible experts, who then proceeded to repeatedly lie to the public about not only the origins of the pandemic but also the effectiveness of various treatments and non-pharmaceutical interventions. You can read Kennedy talking about these and other matters in his own words in his April 2023 interview with Tablet.

Read it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/robert-f-kennedy-jr-interview-david-samuels 

→Both before and after the election, Democrats frequently raised concerns that Trump’s threatened mass deportations were—in addition to being inhumane—expensive and impractical. In an interview with The Free Press, however, incoming Trump “border czar” Thomas Homan gave the distinct impression that he isn’t screwing around. Asked by reporter Madeleine Rowley what the administration will do if foreign countries refuse to accept their citizens from the United States, Homan said, “We’ll cancel the visas, including visas for government personnel. We’ll send everyone home.” Homan acknowledged that “we won’t be able to find everyone” out of the estimated 11 million (and likely far more) illegal immigrants living in the United States but said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was “pretty good at locating them” and would prioritize “public safety threats and national security threats.”

→On Monday, we shared a report from The Daily Wire that a Florida FEMA official, Marn’i Washington, instructed her subordinates to “bypass the homes of Trump supporters” while canvassing in the wake of Hurricane Helene in October. Washington was fired soon after the report came to light. In a Wednesday evening interview with Fox News, however, Washington claimed that she was merely following orders from her superiors, who are now attempting to scapegoat her for what was in reality an official agency policy. “Why is this coming down on me? I am the person that jotted down the notes from my superiors,” Washington said, according to a write-up of the interview from Fox News Digital. Washington claimed that the instructions were part of a “deescalation” policy meant to avoid making FEMA employees feel “uncomfortable,” which had been implemented after unspecified “hostile political encounters.” But she was adamant that the guidance had not originated with her. “It's easy to then say, ‘Well, ha ha! It’s her name. It’s her writing. Make her accountable for it.’ But I’m just simply executing again, what was coming down from my superiors.”

→Kamala Harris chose not to appear on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast due to “backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it,” Jennifer Palmieri, a senior adviser to Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, told the Financial Times. We suspect that’s true, but after the FT published its story, Palmieri posted on X that she had misspoken and that the vice president had “made the decision” to appear on Rogan’s show but never went through with it because of scheduling issues. We’re not sure which story is supposed to be the flattering one: that Harris was too scared of her staffers to overrule them, or that she and her team were too inept to successfully schedule a slot on the most popular podcast in America. Rogan’s interview with Trump racked up nearly 50 million views on YouTube, and the podcaster endorsed the former president on the night before the election. 

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The IDF’s New Recruits

As small but growing numbers of Haredi men enlist in the Israeli military, attitudes in their strictly observant communities start to shift

by Hillel Kuttler

Haim Traitel reclined in bed in a third-floor room at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba on a late-October afternoon. During a two-hour interview, he discussed the battle injury he suffered the previous week in the Gaza Strip, his service in the Israel Defense Forces, and his motivation for enlisting.

Traitel spoke on the record and OK’d his photo appearing with this story. But he declined to name the specific Hasidic sect to which he and his family belong, beyond saying that it’s an “important” group in the Haredi-majority town of Bnai Brak, where he lives with his parents, brother, and sisters.

The 19-year-old sergeant plans to return to his unit after recuperating. Haim’s father, Moshe, plans to host a seudat hodaya, a thanksgiving feast—a traditional celebration after someone survives a life-threatening circumstance—and expects no problem in renting a hall for the occasion, but he’s sure the community’s leadership won’t attend.

That’s because military service is not encouraged where they live, Moshe told me while visiting his son the same day. For that reason, Haim added, he’s sure he won’t be asked to speak about his Gaza experiences at the family’s synagogue or the schools he attended.

Haim grew up knowing little about life beyond Bnai Brak, a city of more than 200,000 bordering Tel Aviv. He attended yeshiva, but wasn’t studious. He secretly bought a smartphone—Moshe, himself holding a smartphone during our interview, smiled at his son’s daring—and went online to learn about politics and national affairs. He read about the IDF and watched videos of soldiers’ exploits.

“I saw heroes with weapons,” said Haim. “It fires you up. When there was a terrorist attack, I’d say, ‘I’m enlisting.’ When there wasn’t, I didn’t. It hurt me that I wasn’t taking part in the [country’s] defense.”

Haim was fortunate to receive his parents’ support, and their hugs, when he announced at age 17 his intention to join the IDF. They attended the ceremonies when he was sworn in and completed basic training.

The reality of life for an IDF soldier from Bnai Brak, as in many Haredi (strictly observant) communities, is complex, even after Haim nearly was killed in Jabalia by a Hamas sniper’s bullet from behind that tore a muscle, exited his left shin, required seven stitches, and necessitated a monthslong rehabilitation.

And their community, Moshe and Haim explained, is—on the Haredi spectrum—relatively liberal.

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“Is the blood of Haredim worth more?” reads a sign hanging from an overpass on Highway 7, east of Ashdod.

The question was jarring and ironic, given that I passed it while driving to meet this Haredi teenager who nearly was killed defending Israel.

The message apparently was painted by a secular Jewish Israeli upset by Haredim not sharing the burden of military service—specifically, fighting in the ongoing wars in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon that, as of Nov. 5, have taken the lives of 780 Israeli soldiers and other security personnel. Israeli governments since 1948 have allowed Haredim to study full time in yeshivot and skip IDF service that’s otherwise mandatory for Jews and Druze. But many Israelis have long resented what they see as Haredi abuse of the system to also exempt those not studying Torah full time.

“The sign is very, very painful,” Traitel said when I told him of it. “I understand the pain. There are not many like me.”

An IDF spokeswoman said figures aren’t available on how many Haredim are serving in the military. Experts estimate the number in the low thousands, minuscule in a population of 1.3 million Haredim.

The simmering social pot has been boiling over the past six months due to the long stretches, some more than a year, served by IDF reservists in the ongoing wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The renewed friction led the Supreme Court to rule in July that authority for the exemptions had lapsed and that draft notices must be sent to approximately 60,000 Haredi men. Three thousand notices went out—Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced last week, before he was fired from his post, that 7,000 more would be sent—but only a fraction of those summoned showed up at induction centers.

Anti-draft demonstrations continue to be held in Haredi areas. And last week, Haredi members of Knesset were threatening to withhold their votes for a national budget if a draft-exemption bill isn’t passed.

The issue continues to anger—and not only secular Jewish Israelis are venting. Resentment has come recently from the religious-Zionist (akin to modern Orthodox in the United States) camp, usually among Israel’s most unity-preaching sectors.

One such member, Rachel Goldberg, spoke emotionally during the shiva for her husband and the father of the couple’s eight children, Avi, killed in battle in Lebanon on Oct. 26.

Israel is at war “against accursed enemies, and many people wear green uniforms and join to fight in God’s army, the IDF, but we don’t have enough people,” Goldberg said in a video clip posted on Facebook. “I want to call on people learning Torah and not serving in the military to enlist in the Jewish people’s military.” She drew a parallel with pre-Shabbat preparations: “It’s not that one person sits at the table, praying that the house will be clean. Everyone must clean. Everyone must stand and act and exert one’s body. And whoever doesn’t—it’s not educational, not Jewish, not moral to give him something,” Goldberg said, referring to governmental subsidies for yeshiva students.

Rabbi Menachem Bombach, whose organization, Netzach, runs Haredi schools teaching secular subjects alongside Judaic studies, said in a phone interview: “There is an ethical and moral price for not participating in defending the Jewish state. … If this is your way, it is very selfish.”

Bombach served in the IDF, as did his son. “There’s now an awakening,” Bombach said of Haredim, of which he is one. “It’s not enough, but it’s a change.”

The social tension comes as Haredi opposition to IDF service appears to be softening, at least in the short term, due in part to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, murderous rampage across the western Negev that stirred Haredim emotionally. That’s the view of several community members interviewed for this article, including one who mentioned Haredim murdered that day. Haredim have visited those recovering from the attacks and soldiers wounded in battle, cooked for deployed soldiers, and donated needed products. Some interviewees reported Psalms and other prayers now being recited in their synagogues for the IDF’s success and for wounded soldiers’ recovery.

From there, they said, it’s less of a leap to Haredi men enlisting and to community members accepting their decisions to do so. But anything approaching broad Haredi enlistment “will take two or three generations,” said Dov Lipman, a U.S.-raised former Knesset member who is Haredi and whose son served in the IDF.

Tel Aviv University professor Nechumi Yaffe said she detects Haredi attitudes toward military service changing.

Yaffe and colleague Yael Itzhaki-Braun polled approximately 1,000 Haredim throughout Israel after Russia launched its war against Ukraine in February 2022, then following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, and then at points throughout the ensuing wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

The researchers asked whether the Haredi public must find a way to contribute to Israel’s defense, and found that affirmative answers jumped from 42% to 63% following the massacre. On whether the respondent personally should contribute to Israel’s military effort, the increase was higher over the same period: from 35% to 58%.

“The stigma [against] people who have served has significantly lowered,” said Yaffe, who is Haredi.

Still, negotiations and court rulings on compulsory military service have not considered any roles for Haredi women. (Druze and non-Haredi Jewish women, particularly in their observant communities, can perform national service, such as in schools or hospitals, in lieu of the military. Otherwise, Jewish women, like Jewish and Druze men, are subject to the draft.)

Anecdotal evidence of change, at least for Haredi men, abounds.

Haredi soldiers were known to change into civvies before returning on weekend leave, lest they face scorn or worse in their neighborhoods. That seems to be changing.

“They’re much less concerned about that post-Oct. 7,” said Karmi Gross, a Miami-raised rabbi in Ramat Beit Shemesh, who founded a program for Haredim that combines military service with both Torah learning and an academic program leading to a professional degree. The program is modeled after the hesder track for religious-Zionist youth, which entails Torah study and military training.

During the recent holiday period, one of Gross’ students told him of entering his synagogue for Mincha prayers in uniform.

“Half of the men started yelling at him to leave the shul. It’s very normal,” said Gross. “For the first time, another group—at least half—started yelling back to say, ‘Leave him alone.’ It’s very significant. Army service does not make you a leper anymore. A lot of that, I think, is the Oct. 7 effect. Once that wall falls, time will have its [further] effect. Are you going to see massive numbers [of recruits] coming? No. That will take time.”

Several interviewees remarked that the IDF now faces a golden opportunity to foster greater Haredi enlistment by enticing, not compelling; by reaching out to teenagers less drawn to yeshiva study; and by meeting the religious-observance needs of Haredim, such as their preferred kashrut for food, dedicated times for Torah study and prayers, and not having males serve with females—needs the IDF has made great efforts to meet since the 1990s in its all-Haredi units, including the three now operating within the paratrooper, Kfir, and Givati brigades. A full-fledged Haredi brigade, Hasmoneans, is due to launch in December.

But the military environment makes it “inevitable” that religious observance will be compromised, said Yitzchok Horowitz, 26, who served in the Haredi paratrooper unit.

Horowitz, raised in the Haredi neighborhood of Har Nof in Jerusalem, said he sees the sense in not forcing the issue: “The Haredi community, me included, believes that, yes, [Haredim] should sit and learn [Torah] because these people are protecting the Holy Land in a different way.”

A promising conduit to normalizing IDF service for the Haredi sector might be the track known as Phase 2. Revived by the IDF during this wartime period, it enables Haredi men who passed draft age to enlist, undergo two or four weeks of basic training, and serve in combat or noncombat roles. It requires the person to make a five-year commitment of annual reserve duty.

Phase 2 is “an opportunity we must take advantage of, to bring about a breakthrough, to show that Haredim are entering the military—and then youth will enlist,” said Eliezer Safrin, a 44-year-old real estate developer in Beit Shemesh who entered the program in August after six months of pressing the IDF to accept him. “It definitely gives a big sense of satisfaction and belonging, and a feeling of: ‘Why didn’t I do it earlier when I could’ve contributed more?’ If it weren’t for the war, it may not have crossed my mind.”

The track holds promise because participants are older and life-seasoned, less prone to social pressures against enlistment.

“If you draft at 18, they look at you askance. But if you enlist with a wife and family, it’s more accepted. They judge you less,” said David Klaristenfeld, 35, a married father of two and owner of an air conditioning repair business in Ramat Beit Shemesh.

Klaristenfeld had wanted to serve in the IDF in his youth but said he “couldn’t do it” due to his Haredi surroundings. Then came the Oct. 7 invasion and the gruesome videos he watched of Hamas slaughtering Israelis. “This was the chance,” he said. “I jumped at the opportunity.”

He enlisted, trained for two weeks, served for three months in the military forensics center, then patrolled along Israel’s border with Jordan. When Israeli pilots bombed military sites in Iran in late October, Klaristenfeld didn’t hesitate when his commander summoned him—on Shabbat morning—in preparation for a potential Iranian counterattack. “I have secular clients,” he said. “When I say I’ve just returned from reserve duty, they’re in shock. It’s a form of sanctifying God’s name.”

As for Traitel, he aspires, post-army, to study law or political science. Then, he said, he wants to work in the public sphere. “I can be the connection,” he said, “between the Haredi community and general society, to promote Haredi enlistment.”