Donald Trump Gets A Brutal Reality Check

Donald Trump is not a monarch.

That’s the unmistakable lesson of the ill-fated nomination of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. 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.

Though Republicans will control both chambers of Congress, the resistance from Senate Republicans to Gaetz’s nomination proved that there are still some checks on Trump — no matter how limited — that can hold, despite fear on the left that he will squeeze Congress into submission, get carte blanche from the conservative-dominated Supreme Court and enact his agenda at will.

"I think it shows that Donald Trump cannot get anything he wants,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law.

But Chemerinsky and others cautioned against extrapolating too much from the Gaetz debacle — he was so uniquely despised and compromised by legal and political scandal.

“But the facts here are so egregious, and Gaetz so unqualified, that I would be cautious in generalizing too much from it."