It will be "pretty smooth sailing" for President-elect Donald Trump and his nominees moving forward through the Senate confirmation hearings, Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., predicted on Newsmax Wednesday.
"Yesterday Pete Hegseth did a great job," Donalds said on Newsmax's "National Report" about Trump's nominee for defense secretary. "He was phenomenal in that the Democrats tried to trip him up. They tried to get into semantics. They tried to get into details that, frankly, are reserved for deputy secretaries and assistant deputy secretaries. He did a great job."
Hegseth's performance, he added, "set the tone for the rest of the nomination contests."
"I don't even want to call them fights," Donalds said. "I'll just call them contests, Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio, I mean, not just because they're [from] Florida, but they're going to do exceptional as well today."
Bondi, a former Florida attorney general, has been nominated as U.S. attorney general, and Rubio, a former senator, got Trump's nod as secretary of state.
Meanwhile, Politico has reported that Rubio won't last long in a Trump administration, but Donalds disagreed.
"There are few people on Capitol Hill with as much foreign policy depth of knowledge as Marco Rubio," said the congressman. "That's No. 1. No. 2, he and President Trump have a great relationship."
Matters are also different now than they were when Trump first went to Washington in 2016, said Donalds.
"In 2016, the president nominated an initial Cabinet," he said. "A lot of people rolled out pretty quickly. Donald Trump has had an opportunity to be away from the White House, away from the presidency, so these picks are not just who is in front of him. This has been well thought out for quite some time."
And now, the people being brought in such as Rubio and Bondi "know who Donald Trump is," said Donalds. "He's no nonsense. He has an agenda. If you're not getting the job done to his specifications, you're out of there."
Rubio, he added, is "going to do a great job. He's going to be around for a while."
Meanwhile, outgoing President Joe Biden's nominees were "pitiful," but Americans shouldn't expect to see what they did in Trump's first administration," said Donalds.
"The people coming in, they know the score," he said, giving Trump and his team "major credit" for vetting the nominees.
Meanwhile, Donalds said Democrats questioning Hegseth Tuesday were trying to "find some way to trip him up and make him look bad."
"The Democrat Party is really in a shambles right now," he said. "They don't know what they want to argue about or argue for. A lot of their policy positions were basically thrown onto the ash heap of history by the voters of the United States of America. So they're looking for any opportunity to try to find a wedge for their party to gain their footing."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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