President-elect Donald Trump was blessed by the gods when his nominee for attorney general withdrew from consideration — he should use this as an opportunity to level set.

Matt Gaetz, a disgraced former congressman who is widely loathed by his former colleagues on Capitol Hill and is mired in allegations of affairs with teenagers and sex trafficking, did Trump a favor by withdrawing his name.

Gaetz was always going to be a tough sell in the Senate. He would have created unnecessary friction with senators whose support Trump will need over the next four years and his candidacy was already a distraction for Trump with extensive media coverage of the allegations — and all for a guy who would almost certainly suck at the job.

Up to this point, Trump has made some strong picks, who satisfy at least one of three criteria: requisite experience, policy expertise or leadership abilities.

Susie Wiles, a steady Republican campaign operative who has helped Trump since 2016, was picked for chief of staff (the first woman to hold the position).

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Republican Leslie Knope who has probably been playing model U.N. since elementary school, was picked for U.N. ambassador.

Sen. Marco Rubio, a senior member on both the Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, was picked for secretary of state.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Bergum has both the policy expertise and the requisite experience to be interior secretary.

These picks should have no real problems in the Senate (Wiles doesn’t require confirmation), but they will also likely do a very good job implementing Trump’s ambitious plans.

But some of the picks range from odd fits to totally absurd.

Gov. Kristi Noem was selected to lead the Department of Homeland Security. As governor of South Dakota, she has experience running a bureaucracy and would have made a lot of sense as secretary of agriculture, or interior, or maybe even energy. But heading one of the agencies focused on border security and terrorism makes less sense.

If this was as bad as it got, everything would be fine. But it wasn’t.

Fox News Host Pete Hegseth was selected to run the Department of Defense, which has a nearly $2 trillion budget that includes the military ... like the whole thing.

I didn’t know anything about Hegseth when I first heard the news, so I read his book “The War on Warriors,” which helped me greatly. It’s a good book and I recommend it. His personal mission is to rid the military of DEI programs and woke generals and ideologically this fit makes sense.

But the job requires more than ideology. Hegseth served in the Army, rising to the rank of major, and has leadership potential. He also has several Ivy League degrees and wants to reverse the trend of declining military enrollment.

These are all great things, and he’d probably be great at the Veterans Administration and maybe even as some kind of strategic advisor. But defense secretary is a stretch.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for the Department of Health and Human Services might be the worst choice yet.

Kennedy has neither the experience nor the expertise to lead the department, which has a $2.8 trillion budget (the largest of the departments).

MAGA loves Kennedy because of things like his distrust of vaccines and processed foods. But HHS oversees healthcare policy, Medicare and Medicaid, National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. It’s impossible to go a day without encountering this department’s influence in our lives.

Picks like Gaetz, Kennedy and Hegseth put senators in a bad position and threaten to derail Trump’s agenda before it even gets off the ground. What’s the point?

Matt Fleming is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.