Matt Gaetz perched on the tightrope between political glory and infamy

On the night of the – original, transformative – presidential debate in Atlanta, Florida congressman Matt Gaetz was cock-a-hoop when he entered the crowded floor of the spin room to give his views on Joe Biden’s implosion. It had been reported earlier that he had travelled to the city on Donald Trump’s private jet.
“Well, we were uh … enjoying a good time with friends,” he said when asked about his access to the Republican nominee.
“We got the band back together,” he laughed before offering a typically audacious and brazen review of the debate delivered with his distinctive South Floridian bass note.
“I got texts from friends of mine back in the House, who are Democrats, concerned that they might lose 20 or 30 seats in the House as a consequence of Joe Biden’s performance. What we are going to see in the coming days is a growing chorus of people calling on Joe Biden to reconsider his candidacy. But the Democrats are stuck with him. The time for that has passed. They are a-ridin’ with Biden.
“And you know what? You didn’t hear Joe Biden brag about any Bidenomics. Why? Because they are failing the American people. It was such a tremendous performance by president Trump. I think he stuck to a level of focus that really is admirable.
“You know, I figure every time Kamala Harris shakes Joe Biden’s hand she is gonna be checking his pulse from now to the convention and we will see how that goes. But Joe Biden couldn’t be the standard bearer for a random poetry night at this point, much less a Democratic Party. But at least Joe Biden beat Medicaid! He killed it himself.”
Those few minutes contained much of what makes Gaetz the most controversial of all the Republican politicians who fall under the category of long-standing hard-core Trumpites. He is bright, abrasive and, as his 2020 book title declared, a firebrand. In less than a decade, he has gone from novice, obscure congressman to one of the most divisive figures on Capitol Hill, with a villainous comic-book look of Presley-esque quiff, sharp eyes and a constant knowing smirk.
The selection by president-elect Trump, on Wednesday, of Gaetz as the next attorney general, has generated the first full-blown controversy of the upcoming administration. Many of Gaetz’s Republican colleagues are aghast and disgusted at the appointment and the general view is that it will not be passed by the Senate. “Look, Gaetz won’t get confirmed,” former House speaker Kevin McCarthy said this week.
“Everyone knows that.”
McCarthy has a particular animus with Gaetz, having been forced to resign from his position as speaker after the Floridian led a campaign to oust McCarthy from the role last year. McCarthy claimed afterwards that Gaetz had been motivated to see him removed from the speakership because “one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics [committee] complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old, an ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker. And that’s illegal, and I’m not gonna get in the middle of it. Now, did he do it or not? I don’t know. But Ethics was looking at it. There are other people in jail because of it. And he wanted me to influence it.”
The one person under investigation was Gaetz, who issued a taut response on X: “Kevin McCarthy is a liar. That’s why he is no longer speaker.”
In July, at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, extraordinary footage circulated of Gaetz appearing in the camera frame during a television interview featuring McCarthy to heckle him about not having a speaker’s spot during the week.
“If you tried to speak tonight,” he goaded, “you would get booed off the stage”.
McCarthy ignored him but someone filming nearby caught a further exchange with Richard Porter, an Illinois Republican national committee man.
“Shut up Gaetz. Don’t be an a**hole,” Porter tells him, leaning into his face.
“I don’t even know who you are, man” Gaetz replies.
“It doesn’t’ f*****g matter who I am. Don’t be an a**hole. You’re a f*****g a**hole,” Porter repeats as Gaetz hurries away.
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By then Gaetz was glorying in an acquired infamy. His rise to prominence, since his election to Congress in 2016, was rapid and stealthy and one of those classically southern political stories. He grew up in the Florida panhandle as the son of a multimillionaire and state politician and distinguished himself in high school as an exceptional and provocative debater.
After law school in Virginia and working his way through state elections to Congress, he cottoned on to the fact that media was the way to mark himself out from the crowd. He chose the highly contentious issue of sports stars, led by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, “taking the knee” as a gesture of protest.
“Rather than taking a knee, we ought to see professional athletes taking a stand and actually supporting this country,” he said in one of his first national exposures, with Tucker Carlson, who failed to pronounce his name correctly.
Gaetz is a polished TV performer and he embraced the flood of media invites from liberal and conservative outlets alike in the following years. His vivid communicating style impressed Trump, who absorbs politics as a never-ending television reality show. He took Gaetz under his wing: Gaetz, in turn, used his newfound influence to urge Trump to endorse Ron DeSantis in his bid to become governor of Florida. Trump did. DeSantis won and almost cancelled Gaetz’s rising star by standing against Trump for the Republican nomination.
But his political ambitions revolve around the 2021 revelation that the department of justice had begun to investigate allegations that Gaetz, now 42, had, in 2018, paid for sex and had engaged in sex with a minor. It was later reported that he had requested from Trump a full pardon in the dwindling weeks of his first administration, which was not granted.
Gaetz has denied allegations and the department of justice declined to press charges, but as the internal investigation continued, he found himself as a kind of lone wolf on Capitol Hill. Many Republican House representatives resented his move against McCarthy.
“They think I’m the crazy one and I think they’re the crazy one,” he said during one of his many campaign appearances for Trump early this winter. And within the Maga heartland of the Republican Party, he is a folk hero who forcefully delivers the clarion call to obliterate the prevailing political culture in Washington.
Trump’s appointment of Gaetz is unsurprising in that he has a history of rewarding loyalty. But it was still shocking to many people. By Wednesday evening, Gaetz had posted his gratitude and resigned from Congress, “effective immediately”. In normal practice, following the resignation from office of a lawmaker, or expulsion, any investigation by the bipartisan ethics committee immediately ceases. But because the report into Gaetz was expected this week, lawmakers from both parties have called for the release of the findings, given his imminent appointment as attorney general.
“I don’t think any of us want to fly blind,” Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas said this week. “Part of this is to protect the president against information or surprises coming out later that he and his team weren’t aware of.”
The Republicans’ slender Senate majority means just four dissents could scuttle his confirmation. That stance would displease the new president whose campaign has returned the GOP to a position of power redolent of the Reagan years. But Trump has already called for the Senate to validate his new cabinet through “recess appointments” which allows for speedy confirmation whenever the Senate has agreed to adjourn.. In a Washington Post opinion piece on Thursday, Edward Whelan, distinguished fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre outlined the “cockamamie scheme” the Trump team might resort to find a pathway for Gaetz.
“Under this scheme, it appears that the House would adopt a concurrent resolution that provides for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate. If the Senate doesn’t adopt the resolution, Trump would purport to adjourn both houses for at least 10 days (and perhaps much longer). He would then use the resulting intrasession recess to appoint Gaetz and other Cabinet nominees.”
It all leaves Matt Gaetz in the perilous place he has thrived for years: perched on the tightrope between political glory and infamy.
“In a world where the body politic has the attention span at times of a goldfish, yep, you’ve got to have the ability to reinvent yourself in this game many times,” he told the New York Times in a breakout interview in 2019, when he was in the ascendant. If he makes it to office of attorney general, his stunning and, to many, appalling metamorphosis would be complete.