Either Way, Matt Gaetz Wins
7 min read
Yesterday, when Donald Trump announced that he wanted Representative Matt Gaetz to lead the Department of Justice, virtually all Democrats—and even some Republicans—were aghast. The man who was the subject of a federal sex-crimes investigation will now be America’s chief prosecutor? they wondered, eyes wide. Attorney General Matt Gaetz?
They may have to get used to it. “It’s the absolute perfect pick,” Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign strategist, told me last night. “It’s pure Trump, it’s pure MAGA—and it’s a huge reality check on John Thune,” he added, referring to the South Dakota senator and incoming Senate majority leader generally regarded as an establishment type. Gaetz might be a pariah among his congressional colleagues—and inspire revulsion more widely—but the Florida Republican has consistently remained popular with the one person who matters: Trump.
Gaetz has always sought political relevance and power. Dismissed by many, including GOP colleagues, as a self-promoter, Gaetz’s superpower has been understanding far more clearly than they do how power works in the Trumposphere. And that insight has enabled him to become consigliere to the former and soon-to-be president. “For all the things people say about Gaetz that are true, the one thing about Matt that people don’t fully respect is that the guy is not an idiot,” Steve Schale, a Florida Democratic consultant who knew Gaetz during his time in the state legislature, told me. Now is when Gaetz’s hard work starts to pay off—even if the Senate declines to confirm him.
“Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney,” Trump wrote on Truth Social yesterday, although the truth seems more obvious: Gaetz has scant experience as a lawyer; more important to Trump, he’d be a scrappy loyalist. A few hours after the announcement, Gaetz resigned from Congress. Perhaps the move was a show of confidence in his own nomination; more likely, it was a perfect opportunity to escape the political repercussions of a long-awaited Ethics Committee report. (Gaetz has repeatedly denied the allegations against him. The DOJ dropped its criminal investigation in 2022, but the House panel inquiry had continued—and was set to vote on whether to release its findings soon.)
To understand why Trump chose Gaetz, it helps to understand Gaetz himself. Earlier this year, when I profiled Gaetz, I wrote about his childhood in the Florida panhandle, where his family’s vacation home was the house from The Truman Show, the film whose main character’s entire life is revealed to have been a performance for public consumption. Gaetz’s father, Don, was an extremely wealthy business owner and a powerful establishment Republican, the leader of the state Senate. In high school, Gaetz was entitled, smart, and not very popular. “He would pick debates with people over things that didn’t matter, because he just wanted to,” one of his former debate-club teammates told me.
Before being elected to Congress in 2016, Gaetz had a quick gig as an attorney in Fort Walton Beach, and served a few terms in the Florida state House. He’d been a Jeb Bush guy, but he knew that his district—one of the reddest in the country—loved Trump. Sensing that the wind was shifting direction, he got on board. At first, Congress was tough for Gaetz, former staffers and friends told me. He didn’t love being a freshman backbencher. He was used to being influential and was unwilling to wait his turn for a leadership role.
So he devised a different strategy: He’d go on TV as much as possible, as a way to speak directly to the American people—and one American person in particular. Gaetz quickly became the loudest Trump defender in Congress. He introduced a resolution to force Special Counsel Robert Mueller to resign, and barged into a closed-door deposition related to Trump’s first impeachment. It worked: Right away, Trump was calling him regularly to request policy advice, and inviting him on Air Force One. “Lincoln had the great General Grant … and I have Matt Gaetz!” Trump told a group of lawmakers in 2019, according to Gaetz’s 2020 book, Firebrand.
Although even some of Trump’s closest confidants disparaged him in private, Gaetz never wavered. “Unlike Roger Stone, I never heard Matt Gaetz say anything bad about Trump,” Morgan Pehme, the filmmaker who produced Get Me Roger Stone and The Swamp, told me earlier this year. Pehme spent roughly 50 days with Gaetz, the star of The Swamp. “He was tickled by the fact that he could pick up the phone and have a private back-and-forth,” Pehme said. When allegations that Gaetz had been involved in sex-trafficking a minor emerged in the spring of 2021, Trump distanced himself a little. But Gaetz leaned harder into his relationship with Trump. He went on the road with Marjorie Taylor Greene to repeat Trump’s stolen-election lies.
Last year, Gaetz led the effort to topple his party’s speaker of the House. He thwarted the establishment in service of his own personal interests, as well as the MAGA agenda—and with the incoming speaker, Mike Johnson, he gave Trumpism a bigger microphone. “Gaetz is a creature of our time: versed in the art of performance politics and eager to blow up anything to get a little something,” I wrote in April.
That little something could now be a big thing. Most Republicans, and some of his own allies, believe that Gaetz eventually wants to be governor of Florida. Others assume that he will one day run for president. But if, on his way up, Gaetz has a shot at being the nation’s top prosecutor, why not take it? “Gaetz wants to be relevant,” Schale told me yesterday. “He’s going to find a way to be in the conversation.”
The Senate might not confirm Gaetz. Already, a few Republicans have expressed serious displeasure at his nomination. Perhaps, some political observers have theorized, the pick is intended to be a kind of heat shield for Trump’s other appointments, making Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence or Pete Hegseth for defense secretary look more normal by comparison. If Republican senators are forced to choose their battles, in other words, maybe they’ll choose to bork Gaetz and let the rest go through.
But this is Trump, and these are Trump’s people. If we’ve learned anything in these past eight years, it’s that Republicans will do what Trump wants them to, almost every time. “What I’m hearing privately from a few key GOP senators: yes, they’d prefer to not have a messy fight over Gaetz. Not their favorite. But they also don’t have a lot of energy for pushing back,” CBS’s Robert Costa posted on X.
If Gaetz is approved, some commentators seem confident that he can’t—or won’t—do much damage. “I’m not losing sleep over this one,” Sarah Isgur, a former DOJ spokesperson during the first Trump administration who has since been critical of Trump, told me via text. “Sure, there’s all sorts of stuff that anyone could do hypothetically,” she said, but if Gaetz is the TV face of the department, and someone such as Todd Blanche, the attorney who defended Trump in his hush-money trial, is the AG’s deputy running the show behind the scenes, she’s not worried. Gaetz “is the opposite of the incel types who sit at home stewing about their perceived enemies on the playground,” she said, “and Blanche has a serious background as a good lawyer.”
Yet Trump’s allies are gloating about Gaetz’s nomination, predicting that he will relentlessly go after Trump’s political enemies, at large and within the department itself. “He’s gonna take a blowtorch to the Justice Department,” Bannon told me. As for such former and current intelligence and law-enforcement officials as Merrick Garland, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Monaco, James Comey, John Brennan, and the 50 former senior intelligence officers who signed a letter in 2020 claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop leak looked like a Russian disinformation operation, “all of them better lawyer up,” Bannon said. “He’s going to put the fear of God into the people that have politicized these institutions completely.”
At a minimum, the confirmation hearings will give Gaetz more time in the spotlight, performing as a warrior for Trump. Even if the Senate doesn’t confirm him, he’ll have the chance to burnish his MAGA credentials by claiming that he was thwarted, once more, by the Republican establishment. Without a full-time job, he’ll have time to start shouting that message from the rooftops in Florida, where he could start running next year to replace Governor Ron DeSantis, who is term-limited. “Gaetz doesn’t mind being a MAGA martyr,” Peter Schorsch, a Florida publisher and former political consultant, told me, “so he gets blocked and comes raging hot from Hades and is fully empowered to run.”
The one thing we can predict with certainty is that Gaetz will, as always, make the moment work for him.
