Matt Gaetz, a Bomb-Thrower for the Justice Department

 

Matt Gaetz, a Bomb-Thrower for the Justice Department

 

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be attorney general has set a new bar for in-your-face nominations.

 

Robert Draper

By Robert Draper

Reporting from Washington

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/us/politics/matt-gaetz.html

Nov. 13, 2024

 

In selecting Representative Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general, President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen an undisguised attack dog to preside over the Department of Justice.

 

Mr. Gaetz, 42, a Florida Republican and an unswerving loyalist to Mr. Trump, has a history that under conventional circumstances would make his confirmation prospects appear insurmountable.

 

He was investigated by the Justice Department on suspicion of child sex trafficking. This year, after the government case was shuttered, the House Committee on Ethics opened its own inquiry into the matter, which effectively ended on Wednesday night after Mr. Gaetz resigned from his seat. Mr. Gaetz has also been accused of showing photos of nude women to colleagues on the House floor and of seeking a pardon from the previous Trump White House. He has denied each of these allegations.

 

Mr. Gaetz is also an avowed enemy of virtually every top Republican not named Trump. He led the charge last year to oust one Republican leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and this year openly celebrated the resignations of two others — Senator Mitch McConnell, who announced he would be retiring as minority leader, and Ronna McDaniel, who stepped down as chairwoman of the Republican Party National Committee.

 

“We’ve now 86’d: McCarthy, McDaniel, McConnell,” Mr. Gaetz exulted on the social media platform X in March.

 

“I am not some ‘Lord of the Flies’ nihilist,” Mr. Gaetz insisted to The New York Times in January 2023, just after he had relinquished his five-day blockade of Mr. McCarthy’s eventually successful quest to be speaker. But nine months later, Mr. Gaetz helped pushed Mr. McCarthy out of the job for good.

 

“Developing notoriety becomes an alternate currency in Washington to impact outcomes,” Mr. Gaetz said in explaining his motive.

 

Even Mr. Gaetz’s many detractors ruefully acknowledge the tactical acumen of Mr. Gaetz, a former high school debate champion and commercial litigation attorney.

 

Shortly after first being elected to the House in 2016, he successfully worked the levers of the Steering Committee and, in a rarity for a freshman, landed plum assignments on both the Armed Services and Judiciary Committees. He never became a formal member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, but he served as its loudest spokesman. Along the way he cultivated acolytes in the group, including Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, both flamboyant troublemakers.

 

Most of all, Mr. Gaetz has exhibited a flair for getting attention.

 

As a freshman House member in 2017, he quickly became among the foremost cheerleaders on conservative media of the new Trump administration. In 2019, he and a group of roughly two dozen Republicans barged into a secure facility where the House Intelligence Committee was conducting an inquiry into whether to recommend impeaching Mr. Trump for the first time. A year later, Mr. Gaetz responded to the advent of the coronavirus pandemic by parading around the House floor while wearing a gas mask.

 

Mr. Gaetz’s fidelity to Mr. Trump continued after the former president left office. On Jan. 28, 2021, he traveled to Wyoming, where he stood outside the State Capitol and called for a primary challenge to its congresswoman, Representative Liz Cheney, who had voted to impeach Mr. Trump. Later that spring, he staged “America First” rallies around the country with fellow die-hard supporters of Mr. Trump like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

 

But he was not above tweaking Mr. Trump. During the protracted vote for House speaker in January 2023, Mr. Gaetz ignored the former president’s repeated urgings by phone to “be a hero” and “bring this home” by ending the opposition to Mr. McCarthy, an ally of Mr. Trump. Instead, during the seventh and eighth rounds of balloting, Mr. Gaetz nominated Mr. Trump to be speaker. The gambit did not amuse the former president.

 

In the end, however, by asserting his dominance over the House of Representatives, Mr. Gaetz was speaking the love language of Mr. Trump.

 

Succumbing to Mr. Trump’s wishes by voting to confirm Mr. Gaetz to be the new attorney general will be a bitter pill for some Republican senators to swallow. Senator Lindsey Graham, who will likely preside over Mr. Gaetz’s confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee, warned last year that Mr. Gaetz’s fight to deny Mr. McCarthy the speakership would be “a disaster for the future of the Republican Party.”

 

Many legislators regard Mr. Gaetz as a chaos agent who, as one of his House G.O.P. colleagues once said in confidence, likes to light a match simply to watch it burn. Bringing that kind of arsonist’s glee to the Justice Department would hardly allay concerns that Mr. Trump will exact retribution from his adversaries.

 

If such dilemmas are giving Republican leaders heartburn, then that alone is sure to make Mr. Gaetz’s day.

 

Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades. More about Robert Draper