Has there been a politician both as broadly despised, including in his own party, and yet as improbably effective as Matt Gaetz? When the Florida congressman—previously best known for his unflinching support of Donald Trump’s election denialism and for being investigated over allegations of sex trafficking (he denied them, and the Department of Justice declined to bring charges)—engineered the removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, last week, he had the support of exactly seven other House Republicans, out of two hundred and twenty-one. McCarthy’s supporters denounced Gaetz’s faction on the floor as “chaos” agents “running with scissors.” Even Newt Gingrich, a spiritual grandfather of Gaetz’s intraparty Molotovism, later called for him to be ejected from the Republican caucus. In a sense, Gaetz was doing what Trump has been doing this month as he contests a court case: testing whether the MAGA movement can operate simply as an ongoing insurrection against whatever it is that its principals don’t like.
And yet, in the decisive hour-long debate over vacating the Speakership on Tuesday afternoon, Gaetz also demonstrated a keen eye for political weakness. McCarthy’s supporters rose in waves, protesting that it wasn’t fair to fire a Speaker who had made such progress in passing bills and in oversight. Gaetz kept asking, What progress? Many of the bills that the McCarthy faction was bragging about (some proposing steep cuts to social spending and unwinding the Biden Administration’s energy policies), having been dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, “are not law,” Gaetz said. “It is difficult to champion oversight when House Republicans haven’t even sent a subpoena to Hunter Biden,” he added. “It sort of looks like failure theatre.” As the chamber braced for the final vote, Gaetz, standing in front of a bank of Democrats who were regarding him skeptically but would nonetheless be voting with him, laid down his notes and stopped speaking, almost totally friendless and yet the central figure in Washington.
In the moment, McCarthy’s faction appeared more naturally sympathetic. They seemed genuinely pained; after the vote, when every Democrat had joined the eight insurgents to end McCarthy’s time as Speaker, some Republicans reportedly huddled in prayer on the floor. McCarthy’s allies had seen Gaetz’s opportunism clearly: Garret Graves, of Louisiana, said that the Florida congressman’s campaign was using his challenge to McCarthy to send out texts asking for donations while Gaetz was speaking on the House floor, which even by the standards of Congress was undeniably gross. But the speeches from McCarthy’s allies defending the Speaker gave too much to Gaetz’s radicals. They denounced Biden’s Administration as “lawless,” and declared McCarthy’s majority “the only firewall” against “a dark and scary reality.” The more they insisted that the national situation was desperate, the more they made Gaetz’s case for him.
The salient thing to say about Gaetz’s rebellion is that it has been a long time coming. The Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol, interviewed by Politico, identified a pattern of “bottom-up radicalization” that has consumed the Republican grass roots since the time of George W. Bush’s Administration. Conservative voters have grown ever more angry about immigration and social transformation and dissatisfied with the Republican politicians who pledged to reverse these changes and couldn’t.
But the slow radicalization of the G.O.P. depended at least as much on the capitulation of the establishment to these forces. McCarthy survived in the Party longer than Paul Ryan or Eric Cantor because he conceded more. He flew to Mar-a-Lago to welcome Trump back into the Party after January 6th; he aligned himself with Marjorie Taylor Greene; and he ordered the sprawling impeachment inquiry into President Biden that the base wanted. Had McCarthy’s theory of political exchange worked, and these favors done for the MAGA faction earned favors in return, then the only person in the Party powerful enough to save him might have done so. But last week, when a reporter at a downtown Manhattan courthouse asked Trump whether he supported McCarthy, the former President simply brushed past.
Right now, of course, Trump has his own problems. He was in court to defend himself against civil charges brought against him, his businesses, his two oldest sons, and other Trump Organization executives by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. The lawsuit alleges that they have fraudulently inflated the value of Trump’s holdings—a case in which he stands to lose two hundred and fifty million dollars and also the right to run a business in New York, something that has constituted a substantial part of his brand. The trial so far has not been going well for him: he had the bad luck to draw a judge, Arthur Engoron, who has shown little patience with Trump’s defense (“This is ridiculous,” the judge complained during an extensive line of questioning by one of the ex-President’s lawyers), and who will decide the outcome in part because Trump’s lawyers, inexplicably, failed to request a jury trial. Even in the context of a court case, Trump, who denies any wrongdoing, has now apparently abandoned all social (not to mention post-Presidential) norms, denouncing the trial as “corrupt,” Engoron as “rogue,” James as a “political animal,” and Engoron’s law clerk as the “girlfriend” of the Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer.
The MAGA movement is often described as a far-right faction, but its current incarnation, in which cults of personality loom large, is politically a little cloudier than that. Gaetz and most of his seven rebels have been associated with the extremist Freedom Caucus. But they also included Nancy Mace, of South Carolina, a relative moderate whose gripe with McCarthy was that he’d broken his promises, she said, including one to expand access to birth control. (Most of the Freedom Caucus supported McCarthy.) The exasperation that so many Republicans expressed about Gaetz suggests that they are getting fed up with a MAGA logic in which the outsiders are always right and the Party is never doing enough. But McCarthy will likely be succeeded by an even more conservative Speaker (Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, and Jim Jordan, the Freedom Caucus’s talisman from Ohio, have both announced that they are running, and Trump has endorsed Jordan), and, on the campaign trail, the Party is contesting Trump’s candidacy only meekly, even in the midst of his several trials.
This Speaker election will likely also function as a test of MAGA—whether it eventually drifts away whenever Trump finally does, or becomes a permanent feature of politics. ♦
