Just before story broke, separate report said Gaetz might leave seat
Matt Gaetz was born into politics, but his wild career has been over-the-top even for Florida.
“He’s a professional troll,” said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Tallahassee GOP consultant turned antiTrump independent. “He likes to push the envelope, he likes to be the center of attention . ... He’s a smart man. He’s capable. But he’s made a conscious choice here to become kind of a cartoon of a right-wing ideologue.”
The 38-year-old Republican congressman from Fort Walton Beach, one of former President Donald Trump’s staunchest allies, is embroiled in a federal investigation involving sex trafficking of a child. He denies the allegations and says he’s been the target of an extortion scheme in the case.
The son of former Florida Senate President Don Gaetz, himself the scion of a North Dakota political family, Matt Gaetz grew up in Seaside, a planned Panhandle beach town, and lived in the house used to film Jim Carrey’s home in the movie “The Truman Show.”
Gaetz was arrested on a charge of drunken driving in 2008 and refused sobriety and Breathalyzer tests, but his license was suspended for less than a year and he was never prosecuted. The charge was later dismissed.
Elected to the Florida House in a special election in 2010, he held hearings on the state’s “Stand Your Ground” gun law following the Trayvon Martin killing in Sanford. But he said beforehand he wouldn’t change “one damn comma,” according to the Tampa Bay Times.
In January 2020, current GOP state Rep. Chris Latvala accused Gaetz of having created a “game” during his time in Tallahassee that awarded for “sleeping with aides, interns, lobbyists, and married legislators.” Gaetz has denied involvement.
He became a rising GOP star on a national level when was elected to Congress in 2016, entering Washington at the same time as Trump. Gaetz became a regular on Air Force One and at Trump’s rallies across the state and even the country.
In four-plus years in D.C, Gaetz has mostly gained notoriety for his stunts, including storming a classified impeachment hearing in a secure room in the U.S. Capitol in 2019 and wearing a full gas mask on the floor of the House in the early days of the coronavirus epidemic in 2020, which he later claimed was not an attempt at a joke.
“Just about everything he does is a performance,” Stipanovich said. “The gas mask on the floor of the House, rushing the secured facility … It’s all a performance. He’s a show dog.”
Gaetz is close with Roger Stone, the infamous Trump and Nixon associate and a practitioner of provocative media stunts and right-wing trolling himself. He was among those who successfully pushed Trump to pardon Stone following his conviction on federal obstruction charges last year.
“Enjoyed dinner with the brightest political mind in America!” Gaetz tweeted in 2017, alongside a picture of himself and Stone.
Like Trump, Gaetz has also been an active Twitter user, with his bio on the site reading, “Florida man. Fiancé. Firebrand. America First.”
He joked on Twitter in 2019 that Florida’s welcome signs should be changed to popstar Bebe Rexha’s quote, “There’s no age that you can’t be sexy.” Just last week, he responded to Tesla SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk by saying if he had a scandal named “Elongate,” then Gaetz wanted his to be called “Gaetzgate.”
He was also the only no vote in the House on a human anti-trafficking bill in 2017. He later said the bill was “mission creep” at the federal level, according to the Pensacola News-Journal.
Earlier on Tuesday, before the New York Times story on the federal investigation into potential sex trafficking broke, Axios had reported that Gaetz was strongly considering leaving Congress to work for the right-wing cable channel Newsmax.
Once the story broke, Gaetz didn’t see much support for him on Twitter, once his online haven.
Business Insider reported that former Trump White House aides were happy at his predicament. “Good riddance,” one reportedly said. “It sounds like he let whatever BS power he thought he had go to his head and he thought himself above the law.”
But Gaetz still found support in his fellow Twitter provocateur Anthony Sabatini, a state representative from Lake County now seeking to run for Congress himself.
“I stand with @mattgaetz!” Sabatini wrote. “DOJ and the Media is a shady group of lying creeps—we’ve seen this movie before.”