“Eager To Blow Up Anything To Get A Little Something”
When Gaetz first got to Congress in 2016, he wasn’t really a MAGAt yet. He was sniffing around to see where he’d fit in. He was even a little bipartisan at first— and actually asked AOC out on a date; she demurred— but he soon realized that the action and fame was around Trump. So he asked to be part of the posse. Trump told the pudgy little freshman to lose 50 pounds he could be on TV first. And Gaetz did and Trump, predictably impressed, embraced his fledgling DC career. Trump Jr even went over to Gaetz’s house and met his underage lover (the male one, Nestor, who he had been trying to pass off as his son).
Every now and then someone does the definitive piece on Gaetz. This week it was Atlantic reporter Elaine Godfrey: Matt Gaetz Is Winning, and she did a good job. He’s a major DWT character so, let’s take a look, even if we’ve gone over a lot of her sleuthing before. “Gaetz,” she observed, “is a creature of our time: versed in the art of performance politics and eager to blow up anything to get a little something. He landed in Washington, D.C., as a freshman nobody from the Florida Panhandle, relegated to the back benches of Congress. Seven years later, he’s toppled one House speaker and helped install a new one. He has emerged as the heir of Trumpism. And he’s poised to run for governor in a state of nearly 23 million people.”Gaetz became a household name— in a manner of speaking— for two somewhat related reasons. He’s a polymorphous pervert who will have sex with anyone and he has been investigated by the FBI and is still being investigated by the House Ethics Committee. And that led to the second reason, his successful coup against Kevin McCarthy who refused to accede to Gaetz’s demand that he get the Ethics Committee investigation called off. The affable Gaetz allowed the investigations to define him. “[S]ince the allegations became public,” wrote Godfrey, “Gaetz has tightened his alliance with the MAGA right, and his rhetoric has grown more cynical. He has become one of the most prominent voices of Trumpian authoritarianism. Warming up the crowd for Donald Trump at the Iowa State Fair last August, Gaetz declared that ‘only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.’”
She noted that “Gaetz has all the features— prominent brow, bouffant hair, thin-lipped smirk— of an action-movie villain, and at times he’s seemed to cultivate that impression. When he made his unthinkable move against McCarthy, the Speaker’s “allies had each taken a turn at the microphone, defending his leadership and calling Gaetz a selfish, grifting, fake conservative. McCarthy’s supporters had [phyically] blocked all of the microphones on the Republican side, so Gaetz was forced to sit with the Democrats. A few lawmakers spoke in support of his cause, but mostly Gaetz fought alone: one man against a field of his own teammates. Gaetz didn’t seem to mind. He smiled as he took notes on a legal pad. He displayed no alarm at the fact that every set of eyeballs in the chamber was trained on him, many squinted in rage. He was accustomed to the feeling. Earlier this week, McCarthy lashed out at Gaetz, telling an interviewer that he’d been ousted from the speakership because ‘one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics 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’s other people in jail because of it. And he wanted me to influence it.’ In response, Gaetz posted on X: ‘Kevin McCarthy is a liar. That’s why he is no longer speaker.’” One of them is a liar— or maybe both are.
Gaetz was born into a wealthy Panhandle family. Their vacation home is house where The Truman Show was filmed, “the movie about a man whose entire life is a performance for public consumption. The area, the redneck riviera, is as red as almost any in the country. The partisan lean of his politically backward district is R+38, by far the worst in the state.
If a person’s identity solidifies during adolescence, then Gaetz’s crystallized inside the redbrick walls of Niceville High School. As a teenager, he was chubby, with crooked teeth and acne. He didn’t have many friends. What he did have was the debate team.
“We tolerated him,” more than one former debate-club member said when I asked about Gaetz. (Most of them spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retribution from Gaetz or his father.) Gaetz could be charming and funny, they told me, but he was also arrogant, a know-it-all. “He would pick debates with people over things that didn’t matter, because he just wanted to,” one former teammate said.
Gaetz also liked to flaunt his family’s wealth. For decades, his father, Don Gaetz, ran a hospice company, which he sold in 2004 for almost half a billion dollars. (The company was later sued by the Department of Justice for allegedly filing false Medicare claims; the lawsuit was settled.) Don was the superintendent of the Okaloosa County School District before being elected to the state Senate in 2006, where he became president. He was a founding member and later chair of the powerful Triumph Gulf Coast board, a nonprofit that doles out funds to local development projects; according to some sources, he still has a heavy hand in it. The counties that make up the panhandle, one lobbyist told me, “are owned by the Gaetzes.”
Matt had a credit card in high school, which was relatively rare in the late 1990s, and he bragged about his “real-estate portfolio,” Erin Scot, a former friend of Gaetz’s, told me. “He was obviously much more well off than basically anyone else, or at least wanted us to think he was.” Once, Gaetz got into an argument with a student who had been accepted to the prestigious Dartmouth debate camp, another classmate said. The fight snowballed until Gaetz threatened to have his father, who was on the school board, call Dartmouth and rescind the student’s application.
…After high school, Gaetz went to Florida State University, where he majored in interdisciplinary sciences, continued debating, and got involved in student government. I had difficulty finding people from Gaetz’s college years who were willing to talk with me; I reached out to old friends and didn’t hear back. Gaetz’s own communications team sent over a list of people I could reach out to; only one replied.
[I guess she decided to skip the episode where Gaetz accidentally killed his roommate/lover and he and his father buried the body on the other side of the state and covered up the whole incident— which remains covered up.]
…After graduating from FSU in 2003, Gaetz enrolled at William and Mary Law School in Virginia. Unlike his classmates, who rented apartments with roommates or lived in campus housing, property records show that Gaetz bought a two-story brick Colonial with a grand entranceway and white Grecian columns in the sun room. It was the ultimate bachelor pad: a maze of high-ceilinged rooms for weekend ragers, with a beer-pong table and a kegerator, according to one former law-school acquaintance. Back then, the acquaintance said, Gaetz had a reputation for bragging about his sexual conquests.
The last time [former friend Erin] Scot saw Gaetz was at a friend’s wedding in March 2009, two years after he’d graduated from law school and one year into what would be a very short-lived gig as an attorney at a private firm in Fort Walton Beach. By that point, Gaetz had already started planning his political career, which would begin, officially, a few months later with a special-election bid for the state House. Also by that point, Gaetz had been arrested on charges of drunk driving after leaving a nightclub on Okaloosa Island called the Swamp. He’d followed his own advice and refused a Breathalyzer test. (Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges, and Gaetz’s license was reinstated after only a few weeks.)
At the wedding, Scot was eager to catch up with Gaetz. A photo from the night of the rehearsal dinner shows Gaetz, in a cream-colored suit jacket, wrapping his arm around her. She was excited to show him a picture of her girlfriend, whom he’d never met. She says that later, at the bar, Gaetz passed around an image of his own: a cellphone photo of a recent hookup, staring up topless from his bed.
There used to be a restaurant called the 101 on College Avenue in Tallahassee, just steps from the state capitol. Customer favorites included happy-hour martinis and buffalo-chicken pizza. Gaetz and his buddies in the legislature would hold court there after votes, friends and colleagues from that time told me.
Gaetz had been elected to the state House, after raising almost half a million dollars— including $100,000 of his own money, and support from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who had formerly represented the district and was a friend of the Gaetzes. In the general election, Gaetz defeated his Democratic opponent by more than 30 points; he would go on to run unopposed for a full term in 2010, in 2012, and again in 2014.
During this period, a group of young Republican lawmakers partook in what several of my sources referred to as the “Points Game,” which involved earning points for sleeping with women (and which has been previously covered by local outlets). As the journalist Marc Caputo has reported, the scoring system went like this: one point for hooking up with a lobbyist, three points for a fellow legislator, six for a married fellow legislator, and so on. Gaetz and his friends all played the game, at least three people confirmed to me, although none could tell me exactly where Gaetz stood on the scoreboard. (Gaetz has denied creating, having knowledge of, or participating in the game.)
At the time, Don Gaetz was president of the Florida Senate, and the father-and-son pair was referred to, mostly behind their backs but sometimes to their faces, as Daddy Gaetz and Baby Gaetz. The latter had a tendency to barge in on his father’s meetings, hop on the couch, and prop his feet up, Ryan Wiggins, a former political consultant who used to work with Matt Gaetz, told me. Because of their relationship, Matt “had a level of power that was very, very resented in Tallahassee,” she said.
Gaetz wasn’t interested in his father’s traditional, mild-mannered Republicanism, though. Like any good Florida conservative, the younger Gaetz was a devoted gun-rights supporter and a passionate defender of the state’s stand-your-ground law. As chair of the state House’s Finance and Tax Committee, he pushed for a $1 billion statewide-tax-cut package. But Gaetz talked often about wanting the GOP to be more modern: to acknowledge climate change, to get younger people involved. Toward that end, he sometimes forged alliances with Democrats. “If you went and sat down with him one-on-one,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic consultant who worked with Gaetz in the state legislature, “he could be very likable.”
…Gaetz seemed to relish the sport of politics— the logistics of floor debates and the particulars of parliamentary procedure. He argued down his own colleagues and tore up amendments brought by both parties. Sometimes friends would challenge Gaetz to a game: They’d give him a minute to scan some bill he wasn’t familiar with, one former colleague told me, and then make him riff on it on the House floor.
Gaetz had a knack for calling attention to himself. He would take unpopular positions, sometimes apparently just to make people mad. He was one of two lawmakers to vote against a state bill criminalizing revenge porn. And even when his own Republican colleague proposed reviewing Florida’s stand-your-ground law after the killing of Trayvon Martin, Gaetz said he refused to change “one damn comma” of the legislation.
Plus, “he understood the power of social media before almost anyone else,” Peter Schorsch, a publisher and former political consultant, told me. Gaetz was firing off inflammatory tweets and Facebook posts even in the early days of those apps. All of it was purposeful, by design, the people I spoke with told me— the debating, the tweeting, the attention getting. Gaetz was confident that he was meant for something bigger. “The goal then,” Schorsch said, “was to be where he is now.”
In 2015, while Donald Trump was descending the golden Trump Tower escalator, Gaetz was halfway through his third full term in the Florida House, pondering his next move. His father would retire soon from the Florida Senate, and Gaetz had already announced his intention to run for the seat. But then Jeff Miller, the Republican representative from Gaetz’s hometown district, decided to leave Congress.
Gaetz had endorsed former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in the GOP primary. (“I like action, not just talk. #allinforjeb,” he’d tweeted in August 2015.) But by March, Bush had dropped out. Left with the choice of Trump, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, or then–Ohio Governor John Kasich, Gaetz embraced the man he said was best suited to disrupt the stale workings of Washington, D.C.
In the same statement announcing he was running for Congress, Gaetz declared that he was #allin for Trump.
At first, Gaetz was miserable in Congress… It can take years to rise up through the ranks of a committee, build trust with colleagues, and start sponsoring legislation to earn the kind of attention and influence that Gaetz craved. He wanted a more direct route. So his team developed a strategy: He would circumvent the traditional path of a freshman lawmaker and speak straight to the American people.
This meant being on television as much as possible. Gaetz went after the most hot-button cultural issue at the time: NFL players kneeling for the anthem. “We used that as our initial hook to start booking media,” one former staff member told me. One of his early appearances was a brief two-question interview with Tucker Carlson. Though Carlson mispronounced his name as “Getts” (it’s pronounced “Gates”), the congressman spoke with a brusque confidence. “Rather than taking a knee, we ought to see professional athletes taking a stand and actually supporting this country,” he said.
From there, the TV invites flooded in. Gaetz would go on any network to talk about anything as long as the broadcast was live and he knew the topic ahead of time. He had become a loud Trump defender— introducing a resolution to force Special Counsel Robert Mueller to resign and even joining an effort to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. A white board in his office displayed a list of media outlets and two columns of numbers: how many hits Gaetz wanted to do each week at any given outlet and how many he’d already completed. Around his office, he liked to quote from one of his favorite movies, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in a faux southern accent: “We ain’t one-at-a-timin’ here. We’re mass communicating!’’
Soon, the president was calling. Trump asked Gaetz for policy advice, and suggested ways that Gaetz could highlight the MAGA agenda on television. Sometimes, when the president rang and Gaetz wasn’t near the phone, his aides would sprint around the Capitol complex looking for him, in a race against Trump’s short attention span, another former staffer told me. Gaetz claimed in his book that he once even took a call from Trump while “in the throes of passion.”
With his new influence, Gaetz helped launch Ron DeSantis’s political career. In 2017, he urged Trump to endorse DeSantis for Florida governor. At the time, DeSantis was struggling in the Republican primary, but after receiving Trump’s approval, he shot ahead. DeSantis made Gaetz a top campaign adviser.
Gaetz would occasionally travel with the president on Air Force One, writing mini briefings or speeches on short notice. Trump was angry when Gaetz voted to limit the president’s powers to take military action, but the two worked it out. “Lincoln had the great General Grant … and I have Matt Gaetz!” Trump told a group of lawmakers at the White House Christmas party in 2019, according to Firebrand.
…Gaetz has positioned himself as a sort of libertarian populist. He’s proposed abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, but he’s not a climate-change denier, and has supported legislation that would encourage companies to reduce carbon emissions voluntarily. He has consistently opposed American intervention in foreign wars, and he advocates fewer restrictions on marijuana possession and distribution. He still allies himself with Democrats when it’s convenient: He defended a former colleague, Democratic Representative Katie Hill, when she was embroiled in a revenge-porn scandal and forged an unlikely alliance with Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over their desire for a ban on congressional stock trading.
In his book, Gaetz argues that too many members of Congress represent entrenched special interests over regular people, and too much legislation is the result of cozy relationships between lawmakers and lobbyists. In 2020, he announced that he was swearing off all federal PAC money. (It has always been difficult, though, to take Gaetz’s yearning for reform seriously when his political idol is Trump, a man who not only refused to divest from his own business interests as president but who promised to “drain the swamp” before appointing a staggering number of lobbyists to positions in his government).
Gaetz’s personal life began making headlines for the first time in 2020. That summer, the 38-year-old announced, rather suddenly, that he had a “son” named Nestor Galban, a 19-year-old immigrant from Cuba. Gaetz had dated Galban’s older sister May, and when the couple broke up, Galban moved in and had lived with him since around 2013. “Though we share no blood, and no legal paperwork defines our family relationship, he is my son in every sense of the word,” Gaetz wrote in his book.
Later in 2020, Gaetz met a petite blonde named Ginger Luckey at a party at Mar-a-Lago. Luckey, who is 12 years younger than Gaetz, grew up in Long Beach, California, and works for the consultancy giant KPMG. In the early days of their relationship, she was charmingly naive about politics, Gaetz wrote in his book: During one dinner with Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Luckey was excited to discover that Carlson hosted his own show. “What is it about?” she’d asked.
Luckey is hyper-disciplined and extremely type A, “the kind of person who will get you out of bed to work out whether you like it or not,” Johnson said. Luckey tweets about sustainable fashion and avoiding seed oils, and she softens Gaetz’s sharp edges. She longboards and sings—once, she kicked off a Trump book-release party with a delicate rendition of “God Bless America.” Gaetz asked Luckey to marry him in December 2020 on the patio at Mar-a-Lago. When she said yes, Trump sent over a bottle of champagne.
Three months later, in late March 2021, news broke that the Department of Justice was looking into allegations that Gaetz had paid for sex with women in 2018. One claim held that Gaetz’s friend, the Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, had recruited women online and had sex with them before referring them to Gaetz, who slept with them too. But the most serious allegation was that Gaetz had had sex with a girl under the age of 18, and had flown her to the Bahamas for a vacation. By the time Gaetz proposed to Luckey, the FBI had reportedly confiscated his phone.
Gaetz has denied paying for sex or engaging in sex with a minor. But Greenberg would go on to be charged with a set of federal crimes and ultimately plead guilty to sex trafficking a child. On April 6, the New York Times reported that Gaetz had requested a blanket pardon from the Trump White House in the final weeks of his administration, which was not granted.
Other sordid claims have spilled out since. “He used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend,” one former Republican lawmaker told me. “He’d show me a video, and I’d say, ‘That’s great, Matt.’ Like, what kind of a reaction do you want?” (The video, according to the former lawmaker, showed the hula-hooping woman.) Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide, wrote in her memoir that Gaetz knocked on her cabin door one night during a Camp David retreat and asked Hutchinson to help escort him back to his cabin. (Gaetz has denied this.)
On social media, people called Gaetz a pedophile and a rapist; commenters on Luckey’s Instagram photos demanded to know how she could possibly date him. In many political circles, Gaetz became untouchable. He was “radioactive in Tallahassee,” one prominent Florida Republican official told me, and for a while, he stopped being invited on Fox News. Around this time, DeSantis cut Gaetz out of his inner circle. His wife, Casey, had “told Ron that he was persona non grata,” Schorsch told me. “She hated all the sex stories that came out.” (Others have suggested that Gaetz fell out with DeSantis after a power struggle with the governor’s former chief of staff.)The ongoing House Ethics Committee investigation could have further consequences for Gaetz. The committee may ultimately recommend some kind of punishment for him— whether a formal reprimand, a censure, or even expulsion from Congress— to be voted on by the whole House.
…Rather than cowing him, the allegations seemed to give Gaetz a burst of vengeful energy. He tightened his inner circle and leaned harder than ever into the guerilla persona he’d begun to develop. No longer welcome in many greenrooms, Gaetz became a regular on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast before launching a podcast of his own. He set off on an America First Tour with the fellow Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene. The two traveled state to state, alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election and declaring Trump the rightful president of the United States. People from both parties now viewed Gaetz as a villain. It was as if Gaetz thought, Why not go all in?
Republicans faced disappointing results in the 2022 midterm elections, and by the time January rolled around, their slim House majority meant that each individual member had more leverage. In January 2023, Gaetz took advantage, leading a handful of Republican dissidents in opposing Kevin McCarthy’s ascendance to the speakership. He and his allies forced McCarthy to undergo 14 House votes before they finally gave in on the 15th round. Things were so tense that, at one point, Republican Mike Rogers of Alabama lunged at Gaetz and had to be restrained by another member. But Gaetz had gotten what he’d wanted. Among other concessions, McCarthy had agreed to restore a rule allowing a single member to call for a vote to remove the speaker. It would be McCarthy’s downfall.
In October, Gaetz strode to the front of the House Chamber and formally filed a motion to oust his own conference leader. McCarthy had failed to do enough to curb government spending and oppose the Democrats, Gaetz told reporters. He announced that McCarthy was “the product of a corrupt system.” As a government shutdown loomed, the 41-year-old Florida Republican attempted an aggressive maneuver that had never once been successful in the history of Congress: using a motion to vacate the speaker of the House. Twenty-four hours later, McCarthy was out.Ultimately, the evangelical MAGA-ite Mike Johnson of Louisiana was chosen as the Republicans’ new leader. With the election of Johnson, Gaetz had removed a personal foe, skirted the establishment, and given Trumpism a loud— and legitimate— microphone. “The swamp is on the run,” Gaetz said on War Room. “MAGA is ascendant.” This had been Gaetz’s plan all along, Bannon told me afterward. In January 2023, he had been “setting the trap.” Now he was executing on his vision. Gaetz had ushered in a new “minoritarian vanguardism,” Bannon told me, proudly. “They’ll teach this in textbooks.”
Gaetz has options going forward. If the former president is reelected in November, Gaetz “could very easily serve in the Trump administration,” Charles Johnson told me. But most people think Gaetz’s next move is obvious: He’ll leave Congress and run for governor of Florida in 2026. Even though he’s publicly denied his interest in the job, privately, Gaetz appears to have made his intentions known. “I am 100 percent confident that that is his plan,” one former Florida Republican leader told me. Gaetz looks to be on cruise control until then, committed to making moves that will please the MAGA base and set him up for success in two years.
The Republican field in Florida is full of potential gubernatorial primary candidates. Possible rivals for Gaetz include Representative Byron Donalds, state Attorney General Ashley Moody, and even Casey DeSantis. But in Florida, Gaetz is more famous than all of them, and closer to the white-hot center of the MAGA movement. If he gets Trump’s endorsement, Gaetz could have a real shot at winning the primary and, ultimately, the governor’s mansion.
And Florida deserves him.
