For MAGA: A Sordid Ethics Report > Funding the Government
A tale of two Trump allies in Congress.
TWO OF THE STARS OF THE LAST Republican Congress went into their Christmas breaks in very different ways.
House Speaker Mike Johnson went home in the wee hours of Saturday morning following yet another skin-of-the-teeth legislative success. Despite a blizzard of last-second revolts and demands spearheaded by Elon Musk and Donald Trump, he had managed to keep the government funded.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, on the other hand, spent his weekend sullenly awaiting the release of the House Ethics Committee’s report on his history of drug-fueled sexcapades. By Monday, it had dropped, with revelations as sordid as advertised.
Now, pop quiz: Which of the two is the MAGAati rallying around, and which are they trying to run out of their party? Don’t think too hard.
On Sunday, Gaetz jetted to Arizona to speak at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest—the laser-light-show version of CPAC for the new right-wing kids—where he basked in the crowd’s appreciation. The audience nodded along as he blamed “anti-Trump forces within the Republican conference in the United States Senate” from the stage for his inability to get confirmed as attorney general. “We love you, Matt!” someone shouted.
Outside the main ballroom, Steve Bannon was giving Gaetz artillery support as he taped his War Room podcast live to a small crowd. “We need Gaetz back in, don’t we?” Bannon said to cheers. He then called on Gaetz to, upon returning to Congress, reveal humiliating dirt he supposedly had on the members still there. “Matt, here’s what we need to do. The first day you need to have a press conference . . . We want to hear names, we want evidence. I don’t know what they’ve done worse, is their own personal behavior up there or what they’ve done to the country.”
“Both!” someone shouted. “Expose them all!” the crowd chanted. “Expose them all!”
Meanwhile, the MAGA faithful were treating Johnson’s decision to cancel his own AmFest speech—he’d been scheduled for Friday, but had to stay in Washington to scramble to pass that spending bill instead—as proof he was scared to face The People after selling them out to The Establishment. “What a coward,” tweeted far right media personality Candace Owens. “Someone didn’t want to get booed off the stage I guess,” ventured fellow podcaster Joey Mannarino. Alt-right activist and conspiracist, Jack Posobiec, taping his own live show from AmFest, did a little crowd work: “Ladies and gentlemen, should Mike Johnson remain speaker of the house?” “Noooo!” they shouted back.
Last verse, same as the first. As it was with Paul Ryan, as it was with Kevin McCarthy, so it is shaping up to be for Mike Johnson. It’s impossible to gain power in the House of Representatives and remain popular with the GOP base, because the demands they have for Congress are so wildly incompatible with reality.
It’s also why bomb-throwing lawmakers with no House leadership aspirations—folks like Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace—find it so easy to self-mythologize themselves into MAGA folk heroes. If only we were in charge instead of the RINOs, things would be a little different around here! they sigh.
When you’re actually in charge, like Johnson, you become a heresiarch. Nothing you do can please the base. Each act of governance is viewed as a form of treachery because governance itself is the problem.
When you’re a nihilist outsider, like Gaetz, nothing you can do will harm you in their eyes. All that stuff the Ethics report dug up—all the coked-up partying, all the escorting, the apparent paying for sex with a 17-year-old, the eye-watering price tag of $90,000-plus paid out to women—well, that makes you a martyr. It is just proof The Establishment wants you gone, because otherwise why go through all the trouble?
It’s a totally perverse way of looking at government—pining for meltdown and anarchy, incentivizing the worst forms of behavior, seeing deep scandal as a feather in a reprobate’s cap. But it’s particularly alarming given the other half of the MAGA equation: fervent commitment to whatever Donald Trump wants to do.
In the minds of the Republican base, Trump is the strongman who will break through the partisan gridlock and rule at last with the popular will; and Congress is the institution that gets in his way. The more they reward the sort of behavior that paralyzes Congress, the more paralyzed Congress gets. It all feeds back into their conviction that an unfettered Trump is the last and only real agent for change.