In the end, he may still benefit from these tactics. But will the country?
What is Matt Gaetz doing?
In case you missed it — and let’s remember, the Florida representative’s entire modus operandi is designed to ensure otherwise, thus I am somewhat loath to give him what he wants — Gaetz has flown to Wyoming to campaign against Liz Cheney. Cheney is the No. 3 Republican in the House of Representatives, and was one of ten Republican members to vote in favor of impeaching former president Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 chaos on Capitol Hill.
It’s worth conceding at the outset that one can consider that this is a complicated question (chiefly, in the fact that Donald Trump is no longer president), a question requiring prudential judgment by lawmakers. But even acknowledging a complexity to this issue still allows one to consider that Gaetz’s approach is an excellent model of a particularly toxic kind of politics.
Liz Cheney has almost certainly angered her constituents. Cheney may well subscribe to a different template for elected office, in which, as Edmund Burke once put it, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” But Burke, who at the time of this speech was a member of Parliament for Bristol, failed to win reelection after giving that famous speech. So there is a risk to this method of representation. But if Cheney deserves to lose her seat for her actions, surely that should remain a matter for Wyoming voters. They are more than capable of making that decision for themselves. So why, then, should they welcome the parachuting in of what we once called a “carpetbagger,” hoping both to intensify and capitalize on something that may well have been happening without his influence? The idea of local politics mattering vs. the national, the possibility of federalism as a workable system — both are weakened by the perversely proud insertion of an out-of-stater into a Wyoming issue, particularly one who says such things in his defense as, “This is my first time in Wyoming. I’ve been here for about an hour and I feel like I already know the place a lot better than your misguided representative, Liz Cheney.” Whatever their feelings about Liz Cheney, Wyomingites ought to find this kind of condescending out-of-stater political opportunism insulting.
Gaetz might consider it insulting to himself if he had not long ago largely abandoned the role of serious legislator for that of attention-seeker. Don’t believe me? Consult his own words, from a Vanity Fair interview last September:
Gaetz, like Trump, sees politics as entertainment: if you can keep the people’s attention, you can keep your power. Or, as he puts it, “Stagecraft is statecraft.” . . .
As society’s attention span abbreviates, Gaetz is angling to expand his 15 minutes. “I grew up in the house Jim Carrey lived in in The Truman Show,” he writes. “I know that all the world’s a stage, especially when we all have cameras with phones.” . . .
“Speaker of the House Paul Ryan once knocked me for going on TV too much, without considering that maybe his own failures as a leader stemmed from spending too much time in think tanks instead of in the green rooms where guests wait to appear on TV, and are thereby connected to the dinnertime of real Americans,” he writes [in a then-forthcoming book]. “I take his recent elevation to the board of News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, to be his very silent apology. It’s impossible to get canceled if you’re on every channel. Why raise money to advertise on the news channels when I can make the news? And if you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.” . . .
When he gave these remarks last year, Gaetz gave off the glib confidence of someone who believed he had figured out how the game worked, and that Trump, set for reelection, had changed it forever. Well, Trump lost to Joe Biden, who owes his victory in part to Trump’s very media omnipresence. Biden simply (and ridiculously) just bowed out of Trump’s chaotic universe, allowing Biden to associate that chaos with the then-incumbent (with the help of a compliant press). Forget, for a moment, the performative constitutional abdication of Gaetz’s notion that “if you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.” It also lacks any kind of quality-control component, and ignores the possibility of such a thing as bad press. Millions of people will watch their favorite TV shows, yes. But people also have trouble turning away from train wrecks and car accidents. Gaetz’s scurrying about the country in the wake of Trump’s political defeat and reputational self-destruction, bragging about his fealty (Gaetz said Trump helped him write his anti-Cheney speech) without offering much of a notion of what he himself believes or what parts of Trumpism are worth salvaging (an important conversation to be had) seems more like a desperate attempt to keep the rules of the game the same when they have in fact changed. (If, that is, he was ever right about them in the first place.) As such, it might shade more toward “wreck.”
There is at least a small degree of misfortune to this fact. In foreign policy, my own views incline more toward Gaetz-ism (such as it is) than to Cheney-ism. Indeed, Gaetz’s ostensible commitment to restraint and non-intervention supplied one of the few examples in which he broke from Trump during that presidency. But Gaetz needlessly inflames this important debate within the Republican caucus, does a disservice to it, and engages in world-historical whataboutism when he accuses Liz Cheney, in response to a simple (and largely accurate) dig about his self-proclaimed fondness for TV, of having “blood” on her hands for her support of America’s overseas engagements. By all means, let’s debate the nature and extent of America’s commitments abroad. But does he think such a remark is likely to invite a productive exchange on this topic? Likely not; it was intended instead as a deflection, and as an attention-grab. Well, congrats on score two, though the jury is still out on score one.
Gaetz’s approach here highlights the essential defects of his current mode of political conduct. It seems obvious, at this point, that there is serious disagreement on the right about where to go from here, one amplified by the prospect of an impeachment trial for a former president who seems mostly to invite extremes of opinion both for and against him. Gaetz has made his opinion in this contest obvious. He has done so not in good faith, however, but with a seeming aim of destroying the political fortunes of those who come to opposite conclusions in this matter. It is unfortunate that Republicans are willing to let themselves be consumed by this noxious acrimony at a moment when the Biden administration has only begun its attempts to govern in predictably deleterious fashion from the left wing. For those who think otherwise based on my output, it’s worth my clarifying that, no, I do not enjoy criticizing other Republicans. I would much rather devote myself to calling out the Biden administration’s foibles and schemes. But Gaetz and others are content to dwell at the moment on these internecine priorities, so unilateral disarmament is not in the cards. He may claim to know exactly what he’s doing in them. Yet I wonder if it will actually work in the way he intends. In the end, he may still benefit. But will the country?