Michael Cohen was trying to decompress. He’d just returned to his hotel room after his five-hour public hearing before the House Oversight Committee during which he called President Donald Trump a cheat, a liar, a racist, and a con man. Now, room service was set out on a table by the door, and a TV blared the wall-to-wall coverage of the fiery testimony. His phone buzzed endlessly. Reporters checked in. Friends told him they were proud. His lawyers reached out with prep work for the following day’s hearing.

One text broke through the noise. The previous night, Congressman Matt Gaetz had tweeted a missive at Cohen: “Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot...” Gaetz, a Trump Fox News warrior and vitriolic representative of the Florida panhandle, initially defended his comments, noting during a speech on the House floor that it was “entirely appropriate for any member of this body to challenge the truthfulness, veracity and character of people who have a history of lying and have a future that undoubtedly contains nothing but lies.” He told reporters he was “witness testing, not witness tampering.” That evening, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned him that such comments could affect the committee’s ability to “obtain the truthful and necessary information.” The Florida Bar Association confirmed that it has opened an inquiry into whether his tweets violated any laws, and other lawmakers suggested that he could be referred to the Ethics Committee for witness intimidation or tampering. After this whipped around Washington for hours, Gaetz again tweeted, attempting to try to settle things down. “It was NOT my intent to threaten, as some believe I did,” though he added that “it is important 2 create context around the testimony of liars like Michael Cohen.” He wrote that he was deleting the initial tweet and “should have chosen words that better showed my intent. I’m sorry.” Throughout the hearing the following day, Gaetz tweeted and re-tweeted articles disparaging Cohen and his testimony, even as lawmakers and critics continued to ridicule his comments.

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Now, after Cohen’s day on the Hill, Gaetz was backpedaling even further. “Mr. Cohen, this is Congressman Matt Gaetz,” he wrote in a text to Cohen. “I am writing to personally tell you I’m sorry for the tweet that I sent which many believe was threatening to you. It was never ever ever my intent to threaten you in any way.”

“While you don’t know me,” he continued, “that is not who I am and how I operate. I do not wish any harm to you or your family. I was upset at what was transpiring and chose my words poorly. I will work to be better, as I know you said today you will as well. Have a good evening. – Matt.”

Cohen wasted no time in responding. “Congressman Gaetz, I cannot thank you enough for your message. The tweet, sadly, has only made a bad situation worse . . . not only for my wife but for my children as well. With your permission, I would like to share your message with my wife and children. Hopefully, it will bring a little peace to their damaged life. We all make mistakes especially in this crazy partisan time. Thank you again for your text and I hope that the tweet does not cause you any harm. If it does, and there is anything I can do to help you correct it, please feel free to reach out and I would be happy to assist.” (A spokeswoman for Gaetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Cohen did not respond to an immediate response for comment, either.)

Later that evening, Gaetz tweeted that he had personally apologized to Cohen “4 referencing his private family in the public square. Regardless of disagreements, family members should be off-limits from attacks from representatives, senators & presidents, including myself. Let’s leave the Cohen family alone.”

Gaetz repeated his apology in an interview with Fox News on Friday night, saying he should not have invoked Cohen’s family. He took the opportunity to pat himself on the back, and to chastise those he feels are unduly hard on him because of his vocal support for the president. “The reason your network has me on a lot is because I’m one of the leading voices standing up for the president,” he said. “This time I crossed the line. It’s a sign of valor that I’m willing to admit that.” He added that “it seems as though the people who defend the president most vigorously do spend their time in the barrel with the Ethics Committee, so I guess it’s my turn.”

Gaetz’s unseemly tweets may also recall a different sort of symbolism. One of the most poignant moments of Cohen’s testimony occurred when he turned the tables on his inquisitors. During one fraught moment, Cohen pointed to a poster that a Republican lawmaker had assembled with the words “LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!” next to a blown-up photo of him. “I did the same thing that you’re doing now for 10 years,” he told Republican committee members. “I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years. The more people that follow Mr. Trump as I did blindly are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

For much of the last two years, the president’s Republican defenders have turned a blind eye to the president’s bad behavior and written off the collusion probe as a witch hunt. They have also shrugged off Trump calling Kim Jong Un a “real leader” and his refusal to condemn Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman after the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The vast majority of Republicans have not voiced disapproval of Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency at the Mexican border, either. Gaetz, of course, has gone a step beyond simply failing to speak out publicly. He has introduced a slew of bills calling for Robert Mueller to resign, and attempting to launch investigations into James Comey and Hillary Clinton. He also introduced a resolution calling for a number of Obama-era officials to be charged with lying to Congress.

For some, this blind loyalty is part of a Republican trade-off; swallow the unseemly rhetoric and attacks on the Justice Department in exchange for judicial appointments and preferred Supreme Court picks. For others, it’s an electoral survival strategy. As Gaetz told the Daily Beast last week, “I enjoy tremendous support in my district, in no small part because they see that I’m an aggressive defender of the president.”

But as Cohen has shown, fealty to Trump only gets you so far. Those who know Trump, who have aligned themselves with him with the expectation that he would reciprocate, know how this could turn out for Republicans. Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign aide, relayed to me a piece of advice that Roger Stone offered him when he entered Trump’s circle. “Roger warned me, ‘you need to be careful. I’ve seen it many times. When people start hanging around Trump, they start thinking they are Trump,’” he recalled. “You start thinking you can do the things he does—try to intimidate people, do outlandish things against them—and you won’t face consequences. He might not face consequences, but you’re going to. Everyone could become a kamikaze for him. Just look at Michael.”

Gaetz, far from an insider, appears willing to take his chances. On Saturday, the congressman was scheduled to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Virginia, but his spot on the main stage was bumped when Trump’s own speech stretched for close to two hours. As Gaetz waited for his car back to Washington, he told the Daily Beast, he was a “willing volunteer” in yielding his spot to Trump, who name-checked him during his remarks. “The ones that love Trump, the ones that are really the Trumpers—like Meadows, Jordan, Gaetz—so many of them—they are the ones that win,” he said. “It’s the ones that are a little shy about embracing what we’re all about, they get clobbered.”

Perhaps that’s true. But a number of people who were once “really Trumpers” have gotten clobbered, too. Cohen heads off to federal prison in two months; Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is awaiting sentencing and could spend the rest of his life in prison; his former National Security Adviser, Mike Flynn, awaits sentencing, too; as does Rick Gates, and Stone’s fate hangs in the balance. House Committees have said this week that they plan to seek documents and testimony from Trump’s adult children and executives from the Trump Organization. Any number of people close to Trump have been burned by association. So far, only the only person to remain untouched is the president.