On October 23, a gaggle of House Republicans, led by Matt Gaetz of Florida, stormed the Capitol’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Gaetz had hoped to expose the supposedly secretive nature of the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump. “Stormed” was his own overly dramatic word (though Gaetz soon topped it by comparing his crew to the 300 glorious, nearly naked Spartans who, as you may recall, lost to a numerically superior force during the Battle of Thermopylae). A more accurate description would be to say they barged into a committee room like a bunch of entitled fussbudgets, argued with the committee chairman, took selfies, and then trundled off to hold a press conference.

Contemporary Washington is full of drama queens who pitch their operatic outrage to the farthest seats in the house, but few would stage a mock invasion of a secure facility. Even before he, ahem, “stormed” the SCIF, though, Gaetz was a regular on Fox News, confidently regurgitating conservative talking points and jumping at every opportunity to trash the Green New Deal with his own half-baked legislative riposte, a.k.a. the Green Real Deal. In recent months, he has become one of the president’s most prominent defenders, a reliable interlocutor always willing to accuse the Democrats—“an angry pack of rabid hyenas”—of being the real criminals and traitors in the impeachment drama. The moment a camera starts rolling, Gaetz hits his mark, dutifully repeating the president’s arguments and evasions to the media with, frankly, far more fluency than the president himself.

If Donald Trump owes his fame to saying, “You’re fired!” to a crew of fake businesspeople, then Gaetz is perfectly positioned to assume the role of cocksure reality TV contestant: confident in his own inevitable status as a finalist on the biggest soundstage of all.

Gaetz, who is only 37, has the air of a guy you might run into at a 10-year reunion, bragging about babes and brewskis while droning on about a vast luxury SUV he’d only been able to afford because he’d inherited an auto dealership or pizza chain from his dad. Gaetz very nearly did just that: His father, Don Gaetz, was a state legislator who was president of Florida’s state Senate from 2012 until 2014. He’d made a fortune off a nonprofit-turned-for-profit hospice care scheme. The Gaetzes lived in a picturesque suburban house that was used as a set in The Truman Show, the 1998 Jim Carrey flick about a man who has spent his entire life, unknowingly, in a television program.



Today, Matt Gaetz describes himself on Twitter as a “Florida man proudly serving the First District in Congress,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to a meme in which a generically identified “Florida Man” is forever blowing something up, failing at some inept yet violent crime, or doing something untoward to a gator. The joke is rooted in the popular image of Florida as the slightly sinister underbelly of America. But Gaetz has a Trumpian penchant for turning the worst things one might say about him into a point of pride. He, like Florida Man, has had brushes with the law. In 2008, he was arrested for a suspected DUI on the way home from a club called, in a hilariously ironic bit of prognostication, the Swamp. While serving in the state House between 2010 and 2016, he campaigned for medical marijuana legalization. (In 2017, he even appeared alongside none other than the now-convicted, Trump-advising dirty trickster Roger Stone at a conference of the American Medical Marijua­na Physicians Association.)