Matt Gaetz Is Having a Bad Hair Day
Matt Gaetz doesn’t want to shake my hand when I walk into his office. Considering what he is doing, I’m glad he doesn’t. “I don’t want to get concealer on you,” he explains, turning away from his mirror to greet me. “I promise I’m not doing this for effect for your interview.” A MAC Cosmetics case sits open on a nearby table. He turns back to the mirror and resumes dabbing his face. “Go right ahead with your questions,” he says.
Gaetz, a 37-year-old Republican congressman from Florida, is in a rush. It’s mid-January and a House procedural vote related to President Trump’s impeachment had run long. Now he’s due in a neighboring House office building for a Fox Business appearance. Before the vote, he’d done a hit for Fox News Radio and another for War Room, a podcast hosted by former Trump guru Steve Bannon, former Trump campaign staffer Jason Miller, and former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam. That evening, he’ll head to a studio to appear live on Hannity, the premier platform for any Trump-loving lawmaker. Gaetz is a regular guest.
Outside of maybe President Trump, there isn’t a politician in Washington who exerts as much care over his media presence as Gaetz, who since 2017 has represented Florida’s ultra–conservative 1st District, a swath of Panhandle known for its large military presence. He plasters his face across Fox News; he feuds with his enemies on Twitter; he orchestrates controversial publicity stunts like inviting Holocaust denier Charles Johnson to the State of the Union in 2018 (Gaetz later claimed he didn’t know about Johnson’s anti-Semitism), or introduces dead-in-the-water legislation to disband the Environmental Protection Agency. Following this year’s State of the Union, he announced plans to file a bogus ethics complaint against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for ripping up a copy of Trump’s speech.
The result has been headlines, which are worth their weight in committee assignments in the reality-TV fun house Trump has fashioned out of Washington. Gaetz can’t seem to go more than a week or two without manufacturing a clickbait-ready piece of chum to throw to the press, which has largely obliged him.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/matt-gaetz-trump-loyalist-interview-950196/
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