Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution

by Matt Gaetz

  The first poll testing the viability of a congressional campaign following the unexpected announcement that my predecessor would retire had me down fourteen points to an older, better-known state senator. I’d end up beating him by fourteen, the rest of the field by more.

  As the Pensacola News Journal’s Andy Marlette would observe following one of the 2016 debates that sent me to Congress:

  As far as sheer debate talent and readiness, nobody is close to Gaetz. That’s not an endorsement or a criticism of other candidates. But as the saying goes, the guy just has mad skills. I don’t know if he’s more Steph Curry or LeBron James, but he’s that good when it comes to rhetorical game time. He even inspired Sen. Evers to refer to him as a “slick-tongued lawyer” at one point. Gaetz seems to have the rare ability to speak almost as quickly as he can think, which would get most folks in deep, deep trouble. But whether you agree with his politics or not, watching Gaetz on the debate stage, you’ve got to admit that the guy is playing ball at a higher level than most.

  Firebrands win elections. I’ve never lost.

  Now that voters had given Republicans what we had always asked for—unified control of the government—I was there to capitalize on Trump’s victory and shake things up. But I couldn’t fight for anyone from the rafters. I couldn’t even hear. I would need to fight for a better seat before restoring anything.

  Little did we know at the time that the battle for the presidency was already underway and it called for the best brawlers we had.

  To the charge that I’m a young man in a hurry, I plead guilty. But, thank God, America’s oldest and greatest president is young at heart. He expects you to have sharp elbows if you want to secure a seat at his table. Earn your spot and fight to keep it, or you’re fired! And no, you won’t be invited back next season. “I’m not here to make friends,” every reality TV star tells us. Neither was I. I had a job to do.

  Not that I—or Donald Trump—had a Rolodex full of Beltway friends when we both traded the Florida swamp for D.C. And just like the gators in Florida, some of these slithering swamp creatures had seemingly spent millennia adapting to the sludge, only to face what now threatened to be an extinction-level event.

  It’s easy to enjoy that moment when those who had taken shots at candidate Trump during the campaign had to swallow the fact that he was president. They likely fretted that #NeverTrump would turn to #NeverHired—or #SoonFired by their constituents. With millions of voters behind him, Trump’s ratings were huuuuge. You dared not turn off your phone lest you missed his tweeting, which seemed equal parts executive order and savage taunt.

  It has become fashionable to say that you wish the president would stop tweeting, but tweeting is communicating and communicating is governing. Had Donald Trump found a way to short-circuit politics, the way he seemed to short-circuit the politicians?

  By his nature, Trump is a disrupter and a rebel. Yet even the most disruptive political leader faces huge, almost immovable obstacles in Washington, D.C. The Trump Train can get derailed despite its conductor’s best efforts.

  In fact, the Washington establishment had already decided how it would thwart our little revolution. Even before his inauguration, the Democrats leaked intelligence about the Trump campaign’s purported ties to Russia. Rep. Maxine Waters had suggested that the 2016 election process was so tainted by Russian interference that we must deny the certification of the electoral college decision. The establishment, which for months had claimed that Trump had dangerous authoritarian impulses, turned out to be quite ready to declare the election null and void.

  Trump’s message was threatening precisely because it was so popular. The real danger in the minds of the Democrats and their mainstream media allies wasn’t hackers from Russia but Trump’s message to America: the idea that we could create a new conception of the public good based on sound money, strong borders, national pride, and respect for values founded in faith and tradition. No more big-shot politicians and corporatists wheelin’ and dealin’!

  Nor would the Democrats argue their side. Their strategy wasn’t going to involve policy debates about Obamacare, the tax code, and so forth but an attempt to undermine the messenger. Trump is an illegitimate president, they claimed, and he did not lawfully hold the office. Perhaps after watching Trump feed fifteen Republican primary opponents into the political woodchipper, the radical Left chose personal destruction over policy. The way to defeat Trump, they concluded, was to be as crass and hyperbolic as they mistakenly judged him to be.

  After countless elections involving voting by the dead, bogus “October surprise” revelations, or coordination with transnational corporations and foreign political movements, this particular election was not up to the establishment’s standards and had to be immediately overturned. The precise reasons would keep morphing over the next three years, as one invented argument after another crashed against the rocks of reality.

  If they could get away with nullifying Trump’s election, though, who’s really in charge in Washington, D.C.? Might it be those same powerful figures seated so prominently at the inaugural that day? Is the deep state actually quite near and in plain sight? I wonder how many were thinking, “We’ll tolerate this interloper and the populists who arrived with him—for now. Those we can’t coopt we can undermine and ultimately destroy.”

  Almost as soon as we stepped off the inaugural stage, many powerful Washingtonians—including some Republicans and nonpartisan professional bureaucrats—would sign on to the anti-Trump bandwagon. They were quite accustomed to “waiting out” a shift in the political winds. Washington is full of “apolitical” professionals who are convinced that democracy is a formality and that true patriotism lies in maintaining their power as wise stewards of the political apparatus so that they can go on making decisions for the rest of us.

  Republicans and Democrats, while bickering for show, had long since joined forces to invade everywhere militarily, invite everyone to immigrate, and impoverish Anytown, USA, by forging complicated insider trade deals that drain our economy and leave our towns and our families impoverished while enriching multinational companies.

  Worrying about these issues isn’t quite the old, staid Republican agenda. But then, that agenda had been shaped by some of the very players arrayed that day on the National Lawn. They aren’t monsters (mostly). But their interests have sharply diverged from those of the hundreds of millions of Americans they represent.

  A course correction is urgently needed. An elite that ceases to think well of the people who grant it power deserves to be displaced. To conserve our way of life, we need to think radically about how to meet our obligations to our country. Every slogan of yesteryear, every program from once upon a time, ought to be retested to see if it still works. A new generation requires new thought from new leaders. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance—and careful, deliberate thought.

  But from whom shall we get it? Our think tanks are running on empty. Our economic policy is stuck in the 1980s, our foreign policy in the 1950s, our social policy in the 1960s. Republican voters confronted with uninspiring agendas rejected low-energy “reform.” They elected not a cautious caretaker but a brash, outspoken Firebrand.

  Indeed, there’s an obvious problem with the very idea of conservatism. For as long as conservatism has been a self-identified philosophy, about 250 years, its advocates have struggled with this conundrum: If your goal is to preserve a culture and a way of life, how do you ever make the case for changing it when radical reform is necessary?

  There have been attempts to square this circle. Figures such as the late Sen. John McCain, very much the military man, have emphasized the get-tough “reform conservative” idea that when America recognizes problems, we just have to summon the will to solve them, usually without considering the economic costs and benefits or looking too closely at the leaders and institutions that got us into the mess in the first place. Reform, like
the British ideal of the “stiff upper lip,” becomes an exercise in stoicism, or so we are told. We knew our duty, and we strayed a bit off course, but if we stick to our guns, we’ll see it through.

  This philosophy isn’t very American. It is certainly not the philosophy of young Americans today. If something is broken, it is our duty to fix it. Preferably yesterday. What the hell is taking so long?!

  Some rising voices in today’s Republican Party, such as Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, call that kind of resolve “fortitude.” I don’t mean to dismiss this character trait. Who doesn’t want to be tougher? And where better to draw inspiration than from those who have shown themselves willing to risk all and sacrifice in battle? Yet the substitution of fortitude for imagination—our capacity for seeing, feeling, touching, tasting with the soul—all but guarantees failure.

  If we emphasize the virtue of fortitude, failures of policy start being seen as failures of the will, not the mind. It’s not that we have wrong or outdated ideas, we just haven’t willed them to success. Don’t think too hard about the details, let alone challenge our own longstanding habits and assumptions. We just have to summon up that deep determination from inside us, don’t you know.

  The problem with romanticizing grit as a cure for what ails us is that it all too easily becomes passive acceptance of a lackluster status quo. At its worst, this kind of conservatism devolves into an angry defense of the worst parts of how things are and the insistence that questioning any aspect of the way America currently functions is tantamount to treason. Fortitude too often asks people to stare into a mirror and pretend it is a window to the future.

  Americans are a hurried, impatient people. We don’t have time to wait. Not at the DMV, and certainly not for the economy to rebound after a recession or a devastating pandemic. Manifest Destiny, dammit! We settle the West, we take Berlin, we jealously guard our rights. We even put people on the Moon because we can inspire through achievement. Justice delayed is justice denied, after all.

  The best things about America didn’t happen because we resolved to sit quietly and accept with stoic fortitude whatever fate doled out to us. That was the peasant life the first Western settlers abandoned to stand up and become a nation of greatness through ambition. We’re the people of “Let’s roll,” “Give me liberty or give me death,” and the “shot heard round the world.” We don’t defer to our leaders; we lead, they follow. “Make America Great Again” means we have to do the making in the here and now. No time to waste!

  We sure didn’t become the great nation we are by resolving to let Washington do whatever it likes to us so long as it makes the occasional feeble effort at “reform.” And neither Donald Trump nor I was elected in 2016 to wait politely for Washington to improve itself. A slow path to reform is a path to degeneracy. Didn’t we learn anything from Democratic politician Rahm Emanuel? A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, he said. And waste them we do, preferring to paper them over with more spending and more debt—more, more, more to get less, less, less done. We will always careen from crisis to crisis until we meet our challenges head-on, as President Trump does.

  Stoicism is not statecraft. Calmness is not virtue. Millennials know that playing by the rules is a very quick way to lose the game. They saw their parents buy houses only to suffer foreclosures. They saw no-fault divorce shatter their families. They got college degrees only to be burdened by debt they can never pay off in a market that increasingly values cheap foreign labor and corporate bottom lines over jobs for hardworking Americans.

  Indoor voices get indoor results. John McCain was beloved by the media that hates Donald Trump. There’s a reason. He was running political plays from a losing playbook. He treated politics as though it were a country club where genteel men and women get together and negotiate the unconditional surrender of your rights, your job, and your voice. Even when we agreed with John McCain, he wasn’t effective—and perhaps to his Democrat admirers that was the point all along. Playing by the quiet, reserved rules of the nightly news anchors, of Jeb Bush and his relatives, of coolly detached international diplomats, isn’t governing; it’s stifling that very real and urgent impulse to get mad, get organized, and win. Yes, “Build that wall!” Yes, “Lock her up!” We don’t have time to wait politely while CNN’s Chris Cuomo interrupts us.

  We should be outraged sometimes. We should be animated, showing our disgust with a system that keeps forgetting we’re here. We used to tar and feather tax collectors. Our Founders taught us that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. We need more attitude, less fortitude.

  Stoic fortitude without accompanying attitude is tantamount to accepting the way Washington already does things. You thought you stood firm, but the next thing you know you realize you’re standing motionless while the system buries you alive, having tricked you into thinking you’re “doing your duty” and “respecting the process” when you should have been raising hell.

  Fortitude alone will not help you defeat the deep state; the deep state will bury you.

  The allies of America’s byzantine intelligence sector and the political partisans who steer it to their own advantage are not threatened by your quiet sense of honor. They eat that stuff up, I’m afraid. When the FBI or the CIA wants to pull political strings in favor of politicians they like, nothing helps them more than well-meaning Americans—especially conservatives—thinking they’re doing their patriotic duty by believing what such agencies tell them and doing what they suggest. Former Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy had to sheepishly admit to Tucker Carlson that he now regrets taking the word of the FBI and Justice Department since they made him look foolish by parroting their lies on television. Gowdy, unfortunately, proved that deference means complicity.

  Former FBI director Robert Mueller certainly has fortitude. He’s no loudmouthed hothead. Superficially, the determined, square-jawed, Joe Friday-like demeanor and mindset of a Mueller is exactly what traditional conservatives cherish. How fake it all turned out to be.

  That’s a superficial version of conservatism. Place too much naive faith in the disinterested workings of the American system of justice and in the hands of deep state insiders like Mueller and James Comey and it will roll right over you. These people want Americans to be compliant instead of unruly, quiet instead of combative. That’s central to their plan to rule over us in perpetuity.

  You don’t stop these deep state partisans by trying to match their quiet, cold adherence to procedure. They’ll win. The process is the punishment. You need to get loud and unruly and fight in an unruly way.

  Fortitude—the “trust the process” faith conservatives were preaching, the soothing sounds of wait and see, as if the wheels of justice would soon render an acceptable, fair verdict if we just kept still and let them turn—fails in a situation like impeachment. Of course, by letting it play out, President Trump’s presidency was nearly ruined.

  Now that the impeachment farce is over, you don’t recall the moments of heroic fortitude. You recall the Firebrand moments. They are memorable precisely because they are revealing.

  These moments are what enabled Republicans to prevail. You may recall my colleague Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, who in a fiery exchange during House impeachment hearings got Ambassador Gordon Sondland to admit that “nobody else on this planet told [him] that Donald Trump was tying [Ukraine] aid to these investigations” and called the assumption that Trump was pressuring Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden “somewhat circular.”

  You may also recall Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, who tried repeatedly to get Rep. Adam Schiff to admit to blocking Republican witnesses, and asked, “Mr. Chairman, will you be prohibiting witnesses from answering members’ questions, as you have in the closed-door depositions?”

  Or perhaps you remember Rep. Jim Jordan questioning the integrity of the Judiciary Committee chair—or me, telling Rep. Jerry Nadler that he was out to “overturn the re
sults of an election with unelected people.” These moments were dramatic because they were substantive. You will lose every fight you don’t engage.

  But nothing we do in Washington would matter if there weren’t a far more vibrant and interesting culture to defend beyond the Beltway. Out there, too, there are foes who won’t be impressed if we behave like predictable cogs in a vast machine, doing our duty—and meekly accepting their dominance.

  “Cancel culture,” for example, won’t be stopped by silent resolve or hoping that tech lobbyists will suddenly embrace the virtues of pluralistic debate. Our silence is exactly what they want! Like the architects of impeachment, the social justice warriors will happily thunder and pontificate about white privilege and fragility while we sit, shamefaced, waiting for them to pass judgment on us. No way! Watch footage of these clowns screaming in unison until polite, elderly professors give up and stop talking—then tell me stoic silence is the best weapon against them or that it will spur them to greater civility. I doubt it.

  We have tried to be polite conservatives for the past few decades, like quiet, well-behaved children in a church pew. But the big tech companies—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (which shadowbanned and “labeled” me)—have removed or demonetized our channels. This is the largest in-kind contribution in political history.

  The blatantly biased Southern Poverty Law Center has gone from its noble origins defending civil rights to a thoroughly partisan outfit that labels inoffensive conservative, Christian, or libertarian groups as racist purveyors of “hate.”

  I am not, nor will I ever be, a defender of Nazis or Klansmen. I shouldn’t even have to say that. But the Left throws around these sorts of smears to silence its critics and drive anyone it doesn’t like out of the national conversation. These smear organizations like the SPLC should be defeated, not tolerated, except insofar as even the most reprehensible group has First Amendment rights. But we can and should denounce them. Quiet forbearance is complicity. A much more passionate response is needed. Investigations are a good first step for those who systematically libel their targets—let alone those who commit acts of violence. Attorney General Barr’s large-scale investigation of left-wing terrorist group Antifa in the wake of the recent George Floyd riots is long overdue.