by Matt Gaetz
Democrats prefer Republicans out of power, which is to say, gelded. President George W. Bush is spoken of today by his former opponents with fondness. Why, he even sat next to Ellen DeGeneres at a Cowboys game! It’s easy to forget that the Left tried to tar him as a fascist and called him “Bushitler.” He was hated and vilified when in office. As former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer recounts, Hurricane Katrina deaths were blamed on Bush’s racism, war crimes in Abu Ghraib on his military viciousness, and his indulgence of Russian adventurism in the nation of Georgia on his being too friendly to Putin. Meanwhile, the Bush White House barely fought back, accepting the inevitability of the “respectable” media calling the shots and framing the arguments. Allow the Democrats to control the frame and they’ll hang you every time.
But the times they are a-changing, and Trump’s pugnacity in calling out the “fake news” media is his most powerful move—and a key to his enduring popularity. I know reporters, even left-wing ones, who will rethink their stories or try harder if faced with criticism by the president. Trump never surrenders the frame.
And on perhaps the most consequential issue, stoic fortitude is never likely to call into question our unconstitutional, unending wars. Fortitude—tragically, frustratingly, and almost admirably—always seems to lead to the conclusion that the only honorable course in a military quagmire is to stick it out, whether that means we’re in Afghanistan another twenty years or pretending that Iraq is just another couple billion dollars away from becoming a flourishing democracy.
We conservatives have often been suckers for the argument that any criticism of neoconservative adventurism is a failure to “support the troops.” That’s passive acceptance of the status quo at its worst, and it gets a lot of people killed, including the troops we claim to honor.
You have to have a certain stubborn and even rebellious curiosity about these things—these policies, foreign or domestic, that have been sold to us as permanent and sacred. And these days you have to be a Firebrand to defy a deeply tortured status quo. Fortitude might have been the appropriate conservative attitude had it swept into office a President McCain, Romney, Bush, or Kasich. But under President Trump what we need is something more blazing and spirited. Fortitude means more of the same, and the same currently sucks.
For a new generation of Republican leaders to prove that President Trump isn’t just a one-off, a quirk with a fleeting cult of personality, there will be a need for an animated, organized populism in our country. Not a lazy assumption that conservative values will carry the day so long as we keep saluting the flag and loving the system, or at least accepting it as given.
Washington is a corrupt place full of corrupt ambitions where few deeds serve the public. Conservative fortitude is never going to stop or even slow the corrupt machine. It’s too complex to be stopped by sadly shaking our heads on national TV at anyone unpatriotic or socialist. We need to aggressively point out the countless ways Americans are being ripped off and tyrannized. We need radical and even (rhetorically) violent truth-telling in the marketplace of ideas, not the old conservative soft sell. If the Right is to prevail, it will need to start competing.
Populism can achieve this in a way the genteel wisdom of the average Bush-era country club Republican no longer can. The mindset of idle retirees is fine for idle retirees, but it won’t triumph in the arena against leftists who have every major institution in our society on their side. Fighters cannot abide by the Marquess of Queensberry Rules when matched against an angry pack of rabid hyenas. Those with fortitude quietly internalize their pain. They sometimes have a high tolerance for it but a low capacity to inflict it on others.
You are in a fight when facing the Left, not a Kennedy School seminar where afterward you will all get foreign beers and celebrate how you’ve arrived. Every day they are coming for you. You must first come for them. Our Founders called for energy in the executive, not fortitude—toughness in the arena, not grace under pressure. Donald Trump has high energy; Jeb Bush has low energy. Donald Trump is president. These things happen for a reason. Energy is also contagious in a way that fortitude is not.
The most dangerous thing about the do-your-duty form of conservative stoicism is that it tends to mean following orders and (famously) waiting your turn. That’s an admirable quality in an actual frontline soldier but a formula for disaster in a society full of millions of citizens yearning for genuine leadership. We should raise a ruckus the technocrats can’t understand or control. Remind them who’s really in charge after all. Time to become a Firebrand.
This book is your invitation to the front lines of our fight. Join me with ideas, energy, images, and stories. This is not my chronological diary. You can watch me on television for that. This is how we prevail with joy—and exactly how an exciting president is leading the way against all odds.
This is not a book for those who want to grin and bear it. This book is about winning, winning so much you get sick of it. After all, isn’t that what you were promised?
CHAPTER THREE
THE RUSSIA HOAX
December 9, 2017
Air Force One, en route to MAGA rally in Pensacola.
“Gaetz, what do your constituents think of this Russia bullshit?”
I was prepared for the question because my friend and one of America’s best congressmen, Rep. Jamie Comer (R-KY), had been asked the same a week before and answered truthfully, telling the president, “Frankly, sir, my constituents are so happy you beat Hillary that they don’t care if you did collude with Russia.”
I didn’t have a chance to answer because, as often happens, President Trump answered himself. You’re just the audience with the president sometimes. He goes full stream of consciousness at Trump speed and in Trumpspeak. If I was annoyed at being interrupted, Trump was furious that his presidency had been interrupted before it began. The game was rigged from the start.
Now he told me, “I had nothing to do with Russia. This crap is hurting our country. I’m getting tough with China. Obama left us in horrible shape with the North Koreans. Guatemala and Honduras must take back their illegal immigrants. I promised I’d get our freeloading allies in NATO to pay up. And all people want to bother me about is Russia.”
Stream of consciousness is the best Trump because he is so clear about what he really wants and thinks. His instincts are impeccable.
It was clear to me that he wasn’t going to get over it because the media never would. For all Republican Speaker Paul Ryan’s hope that first year to pass the American Enterprise Institute’s ten-point plan or some billionaire-donor vision of a Grand New Party with Ryan’s Young Guns—all of whom were over forty-five—none of that was going to happen. The time for white papers had ended; the time for white knuckles had begun. Even if Russia wasn’t the fight we picked, it was the fight we were in. Now we needed warriors, not budgeteers, to win it.
It was on Air Force One that Trump inducted me into his posse and a new band of brothers formed. We would call and text constantly. We had a standing meeting every Monday night to compare notes, congressional votes, and strategy.
The president wasn’t shy about calling us by name, much the same way he did on Fox & Friends on April 26, 2018. He had been asked about some Republicans still lukewarm to his leadership style.
“Look: we have some absolute warriors. We have, I just watched your show, Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows and Matt Gaetz and DeSantis and so many…. These are all warriors. We have great people in the Republican Party.”
Warriors had to be willing to make the case for the Trump presidency in any territory, on any program or platform, at any time. We had to fight, fight, fight whenever and wherever. This wasn’t going to be a “kayfabe” fight, as they call staged battles like those the president had in his old gig as a WWE guest star; it was a shootout and we had to be ready to take the hits.
The president watches his haters on television and loves it when th
ey are deboned live, on-air. He knows that his best defenders go beyond the friendly confines of Fox News to face down the likes of Chris Hayes, Chris Cuomo, and the vipers of The View. I’ve done them all. GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, one of our most cerebral congressmen, once asked why I went on so many programs with hostile hosts. “Aren’t you worried they’ll get you?” he asked.
“Win all your home games and go at least .500 on the road,” I told Zeldin. Nobody ever became a champion ducking tough competition. Zeldin would go on to conduct his own very effective media battles. By the end of the Russia fiasco, I had faced down and exposed Peter Strzok, America’s once premier counterintelligence agent. After that, Sister Act celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg don’t seem so tough.
It has been the honor of my life to have been on this team—these Four Horsemen of justice Trump named on Fox & Friends, along with many others such as Rep. Devin Nunes guiding the battle. We fought every day for our president and for the voters who put him and us there, often against our own government and party.
I often think of how those of us who defended the president wound up in the positions of power that now determine the direction of our country and whether that is Providence’s hand. It’s fashionable these days to talk about reality being a “simulation,” as if all of nature is reducible to whatever science fiction movie we last saw. It does seem sometimes as if there are players in the game, and then there are those who are just spectators, or, in video game parlance, “NPCs”—non-playing characters. D.C. is full of NPCs. President Trump wanted us to be players.
The rewards for stepping up have been intense. Meadows is now White House chief of staff. DeSantis is now governor of our third-most populous state. Jordan at one point served as the Republican lead on not one but two congressional committees. But we didn’t know that would happen then. We ride or die with Trump, and we intended to ride. Not for nothing, the president’s favorite movie is Braveheart, which features the line, “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” I kid, but bands of brothers have been formed from far less.
Ryan wanted to push his lobbyist-pleasing agenda and refused to help. From health care to immigration to defending the Republican majority and president, he took failure from a hobby and made it his career. Ryan had followers in the ironically labeled “leadership” willing to tote his off-key note. Democrats sent out hundreds of subpoenas during their reign of harassment, but when we were in the majority, Speaker Ryan didn’t authorize a single one. Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte followed Ryan off the political cliff. Devin Nunes and the rest of us were furious, though Devin is far too much a soft-spoken gentleman to admit that now.
Gowdy, a tough former federal prosecutor, never liked President Trump. Gowdy and I both lived in our Capitol offices, and we used the gym frequently at night. He told me he resented that Trump never granted him an interview for the job he wanted: attorney general. My talks with Gowdy never extended to the open-air congressional showers, though. Gowdy was the only male member of Congress known to shower exclusively in the private, handicapped enclosure.
President Trump once exclaimed to me, “Devin Nunes has balls!”—holding both hands out as if they held two grapefruits. Something tells me the same cannot be said for Trey.
Nunes had created the marquee witness list to expose the Russia hoax early, before more harm could be done to America: Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Rice…all the deep state names you now know as premeditated traitors. Ryan then “directed” Gowdy and Goodlatte, as chairmen of the Oversight and Judiciary Committees, to perform the investigation. Sadly, it was all performance and zero investigation.
While Goodlatte said little (he is a man with very little to say), Gowdy couldn’t stop talking. And his words hurt our quest for justice. On May 29, 2018, he appeared on The Story with Martha MacCallum after emerging from a closed-door meeting with Speaker Ryan, FBI Acting Director/apologist Christopher Wray, and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein (as I write, Wray still holds his position at the FBI, although I suspect he won’t be there in a second Trump term). Gowdy declared on MacCallum’s show, “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what their fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got—and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.”
Gowdy’s defense of the deep state was devastating. He gave the FBI a cleansing cat bath before the nation. In every interview Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, or I did subsequently, we would be confronted with Gowdy’s embrace of those attacking the president. “What do you know that Trey Gowdy doesn’t?” we were asked incessantly.
Momentum was lost. Crooks in our own government escaped and suffered only the tepid indictment of government reports, not grand juries.
On May 14, 2019, I called for the release of sworn interview transcripts from the Intelligence Committee. Almost a year to the day later, they were released. They exposed that all along Trey Gowdy had known about the lack of legitimate predicate for the Russia hoax. He knew it when he took interviews with potential witnesses and got responses in 2017—and when he scuttled our work in 2018.
Gowdy would later sheepishly admit his “mistake” during an interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight, enjoying post-Congress life as a Fox News contributor. Little good it does us now. He had let the voters down and allowed a scam to continue. History should judge him harshly for his failure to judge the facts honestly.
At the time, what the Democrats couldn’t do electorally, they had to do antidemocratically. Donald Trump was victorious, but he still had the haters and the losers to contend with, and some were ensconced in the federal government. Some of them were even appointed by him. Personnel is policy, but in the rush during Russiagate, many positions were not given the careful attention they deserved and were instead filled by people the establishment recommended and whom the Trump team gambled they could trust.
This, too, was by design. Taking President Trump’s attention away from his duties, they wound up disrupting the flow of his presidency. FBI background checks dragged on for languid weeks and months. Leaks of sensitive information were frequent and vicious, and not always true.
Everybody was handwringing and bedwetting as if it were all Watergate to justify the obsessive focus on Russian collusion. They even brought back some of the Watergate cast of characters, including disgraced CNN commentator John Dean, though this bunch’s second act was less Watergate 2.0 and more like Grumpier Old Men.
To be honest, I don’t think many Americans could find Russia on a map, even if people joked that Sarah Palin said that she could see it from her porch. While the globalist Left might see that as a criticism, I see it as an indication of how far we’ve come. My parents did nuclear attack drills at their schools, feeling the ever-present tension of the world’s most dangerous game of chicken. We don’t care now because we don’t have to care. George W. Bush thought he could see into Putin’s soul, John McCain thought he saw the KGB in there, and Mitt Romney saw the crippling former empire as our greatest geopolitical foe. Okay, boomers.
Russia has never mattered less in my lifetime. Its two main exports are models and oil, and America has plenty of both. When was the last time you used a Russian product? Russia is never either as strong or as weak as she looks, however, and she may yet prove to be more dangerous on her way down to demographic ruination than she was on her way up to communist dominion.
I have been on many television broadcast shows—it’s hard not to see me if you watch enough TV. But you will never see me interviewed on Russia Today, that modern-day version of Pravda. I believe Russia belongs not in the future but the past and that her ailing economy and oligarchic politics reflect that growing realization. Everybody who can is trying to get out of Russia—with whatever cash or arms they can launder through British, French, or Swiss property markets.
It isn’t quite the end of history. I don’t believe Russia or her satelli
tes will become good neoliberals tomorrow or maybe ever. As Russia weakens, the line between state action and criminal thuggery all but disappears. At least they no longer pretend to have a compelling, competing vision of the world beyond raw power and thievery, though. Seen another way, the KGB may be all that is holding Russia together and preventing its oblivion.
To be sure, gangsters can still imperil our security. Just look at the chaos south of our own border. But the cartels have something Americans want and some even need to buy—drugs. We don’t need Russia quite as desperately.
But the condition of the country isn’t why the Washington intelligence and media elite want a conflict with Russia. Washington wants a new Cold War because the Cold War was good for Washington. Cold wars are better than hot wars because you don’t even have to make sure the weapons work. Imagine majoring in Russian back in the 1980s only to learn shortly afterward that the Berlin Wall had fallen. There’s no on-the-job retraining for bureaucrats and policy experts, comrade. For many in Washington, long ago trained to address one specific big problem, the Cold War will only end when their bodies are cold. Progress in foreign policy too often advances funeral to funeral.
How to react to Robert Mueller’s appointment as independent special counsel was the subject of much debate in the Republican conference at the time the Russia investigation began. Ryan and Gowdy both surmised that Mueller was some sort of Beltway paladin. The thinking went that we should all praise Mueller, confirm the legitimacy of his team’s investigative work, and then pray that Trump hadn’t done anything criminal. Besides, they thought, a President Pence—one of Congress’s own—wouldn’t be so bad sitting in the Oval Office if it came to that. What couldn’t be done at the ballot box—defeating Trump—could be accomplished ex post facto in the witness box.
