Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution

by Matt Gaetz

  For populist conservatives, the frustration is that the energy that drives our movement doesn’t always convert into the bold policy decisions American greatness demands.

  It wasn’t supposed to go this way. Immigration hard-liners Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, and I had gone to the White House to convince the president to hold firm and hold out if necessary. After all, we felt border security was an essential function of government that has been ignored by both parties for far too long. Nobody was chanting “Build the bipartisan consensus!” at any MAGA rally I’ve attended. Maybe that is because the Trump movement is energized by the need to make things different and better—not keep them the same. President Trump is a Firebrand because he is so rarely satisfied with anything short of America’s best. Bipartisanship is too often the opposite of reform or improvement.

  Comedian George Carlin said, “The word ‘bipartisan’ usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” I’m sure that was true in Carlin’s heyday, though now bipartisanship is the all-too-usual mechanism of deception—the standard way of selling out the country to fuel the largesse of Washington and the greed of its managers. The special interests love a system that demands bipartisanship to get things done. That way, exploitation looks like peaceful coexistence and real change looks like inappropriate partisanship. As the Senate functions today, just one person can have significant ability to block meaningful legislation. It is the tyranny of the minority and D.C. loves it—because the real majority outside of Washington doesn’t like the politicians and gets even more suspicious when a handful of them appear to be gumming up the works of the government’s usual functioning. That’s an unfortunate misconception on the public’s part because much of business as usual in Washington is highly destructive.

  The greatest opportunity we have as Americans to fight back against the corrupt uniparty is the Trump presidency. Candidate Trump had little reverence for how things had been done before. When Trump was booed at debates, he made a point to call out the lobbyists and establishment hacks who fill the debate halls. Trump will never be part of the uniparty because he may be the first American politician to successfully run against it as a foil. Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon put it succinctly: “We made Hillary Clinton the defender of the corrupt status quo.” Stagecraft is statecraft.

  President Trump wasn’t just attacking the uniparty power brokers on the Left—he pushes back on his own administration’s dogmas more than any president in American history. We have a champion and an opportunity here, though overcoming the power structure of D.C. means facing strong headwinds.

  There are strong bipartisan majorities in favor of accumulating national debt, creating new entitlements, irresponsibly printing money, bowing to Big Tech, invading faraway lands, and importing cheap illegal labor. Bipartisanship gave us trade deals that sold out American workers for multinational corporations and a limp-wristed China policy. It allowed our higher education institutions to trick teenagers into accepting a life of indebtedness for worthless degrees. The worst things our government has done to our own people have been delivered through unholy cooperation. This is the agenda of the uniparty, and it must be stopped.

  Both parties have an interest in keeping things almost exactly as they are. Sure, they’ll try to press an advantage against the other side, maybe catch the wave of a big popular cause sweeping the nation once in a while. But for the most part, they fear that a true political upheaval could disrupt their luncheons, campaign donations, speaking schedules, and staffing needs. They’ve got it pretty good. Why risk messing that up?

  The inertia of Permanent Washington doesn’t uniquely benefit Republicans or Democrats in a zero-sum game against one another. It benefits most those corruptible officials willing to work across party lines to screw all Americans.

  Keep rubber-stamping those continuing budget resolutions and voting with your party on the big votes, then writing triumphant—or angrily defeated—press releases about it to the folks back home, as if you really worked up a sweat about it all, and the odds are you can stay here for years. You won’t need to change and grow, and the government won’t change much, either, though it will gradually grow, like an obese person without the will to change their eating habits.

  If coasting like this means not daring to make any big changes in a country that badly needs them, well, that’s a shame, but first things first, and each member can tell himself, “It’s not my fault.” There are 535 of us here, and I do what I can, sometimes. It’d be nice if the whole system got fixed, if each member thinks at one time or another, but since that’s unlikely to happen, I should just keep working the system to my own advantage. It wasn’t easy to devise a system where nobody is responsible for failure and managed decline is a regular Tuesday, but they did it.

  To maximize the odds of Congress working for you—to get both parties to cut spending, chop away at red tape, tackle the debt—we will have to replace the quiet but immense scam the two-party aristocracy has perpetuated with a populist sense of urgency and non-crony priorities. That will have to mean some turnover in Congress, I’m sure. It also means working with the populists on the Left when it suits us strategically, even if we know they want to turn America into a dystopian Woketopia.

  I’ve sponsored legislation with Bernie Sanders’s national campaign cochairman Rep. Ro Khanna to stand against Middle East wars. AOC and I have taken on the drug companies to research and democratize access to marijuana, MDMA, and psilocybin for veterans. Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California and I work together to stop warrantless government spying on Americans. This is a more productive, populist bipartisanship to take on the establishment of both parties!

  The 116th Congress has some heroes and fighters in it, but the establishment is people as well as an almost perpetual mindset. We’ll need more populists, more people in both parties who are frankly disgusted by what Washington has become and thus motivated to do things differently.

  For now, I think only the Republican Party—and we’re lucky if we even win over that party—is going to rise to the challenge. But if there is to be a bipartisan consensus in the future, a time after the fierce and necessary fighting ahead, let that consensus be a populist one, not an exploitative elite one. Let future congresses be filled with people committed to reducing the level of nonsense in Washington, not swamp creatures who pride themselves on being seen at the annual Gridiron Dinner.

  The establishment won’t roll over or disappear just because a few of us tell it to get lost, but if we are persistent—and the establishment, by its very nature, remains lazy and unimaginative—we populists might at least be able to lead here. A vocal enough minority can make a big difference, and if the parties we have don’t offer voters real choices and real differences, our vocal populist minority will have to behave like a party unto itself.

  I think it’s the unofficial new party America will end up supporting. They’ve been duped by the other two for far too long.

  June 18, 2019

  Air Force One. Presidential Office. Traveling to Orlando for Trump 2020 campaign launch.

  “It’s going to be harder for them to impeach me now that I’ve announced for reelection, right?”

  I replied, “No, it isn’t. They’re still going to impeach you. They can’t help themselves. We will make them pay for it, sir, I promise. And the people will return you to the White House to keep winning.”

  My response wasn’t as uplifting as I had hoped. The president half shrugged and returned to the final edits of his speech. He didn’t want to be impeached. “It’s not good for the resume,” he would half joke.

  Impeachment may very well be the best thing that ever happened to President Trump, though. He faced their toughest political weapon and withstood it resiliently. All Democrats and even some Republicans indulged it. Bipartisanship at its worst, at least until we got the rest of the Republicans properly aligned and some h
ealthy fighting between the two parties started. In a second term, to solve America’s major challenges, President Trump will have to take on the establishment in both parties again. He will have to prioritize immigration reform and trade. He’s just the leader to do it. The uniparty is on notice.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ending Endless Wars

  January 10, 2020

  Arlington Cemetery. Funeral of SFC Mike Goble. 7th SFG. U.S. Army.

  “Do what you can to bring them home, Matt.”

  The fallen hero’s godfather had long hair and a beard. Neither had seen a brush in a while. He had more important things to do. If he didn’t have time for a pressed shirt, he surely didn’t care to use protocols, titles, or last names. “Matt” was fine by me. We don’t put on airs when we put our people in the ground.

  A tear-drenched godmother showed me a wrinkled photo of my fallen constituent proudly waving a Trump flag with one arm and hugging his military brothers with the other. “Tell the president Mike loved him.”

  “Sir, the president has been trying to reach you.” My outstanding military aide Charles Truxal knew why, as did I. He handed me the phone as we walked out, past the flag-draped casket. I always cry at military funerals. Sometimes I ugly cry. I wish I didn’t. It is weakness in the presence of strength. But a great country should shed tears for those who shed blood for her. We should feel the pain of every life lost and carry it with us as long as we live, especially when we carry the weight of the decision to send them there. The dead die twice when we forget them and what they lived for. There is something so painful about losing one of our best in the middle of his service to country. A life cut down before it could grow full. So many other lives changed forever.

  President Trump wanted me to vote against legislation I helped draft that would limit his ability to begin an extended war against Iran. No president has been more anti-war in my lifetime than Donald Trump. Still, no president, including Trump, should be able to draw our people into endless, unfocused, undisciplined, unconstitutional wars—especially in the sands of the Middle East, which have been soaked in too much proud, patriotic, American blood. Castles in the sand and democracies in the sky can never be built. Self-government means self-sacrifice. We can’t do it for others any more than they can do it for us.

  It’s hard when you disappoint your heroes—but my hero was in that casket.

  “Mr. President, I just buried one of my constituents. He was a big fan of yours. I promised his family I’d tell you. They know we talk. His daughter is six years old.”

  The commander in chief is also the consoler in chief. “Tell them I’m doing all I can to end these wars. I’m more anti-war than you are, Matt. I believe what you believe even more than you believe it. Promise me you’ll tell them.” I carried the message to America’s newest Gold Star family, my voice cracking as I relayed our president’s gratitude.

  “I don’t want you to do this. You’re hurting my leverage, but I know you feel it in your heart. I’m not going to bust your balls over this.” We’ve never discussed that vote again—at least not directly.

  Later the president would tweet, ostensibly to all members of Congress, to “vote your heart.” I’m not the first man to get a love note tweeted by our president—that honor would fall to my fellow millennial Kim Jong-un—but I sure took it that way.

  Along with the president, my heart breaks when the blood of America’s bravest patriots is wasted unwisely by men who then turn around and pretend that they did nothing wrong as they cash in.

  Former Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed Joe Biden for president—just as he had the warmongers Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Hey, I wonder how the Iraqis feel about him supporting a candidate who called for breaking Iraq into three countries?

  Powell warned that if you break it, you bought it. But he and Biden were among the breakers. We are still paying the price, with rising costs in dollars and lives. Real courage isn’t backing a man who Obama’s own secretary of defense, Robert Gates, said was “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

  CNN breathlessly pretended that Powell’s endorsement was some courageous breaking of political ranks. Powell was the front man for bad intelligence. He should wear that for the rest of his life.

  Indeed, the last time I listened intently to Colin Powell, it was eighteen years ago, and he was saying something ominous about WMDs in Iraq. Unfortunately, others were listening, too. Not so much with Donald J. Trump, who called bullshit and later called George W. Bush a war criminal to a standing ovation in South Carolina—one of our most pro-military states. That was the moment that I knew everything would be different. Because everything about it was true. Finally.

  Courage requires truth-telling. Powell couldn’t tell the truth to the nation, the world, or even President Bush and Shadow-President Cheney. I doubt he can even tell the truth to himself. I wonder if he even knows it now. We don’t get to use truth serum on network news, though everyone would tune in. I told Trump the truth about my vote when we disagreed. I wouldn’t authorize a blank check for another generation of neocon desert adventures at the expense of America’s finest and bravest.

  This is not a policy debate. The victims of bad military decisions are my neighbors. We play cornhole at KC’s Sandbar & Grille in my hometown of Fort Walton Beach. I know what they signed up for because they tell me why they signed up for it. I know they’d die for America as often as God would allow. For some, it is a family endeavor—parents hand off the family commitment to daughters and sons. For others, it is a private, almost spiritual commitment to the country they love.

  They will never run from a fight, but we have a responsibility to make sure it is winnable and worth winning. Fake leaders have no license to spend their lives frivolously, as Powell, Biden, and Cheney have. Capt. Nathan Hale regretted that he had but one life to give for his country. My people give their all—their arms and legs, their backs, and scrambled minds. They give their youth, their marriages, their everything. They carry that service with them in the boardroom and in their kids’ bedrooms as they tell the stories, but they never leave it behind. Those who don’t come home alive—and we never leave them behind even when they are not breathing—hang around in the minds of their moms, dads, and kids, who soldier on without their soldiers long after the medals are doled out and the obits are written. Great Americans always carry on. Military families inspire the best within us because they are the best among us. They’ll go to any land we ask, even to space, because we ask.

  My baseball coaches wore pilot bags. My scout leaders were air commandos. My Baptist deacon maintains the flight line. My amazing Chief of Staff Jillian Lane-Wyant is a marine spouse. During Florida’s legislative session, a bomb technician fed my cat.

  I will never send America’s troops, our neighbors, into a fair fight. Rather, I intend on providing the funding, equipment, infrastructure, and arms to achieve decisive victory every single time. We build the best weapons ever because we, and we alone, never hope to fire them. We trust our best.

  A well-funded force need not be so well worn. Today our military is overstretched, over-deployed, and overexerted. Growing up where I have, I’ve seen my whole life what endless deployments and unfocused wars truly mean for our best people: tearful airport goodbyes. Bargaining with God for the safe return of loved ones. Parenting disrupted. Marriages destroyed. Extra psychiatrists at our schools. Drug abuse. Domestic violence. Veteran suicide. Shattered limbs, broken hearts, and grieving families at Walter Reed Hospital. Caskets draped in flags. Gold Star families in mourning. Roads, parks, and schools named in permanent reverence for the fallen.

  The “fog of war” is no fog to me, nor to any of the seven hundred thousand people I serve. It is weird to talk about service when so many of my constituents serve me and indeed all of us. I never wore the uniform, but I never go long without se
eing it profoundly displayed.

  We see the impact of war every day on the people we love who shape our lives. It starkly reminds us that the unmatched freedoms we enjoy are not free—they are bought with the blood of American patriots. And it is our solemn duty and highest responsibility to make sure that this sacred currency is spent only when absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, our decision-makers have fallen short of this standard, as they have with most standards. They demonstrate a tragic recklessness.

  Of everyone in Congress, I represent the highest concentration of active-duty military. In my district, nobody is too woke to stand for our anthem—even if some stand on prosthetics. We don’t kneel except in prayer, though we do a lot of that here, too.

  Under the America First banner, a new generation of Republicans must stand against endless unfocused unconstitutional wars. We are not isolationist when we call for intelligent exercise of military power. The Bush-Cheney-Clinton-Haley-Cheney desire to start three new wars before lunchtime tomorrow is the undisciplined behavior of an unserious nation in decline. My soldiers, sailors, and airmen deserve better leaders than they’ve gotten. They’ll have to make do with me while I try to do right by them.

  There are times when the fight is just and necessary. But it isn’t naive—as the self-appointed experts would tell us—to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure before we rebuild Kandahar (sometimes for savages who, even when fighting on our side, rape young boys in their tents as we shrug, and then they frag us). Whereveristan should never come before Main Street, USA.

  America First means nation-building at home and an admission that we are not the world’s police force or piggy bank. We should secure every inch of the U.S. border with Mexico (and maybe even Canada) before we send the first American patriot or dollar to defend Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, Syria’s border with Turkey, or Iraq’s border with Iran. How can a nation unserious about its own border spill trillions defending borders and Bedouins oceans away and eons away from our level of civilization? It would be like your neighbor criticizing your marriage while he sleeps with the babysitter.