Mr. Gaetz Goes to Washington: A Review of Matt Gaetz’s “Firebrand” (2020)

Review written in April 2021:

Amazon delivered my Matt Gaetz book today of all days. I always buy these books used so that I’m not directly contributing money to people like this. I skimmed through the whole thing already, which was easy enough to do because it was vacuous and cliche-filled.

For all his TV celebrity and notoriety, I had never really paid all that much attention to Matt Gaetz, so I was learning a lot about him for the first time. The book establishes that he’s a horrendous human being, which I don’t say lightly.

You only learn about his family in the last chapter of the book, whereas most politicians talk endlessly about their families from the beginning. He’s the son of Don Gaetz, a former Florida State Senate President, and Vicky Gaetz, his mother, who has been paralyzed since she was pregnant with his sister Erin, who he admires. He describes himself as a Momma’s boy, how he learned to help his mom put together her wheelchair at six years old and learned to cook alongside her. He says that she is the fiercest campaigner in the family and has called endless voters on behalf of both Matt and his dad, Don. He makes a “joke” about not telling you how old she was on her recent birthday, because he’s “still afraid of her” (pp. 198), which is actually just kind of weird for a grown man. He mentions his “son,” Nestor, who came from Cuba at age twelve; Gaetz “had been dating Nestor’s sister,” May, who “was the successful events director at a [Tallahassee] restaurant” where he held a lot of events (pp. 136).

Gaetz grew up in the conservative panhandle of Florida, in a Congressional district with the highest number of active-duty military people, including veterans he grew up with who mentored him playing baseball, Boy Scouts, and in his Baptist church (pp. 105). The actual physical home he grew up in was featured in “The Truman Show” with Jim Carrey. Perhaps it’s fitting that he emphasizes how important he sees the importance of appearances, media relations, and how “stagecraft is statecraft.” He did his undergraduate work at FSU and then his law degree at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He talks about his disdain for professors a few times in the book, including a reference to how even in law school his professors “were barely his audience when they graded his exams” in law school (pp. 69).

Much of the book is his story of him and his impressions and actions in Washington and for Washington people. It’s a little bit as if it were “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” but instead of it being a story of a pure-hearted average American in Washington portrayed by James Stewart and directed by Frank Capra, it’s like “Mr. Gaetz Goes to Washington,” with the young devil himself going to Washington to acquire power, fame, money, and excitement in a pageant show directed by Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Roger Stone.

He openly discusses his debauchery in Washington and earlier in his life, at least in broad brushstrokes. He talks a lot about his dalliances with women and safeguarding “rules” to avoid sexual relationships with staffers, lobbyists, and journalists. He seems to leave open that campaign staff are a different matter, however. He recounts how Trump and Tucker Carlson, his good friend, had a phone conversation while Gaetz was at Mar-a-Lago, where they talked about Gaetz’s proclivity for women and that he’s “an animal” (pp. 92). He says he has “nothing against drug addicts or drug users, as long as they don’t hurt others. I’ve known and partied with plenty of both in my wilder days” (pp. 69). He admits that he and Nestor’s sister May “even conspired to smuggle some life-extending drugs onto the Communist island where people die who shouldn’t” (pp. 136).

The overt racism in the book is more than I expected and goes beyond what Donald Trump would even do and say with its brazenness. He refers to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the historic civil rights group, as a group that “should be defeated, not tolerated, except insofar as even the most reprehensible group has First Amendment rights” (pp. 31). He contemplates whether to ban all Chinese students from the US, saying while Trump thought student visas should be “vetted more rigorously,” Gaetz wonders “if they should be here at all” (pp. 122). He indulges himself in retelling how he went even farther than Trump’s “shithole nations” comment regarding his disgust for developing countries, recalling a diatribe against Haiti that he once did on TV that garnered him a lot of attention (pp. 144). He talks about the dangers of immigrants in his discussions of anchor babies and “angel moms”: “They aren’t sending their best — but they are taking ours” (pp. 154). Regarding immigrants, Gaetz says, “Newcomers are not always to be shunned, but they will have to prove themselves, like new teammates on a top-tier sports team” (pp. 141). He tries to redefine diversity as how different people “grew up, where they live, how they solve problems, how they learn, and how they process information, among other things” (pp. 142). He fondly recalls the days when environmentalists were equally worried about immigration to the US and he fears that climate change refugees could someday be barrelling down the door of the US. He says that once Donald Trump has finished building the wall with Mexico, “I want to man the gates” (pp. 156).

He attributes his own thuggishness to being a “millennial,” which might make sense as a caricature to conservative older people who would buy the book, but would probably not make sense to anyone who actually is a millennial or who works with millennials. He writes, “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…” (pp. 27), and Gaetz explains that’s why he prefers a more aggressive style in life and politics. He wants to see “toughness in the arena, not grace under pressure” (pp. 35) to sustain a vigorous populist movement for conservatism. He also favorably compares himself to another “millennial,” Kim Jong Un, dictator of North Korea: “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” (pp. 103).

His take on Washington and Florida personalities he likes and doesn’t like are sprinkled throughout the book. He can’t stand Trey Gowdy or Bob Goodlatte in Congress because he doesn’t see them as the kind of true fighters that made up the true posse of Trump “ride-or-die” Congressional loyalists: Jim Jordan, his “mentor”; Mark Meadows, Ron DeSantis, Andy Biggs, etc. These are also mostly the same group he identifies as “immigration hard-liners” later in the book (pp. 96). To emphasize his disdain for Gowdy, he wrote that his “talks with Gowdy never extended to the open-air congressional showers” and that Gowdy “was the only male member of Congress known to shower exclusively in the private, handicapped enclosure” (pp. 38), and then he makes a remark presuming a lack of substantial male anatomy on Gowdy’s part. I only saw one mention of Senator Rick Scott, who he apparently fell out with; he describes Scott as “(R-Puerto Rico)” in a racist, derisive way. He refers to Fiona Hill as a “Department of Defense hack” who seemed “sent from central casting,” complete with the “snooty British accent,” as he proudly recounted his impeachment role breaking into the classified SCIF, where they aren’t even supposed to have cell phones; he relishes the praise of Steve Bannon, who reportedly told him “You broke the fever!” in the “first call [Gaetz] took upon being reunited with [his] phone” (pp. 67). He can’t stand Congresswoman Liz Cheney, allegedly for her hawkishness (pp. 109). He thinks Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke, and Andrew Gillum are all just loser media darlings of the left. He likes Nikki Fried, a Florida Democrat who serves as Agriculture Commissioner, and Katie Hill, a Democrat who left Congress amidst a revenge porn scandal in which she was targeted; he says, like Hill, he is just a bit “different”; he wants more “weirdos” in Congress like Rep. Thomas Massie or Rep. Louie Gohmert: “We need the freak flags to fly at full — not half-mast” (pp. 174), which really makes you wonder….

He depicts Russia as a completely weak, enfeebled country and China as a huge, dangerous superpower that is “sinicizing” the world through globalization (pp. 128). He worries TONS about Chinese foreign influence agents, but ZERO about Russian. He speaks about how “[e]verybody who can is trying to get out of Russia — with whatever cash or arms they can launder through British, French, or Swiss property markets” (pp. 41), interestingly omitting the US from that sentence. In his chapter on China, however, he says “We let them launder their polluted profits through our real estate markets — and push Americans further and further out into the countryside, where nature is paved and commutes lengthened. Our cities become Chinese playgrounds, our universities their training grounds” (pp. 121). He says in a racist and bizarre statement, “We are not and never will be Chinese; they are not and never will be a free people” (pp. 126), ignoring the many pro-democracy movements in Chinese history and recently in Hong Kong, plus in the democratic republic of Taiwan and many other places around the world. He says that Washington was only obsessed with Russia because of old folks still materially invested in the Cold War: “a lot of these people wanted a Cold War with Russia to go one foverer because Russia expertise is good for the pocketbooks of the folks in Washington. Chinese is a hard language to learn, man” (pp. 75); the comment about Russia expertise as a hot career ticket would surprise many Russia specialists, I suspect.

He takes a swipe at the US Chamber of Commerce: “The United States Chamber of Commerce seems to fight for everything other than the United States and her commerce” (pp. 118). He wants to “[b]an foreign companies like TikTok that are little more than data collection operations” (pp. 168). He wants companies to serve America, rather than the other way around (pp. 168). His vision for environmental conservation is that it should begin in local spaces around one’s home, and the EPA should be abolished (pp. 201). He wants fathers to teach their sons to be “gentlemen,” which he defines as “gentle and careful with the natural world” (pp. 200), as opposed to nice to the ladies.

He’s also incredibly narcissistic, sometimes describing himself as a unique, great man; elsewhere, he says he’s “just a country lawyer, but then again, so was Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Calvin Coolidge” (pp. 147). He blasts Bush, Romney, and McCain as “boring” (pp. 177). He acknowledges that he’s “a weird man” and says that “I surely see the weird people. It is my view that the brilliant people in our society are often rare, precious, and strange” (pp. 184). He also claims to love “nerds,” recalling his high school debate days, and says he wants to pick up people who have been “cancelled” to redeem them (pp. 189).

I’ll end with the most hopeful note, for me, in the book. He says that it’s “hard to cancel a congressman, though many may try. Just ask former congressman Steve King or Dana Rohrabacher,” who apparently he views positively (pp. 182). Gaetz says that “everything in politics now is about trying to bring you to your knees. Once you are on your knees, you never get to stand tall again. You’re done. And everyone knows it” (pp. 181).

Just whistling and waiting for Gaetz’s day to come….

End Note:

In Florida, he says he is friends with fellow State Representative Brad Drake, who also admired Nestor’s sister’s beauty (pp. 136); he likes Nikki Fried, the Democrat now serving as Agriculture Commissioner.