Rep. Matt Gaetz was making a name for himself even as a freshman member of Congress, loudly defending Donald Trump and basking in the reflected glory of the president in the process. He’s the kind of guy who wants to go on “Fox and Friends” during the 5 a.m. hour “because the president is watching,” as he told my Post colleague Dan Zak.
On Tuesday, the good congressman tweeted the following message to Michael Cohen, who is about to testify in an open hearing about his knowledge of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors: “Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot...”
My Post colleague Rachel Bade notes that, “Gaetz gave no proof or details about what he meant in his tweet.” But it takes an obtuse mind to read that tweet and not see a veiled threat. At a minimum, it seems like witness intimidation.
The response to this tweet has been predictable. It’s been ratio’ed and ratio’ed badly — as of this writing, the responses to Gaetz’s tweet outnumber the retweets by a factor of eight to one. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi subtweeted Gaetz, warning House members that, “comments made on social media or in the press can adversely affect the ability of House Committees to obtain the truthful and complete information necessary to fulfill their duties.”
The Daily Beast’s Sam Stein caught up with Gaetz to find out what he was doing. Gaetz claimed he was not engaging in witness tampering but “witness testing.” Then he said a few things that caught the attention of the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts:
In a phone interview shortly after he posted the item, the Florida Republican insisted that he was not engaging in witness intimidation at all.
“No,” he stressed, “it is challenging the veracity and character of a witness. We do it everyday. We typically do it during people's testimony.”
“This is what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas,” he added.
Now on the one hand, it seems a bit puzzling that the terms “marketplace of ideas,” “Matt Gaetz,” and “Michael Cohen” would ever appear in the same story. There is no “idea” contained in Gaetz’s attacks on Cohen beyond the insinuation that Cohen is a sleazeball. Even Gaetz acknowledges that what he is doing is highly unorthodox.
On the other hand, I’ve written a book on the marketplace of ideas, and I regret to inform all of you that Gaetz is not wrong about the modern Ideas Industry.
In “The Ideas Industry,” I argued that political polarization generated a demand for a particular type of intellectual: the rabid partisan. Furthermore, polarization meant that partisans preferred their own house intellectuals over more heterodox thinkers:
Polarization disproportionately benefits ideologically homogenous thought leaders. The strong demand for ideas within each ideological group is specific: it is strictly for their intellectuals. It becomes cognitively easy for partisans of one side to reject the criticisms lobbed from someone affiliated with the other political party. They can be dismissed as partisans rather than thinkers.... Thought leaders willing to reinforce pre-existing partisan beliefs will be hailed as original thinkers, however, regardless of how their views are perceived by the broader marketplace of ideas.
It is not hard to see the evidence that Gaetz is correct in his supposition that he will face no blowback from such outré arguments within his own party. Stein asked Jim Jordan, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, for a comment, and Jordan replied, “Matt can tweet what he wants.” Bade reported that criticism of Gaetz “lit up the twittersphere,” but none of her examples include GOP members of Congress. To my knowledge, Justin Amash is the only GOP member of the House to criticize Gaetz.
It is debatable whether any other GOP leader will go as far as Amash. On Tuesday only 13 House Republicans voted with Democrats to overturn Trump’s emergency declaration. As The Post noted in its coverage: “Despite their frequent complaints of executive overreach during the Obama administration, most Republicans fell in line with Trump’s decision to try to circumvent Congress to get billions of dollars for his border wall.”
To paraphrase Roll Call’s Dave Wasserman, Gallup has Trump’s approval rating among Republicans at 89 percent. As long as that remains true, there is no such thing as “too far” for congressional Republicans, even for words or deeds thought unimaginable until recently. It is hard to overstate how much this dynamic drives congressional GOP behavior.
Gaetz does not need to worry about the 2020 general election. Despite doing his best impression of the rear end of a horse in his first term, he was reelected with more than 67 percent of the vote. All Gaetz has to worry about is getting primaried. Antics like this help cement his grip on his seat.
To be clear, Gaetz is not going to convince anyone of his position with his antics. But that is not his goal — his goal is to flatter his base and curry favor with the president. In 2019, that is what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas.
