THE CHAOS AGENT

Matt Gaetz threw the House into disarray. What does he want?

- DEXTER FILKINS

Representative Matt Gaetz arrived at the White House in the last days of 2020, amid a gathering national crisis. President Donald Trump had lost his bid for reëlection the previous month, and his allies were exploring strategies to keep him in office. Though only thirty-eight years old, Gaetz, the scion of a political family in Florida's Panhandle, had become one of the Republican Party's most prominent and divisive figures. His dark hair styled in a kind of bouffant, his lips often curled in a wry smile, Gaetz bore a resemblance to Elvis Presley, or, in the description of a Florida friend, "either Beavis or Butt-head." He was quick-witted and sometimes very funny, and he loved to taunt his enemies, who were numerous, especially in his own party. "He's the most unpopular member of Congress, with the possible exception of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and he doesn't care," a fellow-congressman told me. With a combination of charisma and gleeful shamelessness, Gaetz had come to embody the new Republican creed of doing whatever it took, and laying waste to whatever it took, to insure that Donald Trump would survive and succeed.

By the time of Gaetz's visit, on December 21st, Trump's allies had already set in motion a deceptively simple mechanism to overturn his defeat: in seven states where he had narrowly lost, they attempted to replace the delegates to the Electoral College with loyalists to Trump. The plan, which came to be known as the "fake elector" scheme, was unsuccessful, and led to the indictment of several dozen people. Gaetz was more interested in exploiting technicalities. He joined a group of Republican hardliners in a meeting with Vice-President Mike Pence, to discuss using parliamentary rules to reject electors' votes-attempting to reverse an election that Gaetz described as "uniquely polluted."