Matt Gaetz is the closest America can get to having Donald Trump himself as attorney general. Like Trump, the Florida congressman is a reformer who doesn’t conform to reassuring myths about the character a reformer should have. Those myths have an enduring hold on the legacy media, especially, but voters rejected them in 2016—and again this year.
There are two ways to look at the corruption that is rife in 21st-century American life. One view is that reform demands a saint to reproach the wicked. While we await a political hero with the character of a second George Washington, we must make do with morality-reinforcing illusions, according to which our most powerful institutions—the federal government, the media, the medical establishment—are also good institutions, while wickedness is a characteristic of lone individuals, especially of those who challenge the norms of our institutions.
The second view is that if we must await an immaculate reformer, reform will never come. So we ought to support even obviously flawed individuals when they take on the necessary work of confronting systemic evils. Those systemic evils aren’t impersonal, of course—they are the product of people who insist that they are upholding what is good even while they do what is bad. The merely human, rather than angelic, reformer has a doubly difficult task: In addition to being assailed for his mortal failings, he is charged with attacking the very decency of our institutions. Hence, the campaign against Trump branded him as a threat to democracy itself, as well as a convicted felon.
Nevertheless, voters took the second view. They elected Trump, and in the same spirit, Trump is nominating Gaetz to be the nation’s top law enforcer. The same forces that opposed Trump all along profess shock at this choice, signaling to Trump, and to elite Republicans who reluctantly supported him, that even a president elected in defiance of respectable opinion is expected to defer to respectability when it comes to his appointments. Voters may elect a different man—they aren’t supposed to elect a different government.
This year, Gaetz took James Poulos and a film crew from The Blaze on a tour of congressional offices whose occupants—including Republicans—were violators of Congress’s seldom-enforced rules against insider trading. If Nancy Pelosi and prominent Republicans alike take advantage of the information they receive as legislators to, say, buy stock in the military-industrial complex right before Russia invades Ukraine, who is in a position to complain? Such casual corruption is taken for granted on Capitol Hill. But Gaetz simply doesn’t care about bipartisan respectability, so he talks openly about the kind of secret that keeps incumbents rich and protected from public outrage.
On free-speech as well as economic grounds, Gaetz questions the market power of tech companies like Google. He is a supporter of stronger antitrust measures typically thought of as being a Democratic concern, rather than a Republican one. “He’s one of most aggressive members on antitrust, period,” Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, told The New York Times about Gaetz’s record in Congress. (By contrast, Stoller saw reasons to fear that Kamala Harris might back away from the Biden administration’s antitrust commitments.)
Gaetz has been complimentary toward Lina Khan, chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, and the Biden Justice Department’s chief antitrust official, Jonathan Kanter. The New York Post notes that Google, in particular, is likely to be a focus of antitrust attention in a Gaetz Department of Justice, which might move to break up the tech megalith. The same story quotes Gaetz referring to Big Tech companies in 2021 as “the internet’s hall monitors” with a bias against conservatives.
“Change demands … an attorney general willing to take on his own department.”
Gaetz has described himself as a “libertarian populist,” and that characterization is reflected by his stances on civil liberties and social issues. He is a staunch supporter of Second Amendment rights and a relatively progressive Republican on marijuana and some gay-rights issues (such as adoption by same-sex couples in the Sunshine State). His conservative bona fides on abortion and immigration restriction are consistently attested. And, of course, he has defended Trump throughout the “lawfare” waged against him between his first term and today. Trump’s enemies warn that as attorney general, Gaetz would pursue retribution against them. He is more likely to make it harder for anyone to use the Justice Department against political opponents, as it’s so often been used against Trump and his allies.
From turning a blind eye to the concentration of censorious as well as economic power in Big Tech to harassing Trump and other critics of entrenched political privilege, the Justice Department has long been an enabler of corruption. Change demands not only a president determined to bring about reform, but an attorney general willing to take on his own department. It’s a task that calls for Matt Gaetz as well as Donald Trump.
Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly suggested that Trump won a popular majority in 2016.