Rightwing media helped spawn the gang of Republican rabble-rousers who turned Kevin McCarthy’s speaker’s chair into an ejection seat.
But even though their own party members and some of those same media anchors are criticizing the eight lawmakers after last week’s debacle, experts say the professed outrage is just more fuel for a fire in which performance politics burns the brightest.
“The description of him as a performance character is far more apt to describe Matt Gaetz than as any legitimate politician or policymaker,” said Rebekah Jones, a Democrat who lost to the incumbent Florida congressman in last year’s midterm elections, and believes Gaetz’s widely broadcast ousting of McCarthy was entirely self-serving.
“Matt Gaetz is gifted in his ability to draw attention to himself … he’s always been a showman,” she said. “He’s probably smarter than your average Maga [Make America great again], he’s making moves and keeping himself in the news.”
Vanderbilt University’s Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked Gaetz 185th of 222 House members in the 117th Congress, with just 10 bills introduced, none of them deemed “significant”. By contrast, the Virginia Democrat Gerald Connolly was “most effective” with 51, and the average congressmember introduced 21.
Meanwhile, a cursory Google search by CNN found more than 106,000 news articles about Gaetz, and 347 for Republican Neal Dunn, the congressman for Gaetz’s neighboring Florida district.
Analysts point to others among the coalition of Republican hardliners who toppled McCarthy basking in the glow of their achievement, and taking to the airwaves to try to capitalize.
The Daily Beast reported that the South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace, who is further to the center than her other seven colleagues, and who helped oust the speaker because he had “not lived up to his word on how the House would operate”, could face an ethics investigation for trying to fundraise off her vote on Fox News.
The Arizona firebrand and Trump loyalist Andy Biggs posted a video to YouTube denying that he had helped foment chaos. “We’re not in chaos right now. What I did was, I sided with my constituents and the American people who’ve been asking me for months to make a change,” he said, without presenting any evidence they had.
Among Florida’s Republican delegation, there is growing frustration with what they see as Gaetz’s theatrics. “He has very few friends in the caucus,” Carlos Gimenez, a representative from Miami, told Politico.
“He’s about clicks. He’s about how many cameras he can get shoved in his face and he’s a historical figure because he caused [something] for the first time in history and all that. I think he gets off on that.”
Others say the hard-right networks and other outlets now growing their viewing figures amid the drama of McCarthy’s removal are at least partly responsible for driving that agenda, and shaping the personalities that made it happen.
“I don’t think I can come up with an accurate percentage of how much any given media outlet is responsible for the creation of these monsters, but Fox, and to a lesser extent other far-right media outlets, your Breitbart and Human Events, or these random blogs like whatever one Steve Bannon is running, played a significant role,” Jones said.
Victor Pickard, professor of media policy and political economy at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, said Fox could find it trickier to plot a path towards the election.
“It was always going to be a fraught exercise with so much of this performative,” he said. “Ultimately, with Trump being hands down the leading candidate and tremendously popular among his base, the base that Fox News largely shares, I think that they’re going to follow that audience.
“At the end of the day they’re not going to let petty political disputes get in the way.”
Fox News, especially since the departure of Rupert Murdoch last month, was already wrestling with how to cover Trump before Gaetz and his colleagues made their move. The network, which has attacked the Florida congressman in the days since, must now factor in Gaetz’s alliance with the former president: the two will speak together at a Trump campaign rally in West Palm Beach next week.
“The coverage of Matt Gaetz on Fox has been highly negative,” said Jane Hall, professor at American University’s School of Communication and author of Politics and the Media: Intersections and New Directions.
“[The Republican former speaker] Newt Gingrich said on Sean Hannity he was treasonous, and Laura Ingraham was supposed to have Gaetz on that night, then she says she doesn’t really understand why they needed to do this. It’s been negative for Gaetz in many other places in the media.
“[But] it was mutually beneficial, especially during the Trump era, to have Gaetz, this young firebrand, on their air many, many times. This latest coverage, presenters uniformly condemning him and saying it was terrible for the Republicans, shows you that mainstream members of the Republican party know that this is going to cost them with the electorate in 2024.”
