36 MOTHER JONES |^ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
TROLL STORY“Matt Gaetz is living proof that Veep
was less parody and more prophecy,” says
Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican polit-
ical strategist and a Trump critic. “To some
degree, he’s a character in the grandest re-
ality show of all. He exists at the hinge of
reality and alternate reality.”
Gaetz is often described as Trump’s
protégé, someone who’s become a Fox
News staple not just by sucking up to
the president but by trying to out-Trump
Trump with insults hurled at Democrats
and anyone else with the temerity to chal-
lenge the president. But Gaetz hasn’t simply
been copying the president; he was culti-
vating a Trumplike persona long before
anyone considered the possibility of a
President Trump. And the two men share
more than just a love of playground taunts.
Gaetz’s political ascent was also fueled by a
rich father who paved his way, and a series
of unorthodox financial maneuvers.the meanest member of Congress hails
from a town called Niceville, a sleepy en-
clave of about 15,000 nestled on Choctaw-
hatchee Bay, just off the Gulf of Mexico.
When Gaetz was growing up, it was 90
percent white, solidly middle class, and
best known for hosting the Boggy Bayou
Mullet Festival—in honor of the plentiful
local fish, not the hairdo. The Gaetzes
owned a second home, in the nearby town
of Seaside, where The Truman Show was
filmed. Gaetz, who has devoted his career
to getting on television, spent much of his
childhood in a house made famous by a
character trying to get off TV.
The Gaetzes were conservative and reli-
gious, as was the surrounding community.
(Two abortion doctors were murdered in
the area during Gaetz’s childhood.) Matt’s
mom suffered life-threatening compli-
cations while pregnant with his younger
sister but opted not to have an abortion
and was partially paralyzed as a result. Matt
Gaetz has said her decision influenced his
anti-abortion positions.
But if anyone is responsible for Gaetz’s
rise to political fame, it’s his dad, whose
deep pockets and even deeper connections
in Florida politics are one reason Matt is
known in his district as Baby Gaetz. “Matt
would be an assistant manager at Walmart
if it weren’t for his father,” says Steven
Specht, a Democrat who ran against Gaetz
for Congress in 2016.Gaetz is a third-generation politician.
His grandfather, Jerry Gaetz, was the
mayor of a small town in North Dakota and
a state legislator who died in 1964 at the
state gop convention after giving a speech
endorsing Barry Goldwater for president.
Matt’s father, Don Gaetz, has been a prom-
inent figure in Panhandle politics since first
winning election to the Okaloosa County
school board in 1994.
Matt honed his trolling skills early, in
service of his dad’s political career. In 2000,
when Matt was a high school senior, Don
ran for Okaloosa County school superin-
tendent. Don’s opponent in the Republican
primary was the principal of Matt’s Nice-
ville high school. Matt wore a “Gaetz for
Superintendent” T-shirt to school almost
every day until his father prevailed in the
election. In 2006, Don won a seat in the
Florida state Senate, where he served a stint
as Senate president before leaving in 2016
because of term limits.
Don was a popular politician, even among
Democratic colleagues, who saw him as
decent, if conservative. “Don Gaetz was
very much more of an old-school Repub-
lican,” says Ben Wilcox, research directorof the nonprofit watchdog group Integrity
Florida and a former Tallahassee lobbyist.
“He would tell you that Matt is much more
tea party Republican than he is.”
Matt Gaetz has been a vocal supporter
of the tea party’s agenda, crusading against
the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid
expansion in a state with 2.6 million un-
insured residents. But Gaetz wouldn’t be
where he is today without government
health care programs. In the late 1970s,
his father co-founded a nonprofit hospice
company that successfully lobbied Con-
gress to allow Medicare and Medicaid to
cover its services. Once the public money
started flowing, the nonprofit became a
for-profit corporation, Vitas, that grew into
the country’s largest hospice care provider.
In 2004, Don Gaetz and his partners
cashed in, selling the hospice company
to the parent company of the plumbingbehemoth Roto-Rooter for $400 million.
When he ran for state Senate two years
later, Don had a net worth of $25 million.
In 2013, the Justice Department sued Vitas,
alleging that between 2002 and 2013, the
company had defrauded Medicare by filing
false claims for services never provided or
for patients who weren’t terminally ill. The
company settled the case in 2017 for more
than $75 million, at the time the largest
settlement ever recovered from a hospice
company. (Don wasn’t named in the case
and has denied any wrongdoing.)
Meanwhile, after graduating from
William & Mary Law School in 2007, Matt
Gaetz went to work for a politically con-
nected firm in Fort Walton Beach, near
Niceville. He toiled away on pedestrian
legal matters befitting a junior associate
in a region whose biggest city, Pensacola,
is home to barely 50,000 people. He filed
a debt collection suit against an elderly
woman who couldn’t pay the home care
firm owned by Gaetz’s dad. Matt also rep-
resented a homeowners’ association fight-
ing the county over the placement of a
beach volleyball net. And he sued the “red
fish chix,” two professional fisherwomenaccused of absconding with a $50,000 boat
belonging to a local restaurant that had
hired them to promote it.
Less than a year into his job, he also
became one of the firm’s clients. One night
in October 2008, Gaetz was driving his dad’s
bmw home from a nightclub on Okaloosa
Island when a sheriff ’s deputy pulled him
over for speeding. (Gaetz’s driving record is
the subject of many jokes in his district. In
2014, he rear-ended one of his constituents
while talking on his cellphone.)
The sheriff ’s deputy smelled alcohol and
asked Gaetz to take a field sobriety and
breath test. Gaetz refused, so the deputy ar-
rested him. But a lawyer from Gaetz’s firm
succeeded in getting the charges dropped a
few months later. In the interim, the deputy
was forced to resign after the sheriff ’s de-
partment said he’d used excessive force in
a different arrest. The firing had nothing“MATT GAETZ IS LIVING PROOF
THAT VEEP WAS LESS PARODY
AND MORE PROPHECY.”