Usually, you need about 10 minutes to walk from the Rayburn House Office Building to the House Chamber. But if you’re running from a reporter, it’ll only take you five.

When Matt Gaetz spotted me outside his office door one afternoon early last November, he popped in his AirPods and started speed walking down the hall. I took off after him, waving and smiling like the good-natured midwesterner I am. “Congressman, hi,” I said, suddenly wishing I’d worn shoes with arch support. “I just wanted to introduce myself!” I had prepared a long list of questions, hoping for a thoughtful conversation but ready for a tense one. He was a firebrand, after all, or so said the title of his 2020 memoir, Firebrand.

Gaetz is a creature of our time: versed in the art of performance politics and eager to blow up anything to get a little something. He landed in Washington, D.C., as a freshman nobody from the Florida Panhandle, relegated to the back benches of Congress. Seven years later, he’s toppled one House speaker and helped install a new one. He has emerged as the heir of Trumpism. And he’s poised to run for governor in a state of nearly 23 million people.

I had tried repeatedly to schedule an interview with Gaetz. His staff had suggested that he might be willing to sit down with me. But there the firebrand was, that day in November, running away from me in his white-soled Cole Haans. Gaetz broke into a light jog down the escalator, then flew through the long tunnel linking the Rayburn offices to the House Chamber. Finally, I caught up with him at the members-only elevator, my heart pounding. I stretched out my hand. He left it hanging. We got on the elevator together, but he still wouldn’t look at me.

“Are you … afraid of me?” I asked, incredulous. Finally, he made eye contact and glared. Then the doors opened, and he walked out toward the chamber.

Gaetz speaks to the media on the House steps after Kevin McCarthy’s ousting.(Bill Clark / Getty)

Two incidents have defined Gaetz’s tenure in Congress and helped make him a household name. The first was the Department of Justice’s 2020 investigation into whether he had sex with a minor and violated sex-trafficking laws. Gaetz has repeatedly and vehemently denied the claims. That probe was dropped in early 2023, but the House Ethics Committee is still investigating those claims, as well as others—including allegations that Gaetz shared sexual images with colleagues. One video, multiple sources told me, showed a young woman hula-hooping naked. A former Gaetz staffer told me he had watched from the back seat of a van as another aide showed the hula-hooping video to a member of Congress. “Matt sent this to me, and you’re missing out,” the aide had said. (A spokesperson for Gaetz declined to comment for this article, saying that it “contains verifiable errors and laundered rumors” without identifying any. “Be best,” he wrote.)

The investigations seem to have angered and hardened Gaetz. There was a time when he wouldn’t have run away from any reporter. But since the allegations became public, Gaetz has tightened his alliance with the MAGA right, and his rhetoric has grown more cynical. He has become one of the most prominent voices of Trumpian authoritarianism. Warming up the crowd for Donald Trump at the Iowa State Fair last August, Gaetz declared that “only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.”

Gaetz has all the features—prominent brow, bouffant hair, thin-lipped smirk—of an action-movie villain, and at times he’s seemed to cultivate that impression. The second defining event of his time in Congress thus far came in early October, when he filed a motion to kick Kevin McCarthy out of the House speaker’s chair. The motion passed with the help of 208 Democrats and eight Republicans. But not before McCarthy’s allies had each taken a turn at the microphone, defending his leadership and calling Gaetz a selfish, grifting, fake conservative. McCarthy’s supporters had blocked all of the microphones on the Republican side, so Gaetz was forced to sit with the Democrats. A few lawmakers spoke in support of his cause, but mostly Gaetz fought alone: one man against a field of his own teammates.

[Peter Wehner: Kevin McCarthy got what he deserved]

Gaetz didn’t seem to mind. He smiled as he took notes on a legal pad. He displayed no alarm at the fact that every set of eyeballs in the chamber was trained on him, many squinted in rage. He was accustomed to the feeling.

Earlier this week, McCarthy lashed out at Gaetz, telling an interviewer that he’d been ousted from the speakership because “one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old, an ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker. And that’s illegal, and I’m not gonna get in the middle of it. Now, did he do it or not? I don’t know. But Ethics was looking at it. There’s other people in jail because of it. And he wanted me to influence it.”

In response, Gaetz posted on X: “Kevin McCarthy is a liar. That’s why he is no longer speaker.”

Few items in Gaetz’s biography are more on the nose than the fact that his childhood vacation home—which his family still owns—was the pink-and-yellow-trimmed house along the Gulf of Mexico that was used to film the The Truman Show, the movie about a man whose entire life is a performance for public consumption.

But for most of the year, Gaetz and his family lived near Fort Walton Beach, a part of the Florida Panhandle that’s all white sand and rumbling speed boats—a “redneck riviera,” as one local put it. The area, which now makes up a major part of Gaetz’s congressional district, has a huge military base, and one of the highest concentrations of veterans in the U.S.; it’s also one of the most Republican districts in the country.

If a person’s identity solidifies during adolescence, then Gaetz’s crystallized inside the redbrick walls of Niceville High School. As a teenager, he was chubby, with crooked teeth and acne. He didn’t have many friends. What he did have was the debate team.

Gaetz as a teenager, with his former friend Erin Scot on the right. (Courtesy of Erin Scot)

“We tolerated him,” more than one former debate-club member said when I asked about Gaetz. (Most of them spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retribution from Gaetz or his father.) Gaetz could be charming and funny, they told me, but he was also arrogant, a know-it-all. “He would pick debates with people over things that didn’t matter, because he just wanted to,” one former teammate said.

Gaetz also liked to flaunt his family’s wealth. For decades, his father, Don Gaetz, ran a hospice company, which he sold in 2004 for almost half a billion dollars. (The company was later sued by the Department of Justice for allegedly filing false Medicare claims; the lawsuit was settled.) Don was the superintendent of the Okaloosa County School District before being elected to the state Senate in 2006, where he became president. He was a founding member and later chair of the powerful Triumph Gulf Coast board, a nonprofit that doles out funds to local development projects; according to some sources, he still has a heavy hand in it. The counties that make up the panhandle, one lobbyist told me, “are owned by the Gaetzes.”

Matt had a credit card in high school, which was relatively rare in the late 1990s, and he bragged about his “real-estate portfolio,” Erin Scot, a former friend of Gaetz’s, told me. “He was obviously much more well off than basically anyone else, or at least wanted us to think he was.” Once, Gaetz got into an argument with a student who had been accepted to the prestigious Dartmouth debate camp, another classmate said. The fight snowballed until Gaetz threatened to have his father, who was on the school board, call Dartmouth and rescind the student’s application.

Gaetz mostly participated in policy debate. Each year, the National Forensic League announced a new policy resolution—strengthening relations with China, promoting renewable energy—and debaters worked in pairs to build a case both for and against it. To win, debaters had to speak louder, faster, and longer than anyone else. During his senior year, Gaetz won a statewide competition. He wasn’t just good at debate, a former teammate told me: “That was who he was.”

Marilyn McGill, his high-school-debate coach, fondly remembers a teenage Gaetz happily pushing a dolly stacked with bins of evidence on and off the L train in Chicago—and another time dodging snow drifts during a blizzard in Boston. “Matt never complained,” she said. Another year, Gaetz was so eager to attend a tournament in New Orleans that McGill and her husband drove him there with some other debaters in the family RV. “This is the only way to travel, Mr. McGill!” Gaetz shouted from the back.

McGill gushed about her student in our interview. But when I asked what she thought of him now, the former teacher didn’t have much to offer on the record. “He certainly commands the stage still,” she said. “How about that?”

After high school, Gaetz went to Florida State University, where he majored in interdisciplinary sciences, continued debating, and got involved in student government. I had difficulty finding people from Gaetz’s college years who were willing to talk with me; I reached out to old friends and didn’t hear back. Gaetz’s own communications team sent over a list of people I could reach out to; only one replied.

During the summer after his freshman year, Gaetz spent a lot of time at home, hanging out with Scot and some other friends from Niceville. Sometimes, Gaetz would drive them out on his motorboat to Crab Island, where they’d cannonball into the clear, shallow water of the Choctawhatchee Bay. Other days, Gaetz would take them mudding in his Jeep. Somewhere around then, Scot told Gaetz that she was gay, and the revelation didn’t faze him. This meant a lot to her.

Still, Gaetz could get on his friends’ nerves. He referred to one of Scot’s female friends on the debate team using the old Seinfeld insult “man hands.” Once, he noticed peach fuzz on a girl’s face and made fun of her behind her back for having a beard. Gaetz would occasionally offer unsolicited advice on how his friends should respond if they were ever pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving: Refuse to take a Breathalyzer test. Chug a beer in front of the officer to make it more difficult to tell if they’d been drinking earlier in the night. It was immature kid stuff, Scot said. “Most of us grew out of it. He made a career of it.”

After graduating from FSU in 2003, Gaetz enrolled at William and Mary Law School in Virginia. Unlike his classmates, who rented apartments with roommates or lived in campus housing, property records show that Gaetz bought a two-story brick Colonial with a grand entranceway and white Grecian columns in the sun room. It was the ultimate bachelor pad: a maze of high-ceilinged rooms for weekend ragers, with a beer-pong table and a kegerator, according to one former law-school acquaintance. Back then, the acquaintance said, Gaetz had a reputation for bragging about his sexual conquests.

The last time Scot saw Gaetz was at a friend’s wedding in March 2009, two years after he’d graduated from law school and one year into what would be a very short-lived gig as an attorney at a private firm in Fort Walton Beach. By that point, Gaetz had already started planning his political career, which would begin, officially, a few months later with a special-election bid for the state House. Also by that point, Gaetz had been arrested on charges of drunk driving after leaving a nightclub on Okaloosa Island called the Swamp. He’d followed his own advice and refused a Breathalyzer test. (Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges, and Gaetz’s license was reinstated after only a few weeks.)

At the wedding, Scot was eager to catch up with Gaetz. A photo from the night of the rehearsal dinner shows Gaetz, in a cream-colored suit jacket, wrapping his arm around her. She was excited to show him a picture of her girlfriend, whom he’d never met. She says that later, at the bar, Gaetz passed around an image of his own: a cellphone photo of a recent hookup, staring up topless from his bed.

There used to be a restaurant called the 101 on College Avenue in Tallahassee, just steps from the state capitol. Customer favorites included happy-hour martinis and buffalo-chicken pizza. Gaetz and his buddies in the legislature would hold court there after votes, friends and colleagues from that time told me.

Gaetz had been elected to the state House, after raising almost half a million dollars—including $100,000 of his own money, and support from MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who had formerly represented the district and was a friend of the Gaetzes. In the general election, Gaetz defeated his Democratic opponent by more than 30 points; he would go on to run unopposed for a full term in 2010, in 2012, and again in 2014.

During this period, a group of young Republican lawmakers partook in what several of my sources referred to as the “Points Game,” which involved earning points for sleeping with women (and which has been previously covered by local outlets). As the journalist Marc Caputo has reported, the scoring system went like this: one point for hooking up with a lobbyist, three points for a fellow legislator, six for a married fellow legislator, and so on. Gaetz and his friends all played the game, at least three people confirmed to me, although none could tell me exactly where Gaetz stood on the scoreboard. (Gaetz has denied creating, having knowledge of, or participating in the game.)

Matt Gaetz with his father, Don Gaetz, in 2014. (Phil Sears / AP)

At the time, Don Gaetz was president of the Florida Senate, and the father-and-son pair was referred to, mostly behind their backs but sometimes to their faces, as Daddy Gaetz and Baby Gaetz. The latter had a tendency to barge in on his father’s meetings, hop on the couch, and prop his feet up, Ryan Wiggins, a former political consultant who used to work with Matt Gaetz, told me. Because of their relationship, Matt “had a level of power that was very, very resented in Tallahassee,” she said.

Gaetz wasn’t interested in his father’s traditional, mild-mannered Republicanism, though. Like any good Florida conservative, the younger Gaetz was a devoted gun-rights supporter and a passionate defender of the state’s stand-your-ground law. As chair of the state House’s Finance and Tax Committee, he pushed for a $1 billion statewide-tax-cut package. But Gaetz talked often about wanting the GOP to be more modern: to acknowledge climate change, to get younger people involved. Toward that end, he sometimes forged alliances with Democrats. “If you went and sat down with him one-on-one,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic consultant who worked with Gaetz in the state legislature, “he could be very likable.”

Schale, who had epilepsy as a child, was happy to see Gaetz become one of a handful of Republicans to support the Charlotte’s Web bill, which legalized a cannabis extract for epilepsy treatment. Gaetz also befriended Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who is Gaetz’s current colleague in Congress, when they worked together to pass a bill strengthening animal-cruelty laws. “You could go into his office and say, ‘Hey man, I think you’re full of shit on that,’” Schale said. “And he’d say, ‘All right, tell me why.’ I kinda liked that.”

Gaetz seemed to relish the sport of politics—the logistics of floor debates and the particulars of parliamentary procedure. He argued down his own colleagues and tore up amendments brought by both parties. Sometimes friends would challenge Gaetz to a game: They’d give him a minute to scan some bill he wasn’t familiar with, one former colleague told me, and then make him riff on it on the House floor.

Gaetz had a knack for calling attention to himself. He would take unpopular positions, sometimes apparently just to make people mad. He was one of two lawmakers to vote against a state bill criminalizing revenge porn. And even when his own Republican colleague proposed reviewing Florida’s stand-your-ground law after the killing of Trayvon Martin, Gaetz said he refused to change “one damn comma” of the legislation.

Plus, “he understood the power of social media before almost anyone else,” Peter Schorsch, a publisher and former political consultant, told me. Gaetz was firing off inflammatory tweets and Facebook posts even in the early days of those apps. All of it was purposeful, by design, the people I spoke with told me—the debating, the tweeting, the attention getting. Gaetz was confident that he was meant for something bigger. “The goal then,” Schorsch said, “was to be where he is now.”

In 2015, while Donald Trump was descending the golden Trump Tower escalator, Gaetz was halfway through his third full term in the Florida House, pondering his next move. His father would retire soon from the Florida Senate, and Gaetz had already announced his intention to run for the seat. But then Jeff Miller, the Republican representative from Gaetz’s hometown district, decided to leave Congress.

Gaetz had endorsed former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in the GOP primary. (“I like action, not just talk. #allinforjeb,” he’d tweeted in August 2015.) But by March, Bush had dropped out. Left with the choice of Trump, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, or then–Ohio Governor John Kasich, Gaetz embraced the man he said was best suited to disrupt the stale workings of Washington, D.C.

In the same statement announcing he was running for Congress, Gaetz declared that he was #allin for Trump.

At first, Gaetz was miserable in Congress. Almost a year after being elected, at 34—he’d defeated his Democratic opponent by almost 40 points—Gaetz complained about his predicament to Schale. He’d never dealt with being a freshman member on the backbench. “He hated everything about it,” Schale told me.

In Gaetz’s telling, the money turned him off most. Given the makeup of his district, he wanted to be on the Armed Services Committee. But good committee assignments required donations: When Gaetz asked McCarthy about it, the majority leader advised that he raise $75,000 and send it to the National Republican Congressional Committee, Gaetz wrote in Firebrand. He sent twice that much to the NRCC, he wrote, and made it onto both the Armed Services and the Judiciary Committees. But he claimed to be disgusted by the system.

During those first miserable months, Schale wondered how his colleague would handle his newfound irrelevance. “I would’ve told you he’d do one of two things: He would either retire or he was going to light himself on fire,” Schale told me. “He chose to light himself on fire.”

It can take years to rise up through the ranks of a committee, build trust with colleagues, and start sponsoring legislation to earn the kind of attention and influence that Gaetz craved. He wanted a more direct route. So his team developed a strategy: He would circumvent the traditional path of a freshman lawmaker and speak straight to the American people.

Gaetz and Trump in 2022. (Megan Varner / Getty)

This meant being on television as much as possible. Gaetz went after the most hot-button cultural issue at the time: NFL players kneeling for the anthem. “We used that as our initial hook to start booking media,” one former staff member told me. One of his early appearances was a brief two-question interview with Tucker Carlson. Though Carlson mispronounced his name as “Getts” (it’s pronounced “Gates”), the congressman spoke with a brusque confidence. “Rather than taking a knee, we ought to see professional athletes taking a stand and actually supporting this country,” he said.

From there, the TV invites flooded in. Gaetz would go on any network to talk about anything as long as the broadcast was live and he knew the topic ahead of time. He had become a loud Trump defender—introducing a resolution to force Special Counsel Robert Mueller to resign and even joining an effort to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. A white board in his office displayed a list of media outlets and two columns of numbers: how many hits Gaetz wanted to do each week at any given outlet and how many he’d already completed. Around his office, he liked to quote from one of his favorite movies, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in a faux southern accent: “We ain’t one-at-a-timin’ here. We’re mass communicating!’’

Soon, the president was calling. Trump asked Gaetz for policy advice, and suggested ways that Gaetz could highlight the MAGA agenda on television. Sometimes, when the president rang and Gaetz wasn’t near the phone, his aides would sprint around the Capitol complex looking for him, in a race against Trump’s short attention span, another former staffer told me. Gaetz claimed in his book that he once even took a call from Trump while “in the throes of passion.”

With his new influence, Gaetz helped launch Ron DeSantis’s political career. In 2017, he urged Trump to endorse DeSantis for Florida governor. At the time, DeSantis was struggling in the Republican primary, but after receiving Trump’s approval, he shot ahead. DeSantis made Gaetz a top campaign adviser.

[From the May 2023 issue: How freedom-loving Florida fell for Ron DeSantis]

Gaetz would occasionally travel with the president on Air Force One, writing mini briefings or speeches on short notice. Trump was angry when Gaetz voted to limit the president’s powers to take military action, but the two worked it out. “Lincoln had the great General Grant … and I have Matt Gaetz!” Trump told a group of lawmakers at the White House Christmas party in 2019, according to Firebrand.

The two had a genuine relationship, people close to Gaetz told me. From his father, Gaetz had learned to be cunning and competitive. But he was never going to be a country-club Republican. “He’s aspirationally redneck,” said Gaetz’s friend Charles Johnson, a blogger and tech investor who became famous as an alt-right troll. (Johnson once supported Trump but says he now backs Joe Biden.) Trump, despite his wealth and New York upbringing, “is the redneck father Matt never had,” Johnson told me.

HBO’s The Swamp, a documentary that chronicled the efforts of a handful of House Republicans agitating for various reforms, takes viewers behind the scenes of Gaetz’s early months in Congress, when he lived in his office and slept four nights a week on a narrow cot pushed into a converted closet. Gaetz is likable in the documentary, coming off as a cheerful warrior and a political underdog. But the most striking moment is when he answers a call from President Trump, who praises him for some TV hit or other. When Gaetz hangs up the phone, he is beaming. “He’s very happy,” Gaetz tells the camera, before looking away, lost in giddy reflection.

Gaetz has positioned himself as a sort of libertarian populist. He’s proposed abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, but he’s not a climate-change denier, and has supported legislation that would encourage companies to reduce carbon emissions voluntarily. He has consistently opposed American intervention in foreign wars, and he advocates fewer restrictions on marijuana possession and distribution. He still allies himself with Democrats when it’s convenient: He defended a former colleague, Democratic Representative Katie Hill, when she was embroiled in a revenge-porn scandal and forged an unlikely alliance with Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over their desire for a ban on congressional stock trading.

In his book, Gaetz argues that too many members of Congress represent entrenched special interests over regular people, and too much legislation is the result of cozy relationships between lawmakers and lobbyists. In 2020, he announced that he was swearing off all federal PAC money. (It has always been difficult, though, to take Gaetz’s yearning for reform seriously when his political idol is Trump, a man who not only refused to divest from his own business interests as president but who promised to “drain the swamp” before appointing a staggering number of lobbyists to positions in his government).

Gaetz’s personal life began making headlines for the first time in 2020. That summer, the 38-year-old announced, rather suddenly, that he had a “son” named Nestor Galban, a 19-year-old immigrant from Cuba. Gaetz had dated Galban’s older sister May, and when the couple broke up, Galban moved in and had lived with him since around 2013. “Though we share no blood, and no legal paperwork defines our family relationship, he is my son in every sense of the word,” Gaetz wrote in his book.

Later in 2020, Gaetz met a petite blonde named Ginger Luckey at a party at Mar-a-Lago. Luckey, who is 12 years younger than Gaetz, grew up in Long Beach, California, and works for the consultancy giant KPMG. In the early days of their relationship, she was charmingly naive about politics, Gaetz wrote in his book: During one dinner with Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Luckey was excited to discover that Carlson hosted his own show. “What is it about?” she’d asked.

Luckey is hyper-disciplined and extremely type A, “the kind of person who will get you out of bed to work out whether you like it or not,” Johnson said. Luckey tweets about sustainable fashion and avoiding seed oils, and she softens Gaetz’s sharp edges. She longboards and sings—once, she kicked off a Trump book-release party with a delicate rendition of “God Bless America.” Gaetz asked Luckey to marry him in December 2020 on the patio at Mar-a-Lago. When she said yes, Trump sent over a bottle of champagne.

Three months later, in late March 2021, news broke that the Department of Justice was looking into allegations that Gaetz had paid for sex with women in 2018. One claim held that Gaetz’s friend, the Florida tax collector Joel Greenberg, had recruited women online and had sex with them before referring them to Gaetz, who slept with them too. But the most serious allegation was that Gaetz had had sex with a girl under the age of 18, and had flown her to the Bahamas for a vacation. By the time Gaetz proposed to Luckey, the FBI had reportedly confiscated his phone.

Gaetz and wife, Ginger Luckey, arrive at a Trump rally in 2023. (Alon Skuy / Getty)

Gaetz has denied paying for sex or engaging in sex with a minor. But Greenberg would go on to be charged with a set of federal crimes and ultimately plead guilty to sex trafficking a child. On April 6, The New York Times reported that Gaetz had requested a blanket pardon from the Trump White House in the final weeks of his administration, which was not granted.

Other sordid claims have spilled out since. “He used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend,” one former Republican lawmaker told me. “He’d show me a video, and I’d say, ‘That’s great, Matt.’ Like, what kind of a reaction do you want?” (The video, according to the former lawmaker, showed the hula-hooping woman.) Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide, wrote in her memoir that Gaetz knocked on her cabin door one night during a Camp David retreat and asked Hutchinson to help escort him back to his cabin. (Gaetz has denied this.)

On social media, people called Gaetz a pedophile and a rapist; commenters on Luckey’s Instagram photos demanded to know how she could possibly date him. In many political circles, Gaetz became untouchable. He was “radioactive in Tallahassee,” one prominent Florida Republican official told me, and for a while, he stopped being invited on Fox News. Around this time, DeSantis cut Gaetz out of his inner circle. His wife, Casey, had “told Ron that he was persona non grata,” Schorsch told me. “She hated all the sex stories that came out.” (Others have suggested that Gaetz fell out with DeSantis after a power struggle with the governor’s former chief of staff.)

The ongoing House Ethics Committee investigation could have further consequences for Gaetz. The committee may ultimately recommend some kind of punishment for him—whether a formal reprimand, a censure, or even expulsion from Congress—to be voted on by the whole House.

Gaetz’s response to the investigation has been ferocious denial. He has blamed the allegations on a “deep state” plot or part of an “organized criminal extortion” against him. His team blasted out emails accusing the left of “coming” for him. But privately, in the spring of 2021, Gaetz was despondent. He worried that Luckey would call off their engagement. “She’s for sure going to leave me,” Johnson said Gaetz told him in the days after the stories broke.

But Luckey didn’t leave. In a series of TikToks posted that summer, one of her sisters called Gaetz “creepy” and “a literal pedophile.” “My estranged sister is mentally unwell,” Luckey told The Daily Beast in response.

Gaetz and Luckey married in August of 2021, earlier than they’d planned. It was a small ceremony on Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles. On the couple’s one-year anniversary, Luckey posted a picture of the two of them in the sunshine on their wedding day, Luckey in a low-cut white dress and Gaetz in a gray suit. “Power couple!!” then-Representative Madison Cawthorn wrote. Below, someone else commented, “He’s using you girl.”

Rather than cowing him, the allegations seemed to give Gaetz a burst of vengeful energy. He tightened his inner circle and leaned harder than ever into the guerilla persona he’d begun to develop. No longer welcome in many greenrooms, Gaetz became a regular on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast before launching a podcast of his own. He set off on an America First Tour with the fellow Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene. The two traveled state to state, alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election and declaring Trump the rightful president of the United States. People from both parties now viewed Gaetz as a villain. It was as if Gaetz thought, Why not go all in?

Republicans faced disappointing results in the 2022 midterm elections, and by the time January rolled around, their slim House majority meant that each individual member had more leverage. In January 2023, Gaetz took advantage, leading a handful of Republican dissidents in opposing Kevin McCarthy’s ascendance to the speakership. He and his allies forced McCarthy to undergo 14 House votes before they finally gave in on the 15th round. Things were so tense that, at one point, Republican Mike Rogers of Alabama lunged at Gaetz and had to be restrained by another member. But Gaetz had gotten what he’d wanted. Among other concessions, McCarthy had agreed to restore a rule allowing a single member to call for a vote to remove the speaker. It would be McCarthy’s downfall.

In October, Gaetz strode to the front of the House Chamber and formally filed a motion to oust his own conference leader. McCarthy had failed to do enough to curb government spending and oppose the Democrats, Gaetz told reporters. He announced that McCarthy was “the product of a corrupt system.” As a government shutdown loomed, the 41-year-old Florida Republican attempted an aggressive maneuver that had never once been successful in the history of Congress: using a motion to vacate the speaker of the House. Twenty-four hours later, McCarthy was out.

Ultimately, the evangelical MAGA-ite Mike Johnson of Louisiana was chosen as the Republicans’ new leader. With the election of Johnson, Gaetz had removed a personal foe, skirted the establishment, and given Trumpism a loud—and legitimate—microphone. “The swamp is on the run,” Gaetz said on War Room. “MAGA is ascendant.” This had been Gaetz’s plan all along, Bannon told me afterward. In January 2023, he had been “setting the trap.” Now he was executing on his vision. Gaetz had ushered in a new “minoritarian vanguardism,” Bannon told me, proudly. “They’ll teach this in textbooks.”

Rather than cowing him, the allegations seemed to give Gaetz a burst of vengeful energy. (Photograph by Brian Finke for The Atlantic)

Gaetz has options going forward. If the former president is reelected in November, Gaetz “could very easily serve in the Trump administration,” Charles Johnson told me. But most people think Gaetz’s next move is obvious: He’ll leave Congress and run for governor of Florida in 2026. Even though he’s publicly denied his interest in the job, privately, Gaetz appears to have made his intentions known. “I am 100 percent confident that that is his plan,” one former Florida Republican leader told me. Gaetz looks to be on cruise control until then, committed to making moves that will please the MAGA base and set him up for success in two years.

The Republican field in Florida is full of potential gubernatorial primary candidates. Possible rivals for Gaetz include Representative Byron Donalds, state Attorney General Ashley Moody, and even Casey DeSantis. But in Florida, Gaetz is more famous than all of them, and closer to the white-hot center of the MAGA movement. If he gets Trump’s endorsement, Gaetz could have a real shot at winning the primary and, ultimately, the governor’s mansion.

On October 24, Mike Johnson spoke at a press conference after being nominated for speaker. He hadn’t been elected yet, but everyone knew he had the votes. Flanked by grinning lawmakers from across the spectrum of his party—Steve Scalise, Elise Stefanik, Lauren Boebert, and Nancy Mace—he promised a “new form of government” that would quickly kick into gear to serve the American people. Johnson’s colleagues applauded when he pledged to stand with Israel, and they booed together, jovially, when a reporter asked about Johnson’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Watching on my computer at home, I couldn’t find Gaetz right away. But then the C-SPAN camera zoomed out and there he was, in the back, behind cowboy-hat-wearing John Carter of Texas. I had to squint to see Gaetz. He looked small compared with the others, in his dark suit and slicked-back hair. Once, he stood on his tiptoes to catch a glimpse of the would-be speaker, several rows ahead.

Despite his very central role in Johnson’s rise, Gaetz had been relegated to the far reaches of the gathering, behind several of his colleagues who had strongly opposed removing McCarthy. But Gaetz didn’t seem to mind. He clapped with the rest of them, and even pumped his fist in celebration. Most of the time, his mouth was upturned in a slight smile. He was in the back now, but he wouldn’t be there long.

Earlier this year, two California residents filed a class-action lawsuit against the French luxury design company Hermès. Their grievance was that although they could afford a coveted Birkin bag made by the company, they could not buy one. The bags are genuinely rare, because they are still handmade by specially trained artisans. Wait lists are long. And the company, according to the lawsuit, gives wide discretion to salespeople at individual boutiques to determine who gets one next. This practice creates scarcity and pumps up the resale market, where some Birkins go for the price of a Ferrari. But the result, for some rich people, is the bitter taste of rejection.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, staff writer Amanda Mull talks about the lawsuit and the current state of the luxury market. If these customers win this lawsuit, will they eliminate the preciousness of the item they so covet? What do we actually want from luxury these days? Is there even such a thing anymore as a rare luxury good? And what handbag is Amanda carrying?

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: What’s the most expensive handbag you personally own?

Amanda Mull: I purchased, in 2012, I want to say—on my credit card, at the time, which was very stupid—a Proenza Schouler PS1 Bag that was pre-fall 2012, 2013?

Rosin: I’m looking it up now just to see how much it costs.

Mull: Yeah, it was a blanket-print bag, and it was in the large size. And I think that full-price it was $2,400? And I wrote for a handbag-industry publication at the time, and I waited it out until it went down to $1,900? And then I bought it, which I had no business doing, but I still have it. I love that bag. I think it’s an absolutely beautiful piece of design, and I have held on to it. I always will.

Rosin: I’m looking at it. It’s actually pretty cool. Looks practical and—

Mull: Yeah, it fits a laptop.

Rosin: It fits a laptop, exactly.

Mull: Yeah.

Rosin: This proud owner of a Proenza Schouler is Amanda Mull. Also an Atlantic staff writer.

Mull: The bag that I carry to work today costs $50.

Rosin: Right, right.

Mull: It’s canvas, it is very practical. I don’t buy expensive handbags anymore, but it can take a while to deprogram yourself.

Rosin: Mull recently wrote about a different bag: a Birkin bag. If bags were restaurants, the canvas tote would be a fast-casual chain. And the Birkin would be a three-star Michelin spot with a mysterious, almost mythical reservation system.

Mull: The Birkin bag dates to the 1980s. It’s not quite as old as the company itself. There’s a very perhaps apocryphal backstory to how it came about. The then-Hermès CEO was seated next to Jane Birkin on an Air France flight. Jane Birkin was, at the time, famous for carrying her possessions in a basket. And they got to talking about handbags, and they got to talking about handbags and what she needed and what she wanted from a handbag. And the Hermès CEO took that information back to the company and they created the Birkin bag.

Rosin: What I love about that story, and I have no idea if it’s true or not, is that the way they tell that story now is like, It’s über-practical. She was a mom. She needed places to put her mom things inside her bag, you know?

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: Now, nearly 50 years later, the Birkin bag is at the center of a class-action lawsuit filed in February by people who can afford the bag but cannot get one—a lawsuit that reveals, inadvertently, this very strange moment we are in with the luxury market.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today, a dispatch from up in thin air. To those of us who can not afford a Birkin bag, it all looks the same up there. But to someone like Amanda Mull, who’s a close observer of Americans and their buying habits, the lawsuit is a rare window into divisions within the rich. Because the history of luxury handbags is a pretty good stand-in for the history of Western social wealth.

Rosin: I’m going to now Google—do you have your computer with you? I want to see how much Birkin bags cost. (Laughs) This is insane—the first one that pops up costs half a million dollars. That can’t be true. Wow.

Mull: Yeah, the How much does a Birkin cost? is a $64,000 question, which is perhaps the answer to it in some situations. But Hermès keeps things very close to the vest as far as their pricing, and especially for their most sought-after products, of which the Birkin is the absolute most sought-after. And then you look on the resale market, and almost all of these bags—the smallest, most basic leather Birkin is going to cost around $11,000 and go up from there. You can hit six figures. You can get versions that have solid-gold hardware that are pave-diamond-encrusted hardware.

Rosin: I saw the diamond-encrusted one.

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: I was like, Okay, that must be the top, top, top.

Mull: Yes, those get very expensive. And all of them are going to sell at above retail prices on the resale market, so How much does a Birkin cost? is sort of a fabulously complicated question.

Rosin: Yeah. I think I’m going to land it somewhere between a used Honda Accord and a condo in Washington, D.C. That’s about the range.

Mull: Yes, that’s where you’re looking at.

Rosin: Why are they so coveted?

Mull: There are a thousand answers to that question. Part of it, I think, genuinely is because Hèrmes does make exceptionally nice products. Hèrmes is one of the few leather-goods companies out there. And in my experience, it is the only one of the major leather-goods companies that makes things by hand en masse. All of their handbags are made by hand. They’re stitched by hand. They use really fine materials. They employ their own leather workers. They train their own leather workers. They run a whole academy in France to create the workforce that they need to create these types of bags at scale. And they stand behind them for a lifetime. You can send your handbag back to the Hèrmes spa, which is what their loyal clientele refer to as sending their bag back to get refreshed or fixed or something. It goes to the spa. And one of their leather workers will tighten the stitches, will polish the hardware, will remove the scuffs, things like that, for the life of the bag.

Rosin: A facelift, the bag equivalent of a facelift.

Mull: Yes. But another reason is that the fact that they’re exceptionally well made puts a very real cap on how many can be made per year. There are very few places within the consumer-goods economy, even within luxury goods, that there is real scarcity—not fake scarcity, not limited edition, not, like, Oh, we did this collab with this celebrity or with this other brand. Hermès, it can only produce so many of them. And when there’s a hard limit on something, rich people really want to get into it. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Okay, what you just described makes Hermès—and honestly, I have always thought of them this way—as the hero of a certain kind of story. Like, luxury has gone through conglomeration, and there’s a glut of luxury, and who even knows what luxury is anymore? And then you’ve got this one used-to-be equestrian French company that’s holding the guard. They pay their craftsmen living wages, and they live up to their promises, and all the things that luxury companies really don’t do anymore.

Mull: Absolutely. It is very, very hard to even straightforwardly and dispassionately describe what it is that Hermès does and how it makes its products without sounding like you’re on the Hermès payroll.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Exactly. Exactly. And you’re like, Oh my God, they hand—I mean, you sort of forget about the fact that all of this labor that goes into a bag makes it only available to the very, very, very rich, and then not even, you know? Okay, of what story are they the villain? I’ll ask the question that way. What happened?

Mull: Well, the fact that Hermès does everything that it does in an old-fashioned handcraft way means that its products are (a) extraordinarily expensive and (b) genuinely a lot of them are pretty scarce, and nothing they make is more scarce than the Birkin. It’s become a pop-culture icon. There are storylines about it in Sex and the City; it is, like, a brass ring of personal style and wealth; and it is something that people want to buy and want to own in order to demonstrate that, not only are they personally successful, financially successful, and people of taste, but that they do that at the highest echelon possible. They aren’t just regular rich, they are carry-a-Birkin, have-Birkins rich, which puts you at a particular echelon, even within rich people.

Rosin: And not, like, tacky, not following fads. Like, classic, but interesting,

Mull: And the Birkin has gotten so popular that I think that on some level its own success threatens that idea that it is classic, it is not tacky, it is not nouveau riche, it is not new money, it is not arriviste. Arriviste? No French-pronunciation capability here.

Rosin: Arriviste, yeah. You mean it threatens that, or what did you mean by that?

Mull: I think that it has become an icon of arriving in such a way that it is so broadly desired that it threatens to be a mark of striving in that way.

Rosin: Oh my God, that’s so confusing.

Mull: Yes, it is.

Rosin: Like, it’s such a mark of having arrived that it’s become a mark of trying too hard to arrive.

Mull: Exactly.

Rosin: That is very confusing.

Mull: It is so confusing. Luxury brands walk a very narrow line between whipping up this level of aspiration and this level of desire for their products and ensuring that their products don’t become too readily identifiable as a mark of aspiration. And it is very, very difficult to stay on the straight and narrow when trying to sell as many of these products as possible. But the Birkin, because of its genuine scarcity, it has been this thing that even when you can get everything else, even when you can walk into a Louis Vuitton boutique and buy whatever you want, when you can walk into Chanel and buy whatever you want, you can’t necessarily do that with Hermès. because there are only so many bags and there are so many more people who want them and who can plausibly afford them than there are people who can have them, because there just aren’t that many bags.

Rosin: So if I have all the money in the world and I walk into an Hermès store and I want a Birkin, I can’t necessarily get one.

Mull: Probably not. Not that day.

Rosin: Probably not?

Mull: Probably not.

Rosin: After the break, how to get a Birkin. Which may or may not involve getting a lawyer.

[Break]

Rosin: For a chance at a Birkin bag, Amanda Mull says you have to play something called the “Hermès Game.” Hermès didn’t respond to a request for a comment from The Atlantic. But aspiring customers have pieced together some clues, which basically add up to: Salespeople at each boutique seem to have broad discretion over who gets a bag and who gets off the waitlist.

Mull: Like, somebody will show up on Reddit or on a forum and say, I went to this boutique on this day, I talked to this person, or This is what I saw somebody else offered or saw somebody walk out of a store with, or This is what I was able to glean. And in most of these situations, what people say that you’re likely to hear is that these bags that are referred to as quota bags, which means that—

Rosin: (Laughs.) It’s just, like, this language imported into this context. It’s so funny.

Mull: Yes. So what people online say that you will generally hear when you walk into an Hermès boutique off the street and ask for a Birkin is that Birkins are prioritized to people who have a purchase history with the brand or who support the brand or who are brand-loyal who have relationships with a sales associate, things like that. Which basically means that if a truck pulls up and the store gets four Birkins, then what the sales associates at that store will probably do is look at their client rosters and go, This person expressed to me a year ago that they wanted to know if we got in a blue Birkin, and there’s a blue Birkin in this set, and they haven’t been offered a bag before. So I’m going to call this person up and see if they want this bag instead of just giving it to a person who shows up and says, “I’d like a Birkin. You got any?”

Rosin: Okay. So the way you just described that was pretty value-neutral. Good job. There’s two ways to imagine or—if you were to do a movie about that scene—there’s two ways that you could pitch that scene: One could be a scene of high snobbery, like a sales person looking down upon the person who just walks off the street and has no brand loyalty or history with that store and just squires the bag off to the back. And another way, totally straightforward, like: There’s a waitlist, you know, and on the waitlist is Mrs. So and So, and she’s been waiting for a year and a half, so get in line.

Mull: Right. There really are two legitimate ways to see this. And part of it is that there’s a lot of people who want these bags and a lot of people who asked before you.

Rosin: Right, which seems like there’s waitlists for a lot of things, you know?

Mull: Right. And something that Hermès has to deal with is that the fact that these bags all sell for above retail on the secondhand market means that they deal with something that a lot of other areas of the consumer market that where there’s scarcity also deals with, right? Like Ticketmaster—

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Mull: They do sell something that there is a genuine supply-and-demand mismatch for—Taylor Swift tickets or Bruce Springsteen tickets or whatever. And at a certain point, it is just hard to figure out how you allocate fairly a scarce product to a very large potential group of buyers. And one way that you can do that is to sell to people with purchase histories. So, in one sense, Hermès is trying to prioritize actual customers, and the best way to do that is to look at people who have been actual customers in the past. The other way to look at that is that in order to be offered the opportunity to buy this extraordinarily expensive thing, you have to pledge fealty to this brand by buying all of this other extraordinarily expensive stuff first before you will be given an opportunity to buy the thing you actually want.

Rosin: Right, right, right. Like, you have to buy a scarf, and you have to buy some menswear, and you have to buy a belt, and then you will have proven that you’re a loyal customer. Wow. I don’t even know if that’s legal? Is that legal?

Mull: Well, that is the subject of a lawsuit that was filed in February in California. These two plaintiffs are seeking class-action status over essentially not being offered the opportunity to buy a Birkin. One of the people who filed this lawsuit, it appears, actually did buy a Birkin from Hermès in the past and seems to be upset that she wasn’t offered immediately a second one. And then the other person in the lawsuit appears to have bought a bunch of Hermès stuff and never been offered a Birkin and is mad about that. And I think that being mad about that is reasonable, but also, there’s a lot of people who want a Birkin.

Rosin: But it’s so funny because the people suing them, don’t they understand that winning that right would kind of destroy the rarity of the object they desire and make it not rare?

Mull: I don’t think that they understand that. I think the flip side of that phenomenon is that rich people have been flattered, especially by luxury brands, into a belief that they will always be in the in-group. And suddenly finding out that scarcity sometimes is going to exclude you, that there are people who are a higher priority than you are is—when you have enough money that you want to buy multiple 14,000 handbags—

Rosin: It’s crushing and shocking and intolerable.

Mull: Yes. It is, like, the worst thing that has happened to you in recent memory, finding out that there are things your money can’t buy you immediately.

Rosin: I think what this has led me to think about, this lawsuit, is: What do we want and do we understand what we want? How did we get to a point now where we’re glutted with luxury and luxury becomes a lot more meaningless, and so you have to manufacture scarcity?

Mull: So the beginning of luxury goods as we know them arguably started, like, at Versailles.

Rosin: The most grippingly luxurious palace ever, yeah.

Mull: Yes. This is during that era of France. Clothing and really, really high-end clothing were really important to the social stratification of royalty, the aristocracy. And that is where you get the origins of the French luxury business. And then you see further into the 19th century, as travel became more possible, aristocracies started to travel more. And they needed all kinds of stuff to travel with. You get brands that start emerging to supply those travel items—that’s where Louis Vuitton comes from. It was a trunk maker for the wealthy in the 19th century. Hermès also comes about in this era where it made equestrian supplies.

Rosin: Oh, okay. Okay.

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: I did not put those together. I was wondering why they’re all either equestrian or trunk makers. Interesting.

Mull: Yes, yes. The history of luxury goods is a social history of wealth because all of these companies were founded to, especially in this era, to solve particular problems of modernity. Things are bespoke, they are couture, they are customized to your wishes.

Rosin: So truly rare. Truly rare.

Mull: Yes.

Rosin: Okay.

Mull: Truly rare. And you start to see the luxury industry start changing a little bit, because production capabilities have ramped up and the luxury industry starts to arrange itself—not necessarily arrange itself; people are arranging it—into conglomerates for the first time. In the 1980s, you get Bernard Arnault taking control of Louis Vuitton. And Bernard Arnault and LVMH, the conglomerate that he still runs, is enormously influential in creating the luxury industry that we have today. What Arnault was—and is—really, really good at is understanding how to market luxury brands and vastly increase their production capabilities using modern methods.

Rosin: Is this the beginning of the end? Is this when everything changes?

Mull: Yes. Once Bernard Arnault gets in there, his vision is really to make the luxury business a global, corporatized, huge, profitable behemoth, and he does it.

Rosin: So in the old vision of luxury, scarcity was implied. I’m not sure it was explicit, but it was implied that it wasn’t available to a lot of people. In the new post-Arnault vision of luxury, luxury is a story about luxury.

Mull: Yes, I think that luxury is a story about exceptionalism. Something that Arnault and LVMH know better than anybody is that there are other ways to project scarcity besides not having enough stuff to sell. And this is where you get a lot of limited-edition releases, collaborations with celebrities or with other brands, so that keeps the brand in people’s minds. If you are somebody who maybe wants to buy your first Louis Vuitton bag, then you are probably paying attention to larger fashion and style and pop-culture media, and you were gonna brush up against news about all of these releases that are like, It’s sold out, it’s very limited edition, it’s not available, etc., etc. And those particular very small releases might indeed be genuinely scarce, but there are Louis Vuitton boutiques in every major city in the world that are full of the regular stuff, and all of that regular stuff has the halo of those scarce releases around it.

Rosin: Given everything you’ve described about fake scarcity and the complicated democratization of luxury, do you yourself have more respect for the Hermès way, where you genuinely keep these ways of handcrafting and genuine scarcity, or the other way, in which more people have access to it, but it’s less perfect?

Mull: Yeah. I am not a person who I would say respects a lot of companies.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Mull: But I feel like I do have to have this grudging respect for Hermès because they make products that are what they say they are.

Rosin: Yeah.

Mull: If it takes a guy in a French warehouse 40 hours of work to put together my bag, and he has a good salary and a pension and job security and safe working conditions, then yeah, that bag is just going to be a lot more expensive and there’s just not going to be very many of them. I think that Hermès could charge more for most of its products based on what the market will bear, which is wild because those handbags are so expensive.

Rosin: Yeah. I’m so with you, and I really don’t want to be. The only natural conclusion of the conversation we’ve just had is that the hero of the guilds and the working people of France is a company that sells handbags for $16,000. But that is the way it is.

Mull: Right. And I think that that is indicative of how off-kilter our consumer market is, because it was not that long ago that a lot more of the stuff that we bought was produced in that way. And the production end of the stuff that we buy has gone so far off the rails that it is now truly rare to buy something that was made by somebody with a pension.

Rosin: Right. And so the ability to buy with integrity is also a luxury of being rich. That’s nice. All right, well, Amanda, thank you so much for going through the logic of luxury with me. I really appreciate it. I still can’t afford and won’t buy a Birkin bag, but maybe someday. You never know.

Mull: You never know. If I won the lottery, I’d probably buy one, because they are really nice bags and you’ve got to carry something. But for now, I will stick to my $55 canvas tote.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Yvonne Rolzhausen, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.