The New Yorker:

By Dexter Filkins

When I met Matt Gaetz earlier this year after a Republican campaign event in Little Elm, Texas—where he’d just wowed a crowd at a beer hall, sharing his plans to save “a diminished country”—I asked him what kind of philosophy he was bringing to his work. He described it as “a populist-flavored libertarianism—or a libertarian-flavored populism.” And then Gaetz went on, describing his view of Congress, where he’d served since 2017. “It’s just so corrupt,” he said. “That’s my principal thesis. It’s just broken.”

To that end, at least, Gaetz, whom President-elect Donald Trump chose yesterday to be his Attorney General, has been consistent: in eight years as a congressman in Washington, Gaetz directed his energies to tearing down and mocking what he regards as the corrupt political order, sometimes by means so audacious that his colleagues in the House had never dared to try. Gaetz’s personal life has been similarly unrestrained; he was investigated by the Department of Justice over allegations that he had helped transport a seventeen-year-old girl across state lines, and was facing the results of an investigation into that and other matters by the House Ethics Committee.

Go to link