MANCHESTER, New Hamphire — Standing inside a makeshift office, a crowd of red hat-wearing MAGA acolytes in front of him and a massive mural of piercing-eyes Donald Trump on the wall behind, Matt Gaetz comfortably took questions from the crowd until an uncomfortable one came in.
“What’s the youngest school girl you’ve been with?” a heckler in disguise wanted to know.
Most people, when faced with that question, would grow flustered or even angry. But Matt Gaetz is not like most people.
The lawmaker, standing there in a black quarter zip fleece and jeans at Donald Trump’s Manchester, N.H. headquarters, waited for the boos to subside. Then, like an AI bot programmed for the general election, he ridiculed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for their age and gender.
"Think about being a part of a party where they haven't even tried to make an argument about winning your vote," Gaetz said, sidestepping any discussion of the ethics probe launched against him for alleged sex trafficking. "The Democratic Party today has basically put up as their candidate a nursing home escapee and the annoying lady from the HR department."
No beat was skipped. No eyebrow was raised. The talking points endured. The event continued on.
Trump has a small army of surrogates working on his behalf in New Hampshire this week. None seem to be enjoying the role as much as Gaetz.
The Florida Republican has appeared at meet-and-greets across the state. He has done numerous press hits, at one point on Sunday propping up a laptop on a box of 60 Bic pens to get the right angle for a shot for a Fox News segment. And he was right offstage at Trump’s rally on Saturday night — earning a shoutout from the ex-president and a notable “We love you Matt Gaetz!!” scream from a woman one football field length across the arena.
“I love that this is the fisticuffs of politics,” Gaetz told me from his car after leaving an event Sunday afternoon. “So much of what I do is behind the committee dias or the lectern on the floor. But what is special about this is you get eyeball to eyeball with people who tell you what is on their mind.”
At his events, attendees say they view Gaetz not so much as a surrogate for the campaign but as an heir to the Trump movement. He has begun, to a degree, to physically resemble a Trump, with slicked back hair in the style of Trump’s actual sons. But most people who have flocked to his events say it is his political approach that reminds them of the former president. It’s precisely because he gets heckled that they love him.
“It’s a little bit of crazy but the right kind of crazy,” said Bill Mitchell, 54, of Troy, New Hampshire. “He does what he said he was going to do. And Trump did what he said he was going to do.”
“I love him,” said Peter Salvitti, of Sonopeake, New Hampshire. “He’s got chutzpah!”
Few Republicans in Washington would agree. To them, Gaetz isn’t the right kind of crazy. He’s a chaos agent, whose political convictions revolve around, largely, the promotion of Matt Gaetz. His role in ousting Speaker Kevin McCarthy — a feat treated by Trump fans as akin to Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile — weakened the party and left them in a state of disorder from which they have not recovered. His alleged ethical transgressions aren’t signs that he has the right enemies; if true, they’re illustrations of serious moral lapses. They'd be more than fine if he just went away.
Gaetz himself knows he’s not liked. “They think I’m the crazy one and I think they’re the crazy one,” he told the crowd in Keene on Sunday.
But as Gaetz sees it, he’s closer to the id of the party than many of his fellow congressional Republicans. And if you were to be with him on the trail in New Hampshire, you’d be hard pressed to disagree. One woman who waited in a line to get a photo with the lawmaker put her 91-year-old father on the phone to talk with him. She was so elated, her hands were shaking. She struggled to hit the right button to hang up the line.
“The way he looks at you without blinking,” said the woman, Cherie Rowe, 61, “you know he is never going to back down. It’s like a hawkeye.”
Ginger Heald, of Merrimack, New Hampshire, showed up to Gaetz’s event earlier in the day at the campaign headquarters in Manchester. She had brought an autographed copy of Gaetz’s book Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution. She knew Gaetz from having once lived in his district in Florida but still wanted a picture.
“I always tease him, ‘You married the wrong Ginger,” said Heald, referencing Gaetz’s wife, Ginger Luckey.
Several attendees at the event said they could very easily see themselves voting for Gaetz if he were to run for president. He was, they argued, Trumpism personified; or, at least, attitudinally and temperamentally as close to the personification as someone not named Trump could be.
But could Gaetz see it too?
“If we succeed and get Trump elected there will be many people who rightfully will lay claim to their own role in the MAGA movement,” he told me.
Between that Manchester stop and the one later in the day in Keene, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he was suspending his presidential campaign. When Gaetz showed up at Tempesta's Restaurant to greet the waiting crowd, he seemed jubilant over the news. But beneath the surface, it wasn’t hard to detect some relief, too.
“I didn’t like when mom and dad were fighting,” he said.
Gaetz had helped get DeSantis elected governor. They were once allies. He had done debate prep with him. DeSantis was a fellow Florida man — albeit one who had not enjoyed his time in New Hampshire as much as Gaetz was now.
What, I asked Gaetz, had he and Trump understood that DeSantis didn’t.
“That they wanted to vote for Trump,” Gaetz replied.
That may be a simple observation. But it’s one Gaetz accurately made and many others didn’t. And for that, he is now benefiting, with a captive audience among the MAGA base and a powerful ally in the all-but-assured presidential nominee. He may be persona non grata among certain segments of the GOP leadership. But his brand of lightning-rod politics resonates with the people in the party deciding the elections, for better and worse.
Hours after being confronted by a heckler in Manchester, Gaetz found himself once more targeted in Keene. This time, a man wearing a MAGA hat and a backpack approached him for a photo before declaring that he had brought with him a "bag of underage girls.” He then pulled out a blow-up doll from his bag.
As the heckler was escorted out, blow-up doll in hand, Gaetz kept taking pictures as if nothing had ever happened.
