How Matt Gaetz bypassed Fox to pull off the first speaker coup in history

The Scene

The revolution was televised — and streamed on Spaces, the live chat portal on X, which Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz kept joining to talk about ending Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.

“What do people think is going on right now?” Gaetz asked on a Tuesday night forum co-hosted by Elon Musk (Parody), with more than a million followers, and Not Jerome Powell, with nearly 380,000. “Because I’ve seen some criticism; I’ve seen some people celebrate. I don’t know that either of those are necessarily warranted.”

“This is basically a clear-cut example of accountability,” said Shawn Farash (147,000 followers), a Nashville-based commentator who’d once shown his Donald Trump impression to Trump himself. A reporter named Nick Sorter (275,000 followers) asked if McCarthy had been “too weak” to keep the governing deal he’d made with Gaetz and other rebels in January.

“I don’t think he felt like he had to,” said Gaetz. “I think that once he entered the speaker’s office, the experience in January was insufficient to really change his thinking about the imperial speakership — the speakership that he had dreamt about, and thought about, and legitimately worked very hard for, for 13 years.”

In traditional media, and the longest-lived conservative media, the first-ever removal of a House Speaker by his own party has been covered as a debacle. Fox News hosts have scornfully cross-examined the eight Republicans who sunk McCarthy; “Do you feel good about your vote?” anchor Brian Kilmeade asked Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett.

But the vote that empowered Gaetz empowered the new conservative media, too, becoming the latest in a decade-long run of stories about Republican leaders underestimating their insurgents. On One America News, Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs condemned the “uniparty” of Democrats and Republicans who’d funded the government without deep cuts; on Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” Biggs and other conservatives who’d deposed McCarthy were saving the country from weak, unserious party leaders.

“I’m hearing from my sources that Kevin McCarthy, and that team around him, personally held back oversight,” Bannon told Gaetz and South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace on Wednesday, during a joint visit to his studio on Wednesday. “This is the reason we don’t have subpoenas.”

By Friday morning, reports had emerged that Fox News would host the major speaker candidates for a debate. The reaction was instantly negative from House Republicans, who were exhausted by the role the media was playing in their internal arguments. Candidates began dropping out, leading the network to cancel its event.

But when it comes to McCarthy’s removal — and the fate of his replacement — Fox News may be the least of their problems.

David’s view

Conservative media is always skeptical of dealmaking with Democrats, to varying degrees. But the schism within conservative media over McCarthy also showed how even the fundamentals of running a party operation could be turned against its leaders.

In the mainstream and older conservative media, McCarthy’s prolific fundraising — he raked in more than $260 million to help Republicans win the House in 2022, including some of the members who ousted him — was one of his chief strengths. Among the newer MAGA personalities, it was a source of deep suspicion and resentment.

The latter ecosystem has grown in influence and audience since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which he renamed X; Laura Loomer, an activist banned from the site for much of the Trump presidency, was reinstated last year, and kept her nearly 600,000 followers informed of the donations McCarthy was routing to Republicans like Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, implying that he was buying off support to keep his job.

“It doesn’t take a seasoned political strategist to see that Kevin McCarthy is a liar,” Loomer told Semafor. “You have all these different podcasts, you have all these different independent publications, interviewing members of Congress and bypassing the mainstream media.”

Gaetz encouraged this perception that his opponents were bought off, telling booing Republicans on the House floor to “keep showing up at the lobbyist fundraisers and see how that goes for you.” He later tweeted that he’d negotiate away his demand to let any member call a snap no-confidence vote on the speaker if they adopted a plan by California Congressman Ro Khanna to restrict money in politics and block stock trading by members. That Khanna is a progressive Democrat didn’t matter — Gaetz’s followers were primed to recognize the establishment “uniparty” was the problem here, not partisan labels.

After Gaetz’s gambit against McCarthy succeeded, his many enemies inside the GOP conference went to mainstream media outlets to denounce him. Gaetz isn’t allergic to that; Republicans have vented all week about outlets giving him so much time when they should be skeptical of what he’s saying. “You all know Matt Gaetz,” McCarthy said, sourly, at the press conference where he confirmed that he wouldn’t try to get the gavel back.

But Gaetz and the rest of the GOP’s rebels kept up a direct line of communication with conservative activists and influencers, who could not be mollified by McCarthy. Not by the impeachment inquiry, which Gaetz and Bannon agreed was set up to fail; not by the threat of retaliation, which they relished, after a 2022 cycle when Republicans who’d defied Trump and voted to impeach him were nearly wiped out. (The two Republicans who voted for impeachment and remain in the House come from states with all-party primaries, not states where only GOP primary voters decide who’s nominated.)

“Rep. Gaetz has always been more in tune with younger audiences, and good with social media, and he often hops on X Spaces with the public,” said Alex Lorusso, who posts across different social media networks as ALX — and was restored to Twitter/X last year after a lengthy ban. “I would describe most of the online action as encouraging him to file the motion to vacate, rather than him having to build support… Republicans will be doing next week what I believe they should have done from the beginning.”

Room for Disagreement

Stu Stevens, an anti-Trump GOP strategist who’ll publish “The Conspiracy to End America” next week, said that “the media has followed the party” as it’s moved in Trump’s direction. The medium, old or new, mattered less than the political actors, and the voters who nominated them.

“Fox didn’t want John McCain to win the primary. They didn’t want Mitt Romney to win. They didn’t want Trump to win,” Stevens said. “If Jeb Bush had won the primary in 2016, Fox News would have been behind him 100%. You saw this very starkly when we got the emails and text from inside Fox News in the Dominion lawsuit — they were worried that they were losing market share to Newsmax.”

Notable

• In the New York Times, Annie Karni spends some quality time with Steve Bannon, who’s “capitalizing on the spectacle to build his own following and using his popular podcast to prop up and egg on the G.O.P. rebels.”

• In the Washington Post, Paul Kane looks back at the compromises that cost McCarthy his job: “He regularly forced swing-district Republicans, including 18 of whom hail from districts that favored Biden in 2000, to vote for legislation that had no chance of becoming law and, in some cases, still did not mollify the far right and lost on the House floor.”