The Republican hoping his 'Trump speed' podcast will inspire the next generation of conservatives

Several members of Congress have launched podcasts that flopped, but Matt Gaetz is doing something different with his new show

Congressman Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is one of several lawmakers on Capitol Hill to launch a podcast in the last few years. (Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)

Congressman Matt Gaetz knows his new podcast series, “Hot Takes with Matt Gaetz,” is a self-laid political minefield, a chronological catalogue of his unfiltered gut reactions to everyone and everything making headlines in Washington.

“An opposition researcher’s dream,” the Florida Republican’s chief of staff, Jillian Lane Wyant, tells him of the programme.

Mr Gaetz is pulling no punches.

Take his recent comments during a podcast earlier this month on the legal muzzle aimed at North Carolina Senator Richard Burr, a member of his own party who’s battling allegations of insider trading for selling off more than $1m in individual stocks in February shortly after receiving a sensitive, non-public intelligence briefing about the coronavirus pandemic weeks before the health crisis ravaged world markets.

“Senator Richard Burr is quintessential Washington. He’s been there for a long time, kind of played by Washington’s rules,” Mr Gaetz said on the pod during a nearly five-minute broadside against key GOP colleagues in the Senate.

“How in the world has [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the US Senate not removed Richard Burr as the Intelligence Committee chairman?” Mr Gaetz said.

(Mr McConnell accepted Mr Burr’s resignation the day after Mr Gaetz’ podcast first aired.)

Yes, Mr Gaetz, 38, knows intraparty iconoclasm isn’t usually the most popular method for propelling oneself forward in Washington.

He just doesn’t seem to care. And he doesn’t care if his gut reactions turn out to be premature or wrong, either.

“If all of us recorded our daily reactions to every event around us, you know, we might one day come to see things differently. But I think that's okay,” the congressman said in a recent interview with The Independent.

“The show’s not called ‘Lukewarm Takes,’” Mr Gaetz said.

Mr Gaetz is hardly the first active politician to launch a podcast.

But if he succeeds in cultivating a regular following that’s worth the hour or so he spends each day on production, he might be one of the first ones to do so successfully.

The medium has been particularly popular in recent years among plucky House conservatives.

Since August 2018, House Intelligence ranking member Devin Nunes has sat down for his eponymous weekly podcast with an assortment of fellow Republicans to dish on everything from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation to California’s precarious water supply.

Georgia GOP Congressman Jody Hice, a former local AM radio host, interviews other members of the hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus (HFC) for the group’s namesake podcast each week.

Texas Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw — who famously feuded, and later made up, with Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson — has the top congressional podcast in the US, according to data from Chartable.

The Democratic congressional podcast space is decidedly less crowded.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina has hosted three episodes of “Clyburn Chronicles,” all roughly 35- to 50-minute sit-down interviews with black educators and civil rights activists.

Several members have abandoned idols of podcast fame, an apparent acknowledgement that there’s more to podcasting than blowing hot air into a mic for 30 minutes. Producing a high-quality podcast series requires two of the most in-demand commodities on Capitol Hill: time and consistency.

Among the congressional podcast headstones: HFC Chairman Andy Biggs’ “What’s the BIGGS Idea” podcast; New Democrat Coalition Chairman Derek Kilmer’s “Quick Questions About Congress”; and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s “Canarycast.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders garnered more than 2,000 reviews on his programme — an impressive haul compared to most politicians’ series — before deserting the project in 2018.

Virtually all of these podcasts fall into one of two structural buckets: In the first bucket are shows where the hosting politician brings in a guest — oftentimes another politician — for a one-on-one biographical interview.

In the second bucket go shows that dive into a specific topic or policy issue — presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s recent interviews on his show with erstwhile Democratic primary candidates Andrew Yang, who dished about the economy, and Jay Inslee, who unloaded on climate change, being prime examples.

Mr Gaetz, however, is doing something entirely different.

Average Americans aren’t interested in listening to chummy politicians “giving each other a cat bath” or cutting up over “a series of inside jokes that nobody else understands,” he said, suggesting his colleagues often fall into such traps.

Mr Gaetz prefers to run solo, no guests, treating his show like a half-hour snippet of drive time radio and gearing its message towards “the next generation of conservative populists.”

He uses three news topics of the day as jumping-off points to share his (often explosive) opinions: from China’s role initially covering up the severity of the Covid-19 outbreak to his past criticisms of retired GOP House leaders such as former Speaker Paul Ryan and ex-Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (who now hosts a podcast of his own produced by Fox News).

And he’s posting a new episode every day, not weekly like most of his colleagues.

The news cycle operates at “Trump speed,” Mr Gaetz explained.

“We cannot just, like, hold content in our reservoir for a week. We have to push it out,” he said, adding that he hopes to make his show must-listen content for DC reporters by breaking news on it.

The show’s freewheeling framework and up-to-date approach appear to be working.

Mr Gaetz’s programme has hovered in the top 200 in the US on Apple Podcasts since its launch earlier this month, per Chartable — second only in downloads to Mr Crenshaw’s “Hold These Truths” among pods hosted by current members of Congress.