In a MAGA vs. MAGA House Primary, Matt Gaetz Is Out for Revenge

On Oct. 19 last year, more than a couple of weeks into the House’s speakerless, post–Kevin McCarthy era, Republicans held a feisty meeting trying to chart a way forward. When McCarthy tried to address his fellow Republicans, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz—the instigator of McCarthy’s defenestration—interrupted him. McCarthy reportedly “screamed” at Gaetz to sit down. But Illinois Rep. Mike Bost was even angrier.

What exactly did Bost do in that meeting? Contemporaneous accounts are unclear. Axios had reported that Bost was “almost lunging” at Gaetz in a rage. Gaetz, after the incident, said that Bost “was pretty animated, but I don’t know if I would describe it as a ‘lunge.’ ”

What is a lunge? Who’s to say? What Bost was reported to have said to Gaetz, in his fury, though, was: “If you don’t sit down, I’ll put you down.” Bost wasn’t in a good place to begin with. He said he was so stressed during the speakership ordeal that it led to stomach pain and occasional vomiting.

Bost and Gaetz had a history. This wasn’t their first highly publicized spat during a speaker’s race; it wasn’t even the first of 2023. That January, Gaetz had led the group that sought to deny McCarthy the gavel. During that saga, Bost had risen on the House floor to shout down Gaetz after the Floridian had called McCarthy’s pursuit of the speakership an “exercise in vanity.”

Gaetz maintained a disinterested bearing toward Bost during both anti-McCarthy rebellions, as if the Illinois fifth-termer could scream at him all day long and Gaetz wouldn’t bat an eye.

But that attitude doesn’t square with Gaetz’s push to put Bost out of a job.

There has been a decent amount of coverage this primary season of McCarthy allies trying to take out members of the “Gaetz Eight,” who voted to depose McCarthy. But in the March 19 Illinois primary, it’s Gaetz who’s on the offensive, backing and campaigning for a challenger to Bost. Surprisingly, it’s one of only a few times that Gaetz has pushed to unseat a fellow Republican—and he’s on a bit of an island, even within MAGA World, in this venture. The McCarthy speaker wars may be over, but there are still accounts to be settled this primary season.

The primary challenge to Bost isn’t a soup-to-nuts Gaetz operation. Darren Bailey, the hard-right former Illinois gubernatorial candidate who’s running against Bost in Illinois’ 12^th district, covering the rural southern tip of the state, filed his candidacy around the Fourth of July in 2023. That was almost exactly a year after Bailey, then a candidate for governor, had said, “Let’s move on and let’s celebrate the independence of this nation,” following a mass shooting at an Illinois July Fourth parade. Democrats had spent millions to prop up Bailey in the GOP gubernatorial primary that year, seeing him as the easier opponent for Gov. J.B. Pritzker to defeat in November 2022. It worked.

The policy disputes between Bailey and Bost have been negligible. Conditions at the southern border are the top concern among Republican primary voters, so many points of attack have centered on that. But the opponents don’t really disagree on anything. As the Belleville News-Democrat, which had each candidate answer a questionnaire, put it, “Both identified border security as the most important issue facing the U.S. Both believe finishing former President Donald Trump’s border wall is part of the solution to fixing the nation’s immigration system. And both oppose the bipartisan immigration reform deal with new border laws that federal lawmakers proposed earlier this year.” Bailey’s main criticism of Bost is that the latter supported a 2018 House GOP immigration bill, supported by the Trump administration, that would have allowed certain DACA recipients to apply for renewable legal status in exchange for everything that Republicans wanted on immigration. OK?

Bost’s record generally doesn’t lend itself to the mushy establishment moderate vs. true conservative fighter archetype that Gaetz and Bailey are trying to create. Although Bost is a leader of the GOP’s Main Street Caucus, which emphasizes pragmatism, his record isn’t that of a maverick. He’s been with the team on every high-profile vote in recent years: for repealing Obamacare, for tax reform, against same-sex marriage protections, against the bipartisan infrastructure law, against the bipartisan gun safety law, against the 2023 debt ceiling deal, and against the CHIPS and Science Act.

It should be said, too, that Bost is far from mushy temperamentally. Screaming at Gaetz on the House floor was not the first time that he has been mad in public. Bost, as a state legislator, was notorious for his outbursts during legislative sessions. In the most infamous of them, during a debate over pensions, he threw a stack of legislation into the air and punched it on the way down, while screaming. He also once drove to his wife’s cousin’s house and shot their dog—a beagle named Rusty—to death after Rusty had bitten his daughter.

(A brief pause here, to digest the previous paragraph’s information.)

What ultimately matters about a House GOP incumbent’s ability to stave off a primary challenge from Gaetz and the conservative entertainment complex, though, is his record on Donald Trump. On this, Bost’s credentials are stellar. He voted against impeachment both times. He was among the 126 House Republicans who signed the Texas amicus brief asking SCOTUS to overturn the election results. And he voted to support objections to the counting of Pennsylvania’s and Arizona’s electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021.

Sure, Bailey had done his work too. He made a point of showing up to Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club the night that Trump was indicted in the classified documents case. He brought Don Jr. out for a fundraiser last fall. But Bost “used to send prayer cards from his constituents to the then-president,” CNN reported, “which Trump once brought up to Bost during a flight on Air Force One and thanked him for doing, according to a member who was on the plane.”

Trump endorsed Bost in February.

“While I like and respect Darren Bailey, and was proud to campaign for him in 2022,” Trump said in his endorsement, “Mike Bost was one of the first House committee chairmen to endorse my campaign, and Mike was a stalwart supporter of our America First agenda during my record-setting administration.”

It’s rare for Gaetz to land opposite Trump on, well, anything. But such is the apparent urgency of getting rid of Mike Bost.

Gaetz insists that his push for Bailey “isn’t personal,” just that Bost is “bought and paid for by the lobbyists and the special interests,” and that he’s “on a mission to change Congress, and I can’t do it with the people who are currently here.”

Sure. This is the same tune Gaetz sang when he was working to oust Kevin McCarthy, arguing that it had to do with procedural and budget minutiae like passing continuing resolutions instead of individual appropriations bills on time. (Speaker Mike Johnson has since passed several continuing resolutions, and he still has a job.) But, as has been reported, Gaetz also blamed McCarthy for reviving an ethics investigation into him and wanted retribution. If Gaetz is ever going out of his way to tank someone’s career and says that it isn’t personal, look closer.

It’s certainly personal for Bost.

“I never considered Matt a threat,” Bost told Politico in February. “I considered him an ass, but never a threat.”