Matt Gaetz Is a Congressman Liberals Love to Loathe. It’s All Part of the Plan.

WASHINGTON — Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida came to Washington in 2017 with a reputation for bipartisan deal-cutting in the State Legislature — then spent a year idling behind the slow-moving minivans in the House Republican Conference like a Mustang stuck in traffic.

So he decided to go the full Trump. With a near-constant presence on the president’s favorite network and a penchant for own-the-libs outrageousness, Mr. Gaetz has, in short order, become the lawmaker Democrats love to loathe. It is all part of the plan.

“In a world where the body politic has the attention span at times of a goldfish, yep, you’ve got to have the ability to reinvent yourself in this game many times,” said Mr. Gaetz, who in his second term representing Florida’s western Panhandle has emerged as one of President Trump’s fiercest and most frequent defenders on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.

“I did one cable news hit during my first 10 months in Congress,” he said during an interview in his Capitol Hill office last week. “Yeah. And now it’s only a couple of years later and The New York Times is sitting in my office asking me about my life. The only thing that’s changed is a little bit of time and a whole hell of a lot of cable.”

Many Republicans in Congress stick close to Mr. Trump’s feed-the-base strategy, but few are more naturally inclined to adopt the president’s brass-knuckles brand of politics than Mr. Gaetz, 36, the ambitious son of a former Florida State Senate president, Don Gaetz.

“Matt feeds off disruption; it’s just this big adrenaline rush for him,” said Christian Ulvert, a Miami-based Democratic political consultant who met Mr. Gaetz at Florida State University in the early 2000s. “But it puts a ceiling on him, because it wears thin after a while, and it puts so many people off.”