Matt Gaetz

Just mentioning it.

I don't know that that's productive, but I think that it would not be difficult to look at the...

college of senators who have been otherwise problematic for some of Trump's appointees, and that's where I had problems.

Yeah, I didn't think that me doing some multi-week, multi-month fight to try to grind down the last of Mitch McConnell was somehow going to help the administration in the end.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I oftentimes couldn't get a meeting with people like Senator Murkowski and Senator Collins.

They were not interested in even having a discussion with me.

So it would have been hard to execute a trade.

Well, and I think also there's something unsettling about my unpredictability.

People who read the script are easy to predict and manage.

Not at the top.

Trump's pretty strong.

Weakness and risk aversion.

And risk aversion is fundamentally anti-American.

We are a nation of risk takers at our best moments.

That's who we are.

But in government, it's often, you know, how do I avoid any attention or ire?

I do think that the riskiest thing we've seen is what Obama got everybody together to do on December 9th of 2016 when he ordered the Russia hoax.

I think that is really the original sin of a lot of this that has happened.