Matt Gaetz: The King of the Trump Hotel, the Bawdy Headquarters for Barely Legal, Booze-Fueled Sexscapades During the President’s First Term

Part II: After emerging as a rising star in MAGA World, Gaetz made the Trump Hotel the main base of operations in Washington for his nighttime exploits. His secrets were safe at the president's proper

Gaetz with two other members of the MAGA aristocracy, Ivanka Trump and Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA. The photo was taken at an event held at the Trump Hotel to promote Kirk’s book, “The MAGA Doctrine.” Photo posted on social media/Public domain.

Part I of this story was published on February 18. This is the second and final installment.

The Trump International Hotel didn’t survive for long after Donald Trump’s first term as president ended in 2020, but during his initial four-year stretch at the White House it was the premier nighttime gathering spot for administration officials and GOP congressional leaders. During his first two years in office, at least 28 of the 37 cabinet members Trump appointed up until then had been to the premises, as had 35 of 65 Republican senators who held office during that period, according to a tally by Zach Everson, creator of 1100 Pennsylvania, which was essential reading for anyone tracking affairs at the property.

The routine presence of so many influential figures made the hotel an irresistible magnet of after-hours socializing for everyone looking to curry favor with the Trump administration, from GOP megadonors to corporate lobbyists. It also attracted flocks of the MAGA faithful from the local area and around the country, in particular devout Orthodox worshippers who made the pilgrimage to the property, which was considered to be the cult’s holiest shrine in Washington and second most sacred site anywhere after Mar-a-Lago. The “archetypal” post to social media from the hotel featured a “young white person sitting in the lobby...with a glass of champagne” with a caption saying something along the lines of “just having a little me time” or “thinking about how we can make America great again,” Everson told Washingtonian.

The Trump Hotel inevitably became the No. 1 pickup spot in the capital for Republicans seeking Republicans for long term romance or, more typically, a fast romp in the hay. A defense contractor who stayed at the property during a business trip to Washington at the midpoint of the president’s first year in office, was shocked by the carefree carousing. With families and kids strolling through the property, and customers hanging around who might well be liberal reporters or Democratic Party spies, it was only a matter of time before the situation created serious PR problems for the president, he feared. 

Ranking high among his specific concerns was Corey Lewandowski, who was fired from his job as Trump’s 2016 campaign manager five months before the presidential election following a series of embarrassing public screwups, including manhandling Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields at a press conference. Lewandowski, who also had an extramarital affair with campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks before being shitcanned, “was always running his mouth off and after a few drinks you could see the pin starting to fall out of the grenade,” the contractor told me.

He shared his fears with White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, telling him the situation was “big trouble and he needed to nip it in the bud.” Bannon didn’t do anything to address the problem or didn’t get far in the unlikely event he tried, as the dumbfuckery continued unabated. In Lewandowki’s specific case, he slapped the buttocks of singer Joy Villa at a year-end holiday party in 2017, leading her to file a sexual assault complaint against him. 

In mid-2018, then-Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, became a nighttime fixture at the property. With the presence of Gaetz – who was forced to withdraw as Trump’s first nominee as attorney general in his current administration in the face of growing evidence of his chronic, abysmal past sexcapades – the seedy side of social life at the hotel reached new lows, based on the accounts of six GOP sources who were regulars at the venue during its heyday.

The sources collectively named eleven other conservative political and media celebrities they’d directly observed at the hotel conducting themselves in ways that would almost certainly have caused a scandal had word hit the press. Notwithstanding the contractor’s worries about imminent PR blowback for Trump, the media never covered the raunchy evening scene at the president’s hotel, so everything I was told – which was obviously a tiny slice of the full panorama of sketchy activities that occurred on the premises – stayed hush hush.  

The sources’ stories and other information I learned while researching this story reveals as much about Washington’s rancid political culture than it does about Gaetz himself. 

(Gatez didn’t reply to a request for comment sent via email.)

President Trump (third from right) at his hotel in early 2020 with a group that included White House Chief of Staff Mark Medows (to his right), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy(to his left), and Congressman Jim Jordan, who like Gates was a leader of the House Freedom Caucus, the far-right group that worked closely with the administration. Photo posted on Instagram by McCarthy/Public domain.

Social intercourse at the Trump Hotel revolved around the Benjamin Bar & Lounge in the spacious marbled lobby, which had the feel of a big, comfortable living room. Couches and tables were scattered around the lobby, where customers assembled after ordering cocktails at the bar.

On a typical night, the women socializing at the hotel were, on average, a lot younger than the men. A sizable contingent were recent college graduates who’d come to town to work for the Trump administration, a GOP member of congress, or a conservative nonprofit organization. A smaller subset had just finished high school – maybe. 

A GOP insider who was at the hotel one night with a group of people asked the young woman sitting next to him if she wanted a drink as he was heading to the bar. “I didn’t know her so I asked how old she was,” he said. “She was 17 or 18, I don’t remember for sure, but not nearly old enough to drink so I bought her a soda instead of the gin and tonic she asked for.” 

The men drinking in the lobby tended to be a mix of “awkward nerds and guys trying to look important” and well known political figures with a lot of disposable income, one source said in characterizing the usual crew on the other side of the gender equation. Needless to say, members of the latter half were far more likely to behave badly, with the worst of the lot, easily exceeding government officials and members of congress, being big donors, in this person’s opinion. “A lot of them were married and the main reason they were at the hotel was to look for someone to go home with for a few hours or overnight if they had a good alibi,” he said.

A long list of high profile Trump Hotel frequenters had well known track records of egregious personal conduct, with Exhibit A in that regard being the property’s namesake owner. Fox News star Eric Bolling, who was given the boot by the network in 2017 for reportedly sending “unsolicited photos of male genitalia” to female colleagues, was in that category as well.

So, too, was North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn, who became a customer after he took office in 2021, at which point overall business at the hotel had fallen off a cliff following Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the prior year’s presidential election. In February of that year, the month after Cawthorn was sworn in, BuzzFeed ran a story that quoted four women who alleged he sexually assaulted or harassed them during his college days. In May of 2022, the month the Trump Organization sold the management and naming rights to the hotel, the Daily Mail revealed that Cawthorn had costarred in a sex video with a male staffer on his House payroll who he’d showered with gifts, which played a major role in his failed reelection bid six months later. 

Gaetz was pals with Bolling and Cawthorn – and Trump as well, though that’s less relevant in this context – though the sources I spoke with didn’t see him fraternizing at the hotel with either of them other than in passing. But just as in high school, where jocks, dweebs, druggies and other societal malcontents find their way to each other, birds of a feather flocked together at the hotel as well, and Gaetz’s social circles included an assortment of Grade A dipshits in the department of sexual misconduct. 

To name just two, I’ll start with Lewandowski, who Gaetz was known to hold court with in the lobby from time to time. In 2019, Lewandowski commenced an extramarital affair with South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, now Trump’s head of the Department of Homeland Security. Two years later, he got hammered at a Las Vegas fundraiser for an organization that fights substance abuse and crudely propositioned one of his tablemates, which was triply unfortunate. 

First, Noem was a keynote speaker at the event; second, the woman he hit on, in an unusual courting ritual that included boasting that his penis was four inches longer than normal, was the wife of a major Trump donor; third, Lewandowski had a lavishly-paid consulting gig at the time with a Trump Super PAC. Noem kept him around after the woman filed a police report, but the Super PAC fired him.

Rudy Giuliani in Sacha Baron Cohen’s second movie chronicling Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev’s adventures in America, which was filmed during the 2020 election. In this much discussed scene, Giuliani lies flopped on his back on a hotel bed with a hand down his pants following an interview with Tutar, who was supposedly Borat’s daughter. Giuliani, who assumed the position after asking Tutar for her phone number, said he didn’t do anything inappropriate. Screenshot from movie trailer/Public domain.

The second dipshit I’ll mention here is Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, who Gaetz periodically fraternized with at the hotel. Giuliani’s first marriage was annulled after he learned he’d wed his second cousin, his second wife found out he was divorcing her when he announced it at a press conference, and his third matrimonial partner filed for divorce a few days after she discovered he was cheating on her in June of 2018. 

The following January, Noelle Dumphy, who Giuliani hired to assist him on private business matters, sued him for alleged sexual harassment and assault. Dumphy submitted transcripts of audio conversations in court that found Giuliani telling her "I want to own you, officially;" “These breasts belong to me;” "I'm gonna make it a little painful;" and “Matt Damon is a fag...Coochie-coochie-coochie-coo."

Among those Gaetz was most frequently seen with at the hotel – was Vish Burra, a former producer of Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, who Gaetz hired in May of 2021 to run damage control after it was reported he was under federal investigation for sex crimes, and Sergio Gor, a top staffer for Senator Rand Paul who resigned in 2020 to take the job of chief of staff with the Trump Victory Finance Committee. An intimate and business partner of Don Jr., Gor currently is the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office.

Raheem Kassam, a one-time adviser to right-wing British leader Nigel Farage and co-host of “War Room: Pandemic,” met White House digital strategist Noelle Garnier at the hotel and she said yes when he proposed to her at the White House in December of 2020, though they never tied the knot or their union didn’t last long if they did as she wed the son of Michigan Congressman Bill Huizenga three years later. Garnier is a lot younger than Kassam – she was in her mid-20s when they met, about half his age – but not so young that they needed to hide their relationship nor did they try to; Politico made a short, friendly mention of their engagement with a photo of Kassam on bended knee before her, and it’s still easy to find pictures of them together on social media. 

As was true of many of his dalliances in Florida, Gaetz had to be much more discreet about some of the intimate partnerships he struck up at President Trump’s property.

Gaetz’s official congressional portrait for 2019. Public domain.

On the advice of counsel, I’m not going to name or even hint at the identity of the twelve miscreants ID-ed by my sources, with the obvious exception of Gaetz – and to be clear, Gaetz is the only one of the Dirty Dozen who is mentioned anywhere in this story. No one else who’s named herein made the list, including Lewandowski, whose sins reported to me by the contractor were relatively minor and pales in comparison to the Las Vegas debacle and other previously reported cases of his misconduct over the years. 

Furthermore, I didn’t hear a word about Burra or Gor behaving badly with women at the hotel, or for that matter anything about their interactions with women at all, other than a favorable remark about Gor being involved in a long term relationship. The primary topic that came up in regard to Kassam was his relationship with Garnier, as noted above. 

(Burra declined to comment for this story. Kassam initially agreed to in a text message exchange, but failed to respond to subsequent requests. Gor did not respond to requests for comment sent via email in November, when I began working on the story, and one today to his Twitter page.)

Congressman Gaetz, on the other hand, was spotted chatting and drinking with a revolving cast of female companions, not infrequently young women he had met at the hotel on the very night in question. Two sources reported seeing him buy another round for his table or couch mate as soon as her cocktail glass ran dry. The congressman, incidentally, billed about $7,200 worth of his historic charges at the hotel to his political treasury, mostly for wining and dining, according to his campaign finance disclosure reports to the Federal Election Commission.

Gaetz was one of few members of congress who stayed at the hotel drinking until the late hours, and one of fewer still who was known to depart with a group of civilians after closing time in search of more fun. A favorite destination was the bar at the nearby Hotel Harrington, a cheap oasis in downtown Washington that became the Proud Boys’ favorite haunt during the final months of Trump’s first term as he tried to remain in the White House by hook or crook.

Sometimes, rather than tag along with the last crew of hotel revelers, Gaetz left with a female companion he hooked up with during the night’s festivities, typically one of the young recent arrivals to town. He wasn’t the only prominent figure in the political world who honed in on that sector of the hotel’s customer base – hitting on age-inappropriate women was by far the No. 1 type of sleazy behavior my sources cited when flagging members of the Dirty Dozen – but he did it more routinely and often looked to pick up one of the youngest available females on hand. 

Of course, for Gaetz, lining up barely legal sex partners was all in a day’s work and in at least one widely reported case, which eventually terminated his congressional career, the partner wasn’t quite legal. In 2017, his freshman year in congress, Gaetz attended a party in Florida where “call girls roamed the premises” and refreshments included alcohol, weed, cocaine, and ecstasy, and paid the 17-year-old girl – a year below the age of consent in his home state – he was with to have sex, twice, “at least once in the presence of other party attendees.” Being a gentleman, Gaetz reportedly picked up the teen’s drug tab, too.

So, every so often, Gaetz left the hotel arm in arm with a girl – and a few times with two – freshly out of high school, as was noted in Part I. The age of consent in Washington is 16 and none were younger than that, but a few were just above legal age in Florida, though that wasn’t always easy to know based on appearances alone. 

One of the sources saw Gaetz leave the hotel with two girls who he believed were 18 at best. He was right; after learning their names and determining their ages, it appears that the two, who are both deeply immersed in the MAGA-sphere politically and ideologically – had very recently turned 18 when the source first saw them at the hotel with Gaetz. “It was ludicrous,” he said. “He was a sitting member of congress buying drinks for girls who were too young to drink legally and going home to have sex with them when they were barely over the age of consent.”

None of this negatively affected Gaetz’s standing at the hotel. He spent most of January 2020 bunkered down at the hotel with Trump, his family, close friends and most fervent political supporters during the Senate debate on two articles of impeachment against Trump the House had approved a month earlier. On the night of January 29, Gaetz and Lewandowski grabbed “at a high-profile table right by the bar, shaking hands and posing for at least a dozen photos,” Everson, who’s now a reporter with Forbes, reported at 1100 Pennsylvania. “At one point, Gaetz left the table and worked the lobby, stopping at several other tables for more handshakes and photo ops.” A week later, Gaetz was at the hotel to celebrate Trump’s acquittal in the Senate with the president, members of his family, and administration officials.

Gaetz continued to be an honored guest during the remainder of 2020, Trump’s last year at the White House during his first term. In late August, he was one of a limited number of guests allowed into the hotel when the Republican National Convention was held there. Gaetz was also a VIP speaker at the convention along with other trusted members of Trump’s inner circle.  

Nor did Gaetz fall from grace at the property or in polite Republican society after it was reported that he was under federal investigation for sex crimes in April of 2021, three months after Trump’s reluctant departure from the White House. That August,  Gaetz married Ginger Luckey, who he’d met the year before at Mar-a-Lago, in a small ceremony on an island off the coast of California that was attended by Gor, who presided as the officiant and DJ, and Kassam.

Image from House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz. Public domain.

Most of the MAGA faithful stopped visiting the property soon after Biden’s inauguration, but Gaetz continued to trek to the hotel until the bitter end. In late March, he billed his campaign treasury  $418 for his final supper at the property; about six weeks later, The Trump Organization sold the management and naming rights to the hotel, which has operated under the Waldorf Astoria brand ever since.

Had Gaetz’s exploits become known outside of the friendly confines of the hotel and congress, it would have been just as fatal to his political career as his night at the 2017 party in Florida proved to be, even if the young women at the Trump Hotel were a tiny bit older and just north of the age of consent. Given the risk, it’s incredible how reckless Gaetz was in the capital and his home state. 

For example, he and his former best friend and partner in sex crimes Joel Greenberg didn’t make their Venmo transactions private so – as the Daily Beast reported days after it became known Gaetz was the target of a federal probe in 2021 –  suspicious payments to a woman who later dated the congressman for a $1,000 “salad” and $500 “ice cream” were  publicly available for all to see. “What’s the opposite of a criminal mastermind?” Jimmy Kimmel said mockingly of Gaetz.

However, a more interesting question than how Gaetz could be so careless in leaving evidence strewn around – short answer: like any man with a hobby, whether stamp collecting or sex with minors, Gaetz couldn’t shut up about his pet interest, even when he was addressing a group of Christian conservative leaders and told jokes "laced with sexual innuendo" – is why he didn’t get busted earlier despite being such an idiot. 

The main reason no one at the hotel called out Gaetz was the precise same reason he felt so at home there: given the owner, and the property’s client base of so many men like him the atmosphere was propitious to men behaving badly without having to worry that someone was looking askance. And so what if they were? What were they going to do, write a stern letter of complaint to President Trump demanding he shut down the fun and games?  

Gaetz felt compelled to portray himself as a moral titan when he made his initial run for Congress in 2016, saying in an interview during the closing days of the campaign, “The Bible, the gospel – these are our instructions from God. We are to follow faithfully.” But Gaetz didn’t give a rat’s ass about the bible, that was rhetorical garbage for the rubes in the Florida Panhandle whose votes he needed to win a seat in Congress. 

Four years later, he didn’t bother maintaining the pretense. Trump “doesn’t care for puritanical grandstanding or moralistic preening,” he wrote in his 2020 book, Firebrand. “If politicians’ family lives aren’t what really matter to the voters, maybe that’s a good thing. I’m a representative, not a monk.”

His secrets were equally safe in Congress, partly for the same reason. Virtually no one in either party seriously intended to follow through on their campaign promises to “Drain the Swamp,” crack down on special interest groups, or be good boys and girls, so there were also few members of the House or Senate who were likely to criticize their congressional colleagues for failing to live up to their rhetoric either unless forced to when public anger boiled over every once in a while. Better to keep a low profile than make enemies and risk becoming a target down the road.

But there was another related but separate issue that kept lips sealed about Gaetz in Congress, which is that political leaders are just as reluctant to cross the thin blue line and rat out their own as cops are. Former Congressman and current Senator Markwayne Mullin told CNN that in 2017, when he and Gaetz were both were going through freshmen orientation for House members, his Florida colleague bragged about snorting Viagra so he could "go all night," and showed other lawmakers photos of naked women he claimed he’d had sex with. 

But he didn’t reveal that until October of 2023, almost seven years later, after Gaetz succeeded in ousting Mulin’s close ally Congressman Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, and no one else did either. From that point going forward, Mullin, other supporters of the former speaker, and McCarthy, who resigned from Congress later that year, waged war on Gaetz by stoking the flames about his alleged sexual improprieties – even though McCarthy has long been dogged by rumors of extramarital affairs and he and one of his advisors both frequented the Trump Hotel, where the latter was said to prowl the premises for female companionship – and helped bring about his political downfall late last year. 

Gaetz’s GOP colleagues obviously knew more about his after hours exploits than Democrats, but it’s inconceivable that no one in the opposition party had any idea what he was up to. In fairness, Democrats aren’t any better than Republicans about policing their own ranks, which is why votes in the House Ethics Committee, which largely operates in secret, almost always split 5 to 5 on partisan lines and investigations rarely lead to punishment no matter how strong the evidence.

The Ethics Committee finally voted to release its report on Gaetz after two Republicans defected following a 5 to 5 split about two weeks earlier that kept it secret. The second vote that approved making the finding public – which was forced on the committee after lawyers who represented Gaetz’s alleged victims before the panel threatened to disclose their clients’ testimony and other suppressed information – came on December 5, after Gaetz had already withdrawn as Trump’s attorney general nominee when it became clear the Senate wouldn’t confirm him.

Otherwise, the Ethics Committee would simply have sat on the report, which concluded that between 2027 and 2020, Gaetz “made tens of thousands of dollars in payments to women that… were likely in connection with sexual activity and/or drug use, including the 17-year-old girl at the 2017 party in Florida. “The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report stated.

Meanwhile, following his failed nomination as attorney general, Gaetz has rebounded from rock bottom – though almost imperceptibly, so it may be more accurate to say he’s made a lateral move from rock bottom – to hosting his own show on One America News and becoming the nation’s most famous  ivermectin salesman. But Gaetz still has a lot of powerful friends in the Trump administration, including the president himself. 

Hence, like his buddy and fellow fuckup Lewandowski, who’s been repeatedly exiled from Trump’s inner circle but always manages to find his way back, most recently as a “special government employee” at the Department of Homeland Security working for Noem, who was still his paramour as of last year according to a soon-to-be-released book by Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt, Gaetz may not be permanently finished in national politics.

There’s been talk recently that The Trump Organization is seeking to regain the rights to operate the president’s former Washington hotel, and reports as well that Elon Musk is planning to buy The Line Hotel in Adams Morgan and turn it into a private club.