After a couple years Boehner met with Roger Ailes, a longtime friend who was then head of Fox News. He pleaded with Ailes to keep flamethrowers like Bachmann off the air. Instead the TV executive told the speaker that the Obama administration was spying on him — the conspiracy theories were within Fox headquarters. Fox was afraid that other conservative personalities would eat into their ratings, so they ignored Boehner’s entreaties and steered deeper into that world, right through Trump’s own 2016 campaign, according to Boehner. “These shows went from real commentary pushing conservative ideas to just pissing people off and making money,” he writes, perhaps giving the shows more credit for seriousness in retrospect than they showed at the time. Gaetz fed off this as much as any lawmaker the past five years. He never held any clout other than drawing attention to himself and the occasional call from Trump thanking him for his forceful defenses of him. In the HBO documentary, Gaetz explains what he tells young Republicans looking for advice in how to advance their own brand: “I tell them at the outset, you make yourself a target when you live like I live. I mean, if you want to really get in the fight, there’s going to be some return fire.”