Trey Gowdy, Global Impresario of Manufactured Outrage: How One Congressman Taught the World to Monetize Indignation
Trey Gowdy and the Exportable Art of the Congressional Spectacle
By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Foreign Correspondent Club, Geneva
If you’ve ever watched a developing nation stage its first televised parliamentary brawl—plastic chairs hurled like discus, neckties used as garrottes—you may have wondered how mature democracies manage to look civil while accomplishing even less. Enter Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina forensic stylist whose silver quiff and prosecutorial zingers once turned C-SPAN into must-see TV from Timbuktu to TikTok. To the rest of the planet, Gowdy is less a politician than a case study in how to monetize indignation without leaving fingerprints.
Europeans, who still cling to the delusion that committee hearings are for gathering evidence, watched agog as Gowdy chaired the Benghazi inquisition. Eight million taxpayer dollars, eleven hours of Hillary Clinton’s blink-rate monitored in HD, and precisely zero smoking guns—yet the clip packages translated beautifully into every language. Overnight, Italian talk shows imported the format: same indignant monologue, same empty swivel chair awaiting a witness who had already left the building. Ratings soared; governing did not.
In the Global South, where courts are often short of paper clips let alone subpoena power, Gowdy’s theatrical cross-examination became a master class in soft-power ventriloquism. Kenyan MPs now study his cadence the way they once studied the British mace. Brazilian investigators copied his trick of stacking 40,000 pages of “classified” appendices on the desk for the camera, creating a paper barricade so high it resembled a cubicle Versailles. Whether any of it advances justice is immaterial; the image travels faster than the substance, and the image pays.
Meanwhile, the Chinese state documentary unit—never one to miss a good meme—spliced Gowdy’s greatest hits into a segment on Western procedural decay, subtitled with helpful Confucian commentary: “When ritual outruns result, the tree forgets the forest.” Irony abounds: a Communist superpower using a free-market conservative to prove that too much democracy is bad for your arteries. Somewhere in an air-conditioned think tank, a junior fellow just earned a PhD for that very sentence.
Of course, Gowdy himself has performed the customary pirouette from inquisitor to pundit, proving that outrage has a sell-by date roughly equivalent to Greek yogurt. One day you’re demanding truth about dead ambassadors; the next you’re on Fox News explaining why the deep state hides your car keys. The international lesson is clear: in the attention economy, moral capital depreciates faster than the Turkish lira. Countries still banking on charismatic avengers should diversify into something sturdier—perhaps tulip futures.
Yet even as the Gowdy brand cools in the United States, it incubates abroad. Poland’s ruling party has reportedly hired American consultants (rate: two Zloty per indignant glare) to script their next parliamentary probe. The Philippines, never shy about borrowing foreign trademarks, is rumored to be auditioning look-alikes who can furrow a brow on cue. Somewhere in Manila, an actor named “Trey Gow-dy Santos” is practicing his drawl between telenovela shoots.
All of which raises the question: if the performance is the point, why bother with policy at all? The honest answer, whispered from Warsaw to Windhoek, is that policy is hard and optics are cheap. Gowdy showed the world how to manufacture gravitas in bulk, no factory required—just decent lighting and the pretense that someone, somewhere, will eventually read the footnotes. Spoiler: they won’t. The footnotes are compost for tomorrow’s outrage cycle.
So here we are, orbiting a planet where a congressman from Spartanburg exports more indignation than coffee beans, and where aspiring autocrats binge-watch his highlight reel like teenagers learning guitar riffs. If that strikes you as absurd, congratulations: you’ve grasped the product. The rest of us can only sit back, pop the corn, and marvel at the free market in moral panic. Curtain falls, credits roll, and somewhere the next Trey Gowdy is already oiling his vocal cords—ready to ask the eternal question that needs no answer: “Madame Secretary, where were you between the hours of 9:42 and forever?”
