The modern-day GOP is, for lack of a better word, an absolute dumpster fire, but no one is scraping the bottom of the barrel quite as efficiently as Matt Gaetz.
The utter disgrace of a politician was facing legal issues long before he stepped into office, but within years of the 41-year-old becoming the U.S. Representative for Florida’s 1st District, far more damaging issues began to weigh him down. Those have haunted him for years, yet somehow — despite their inarguably serious nature — this man still has a position in politics.
In 2020, Gaetz was accused of not only sex trafficking — a horrifying offense — but also of having relationships with minors. That would be enough to disqualify most people from working at McDonalds, but in the United States of America, it’s not enough to disqualify Gaetz from his high position in our government. Gaetz largely treats the accusations against him as unworthy of discussion, but the rest of us aren’t letting him off the hook that easily ⏤ not even Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican Speaker of the House who was dramatically ousted from his position. Gaetz was a key player in McCarthy’s ousting, and the 59-year-old politician is clear in his opinions on why that removal came to happen.
McCarthy didn’t name names in his interview with campaign strategist Mo Elleithee, but he didn’t mince words over the culprit he pins the blame for his departure on, either. He noted, in response to the implication that “concessions” were behind the vote, that “it’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.”
It may be the first time an American politician has ever been so open and honest in an answer (this side of Hakeem Jeffries’ recent View appearance), and it led to immediate stirrings amongst the American public. People were shocked to hear McCarthy so openly address the issue and many saw his statement as confirmation that Gaetz is, in fact, a predator with pedophilic tendencies.
McCarthy did clarify, just a few sentences later, that he has no confirmation that Gaetz is actually guilty, but asserted his lack of regret over letting the ethics investigation continue as planned. Just his admission of a member of Congress who “slept with a 17-year-old” was more than enough confirmation in most people’s eyes, however, and it led to a resurgence of Gaetz criticism.
People are largely fixated on the whole “sleeping with minors and then trying to cover it up” thing, but as images of Gaetz make their way across the web, others are noting his strange similarity to one of cinema’s best actors. His eerie, soulless smile brings Jack Nicholson’s Joker to mind, and he matches that discomfiting smile with a predatory gleam in his eyes that only a proper psychopath could match.
While I hate to disagree with the internet, I can’t help but see a bit more Jack Torrance than Jack Oswald White in those manic eyes. He just seeps psycho killer energy, and with each new image, I can practically see his sanity deteriorating. We’ve got to be mere months away from the 41-year-old politician smashing his way through the House podium with a firemen’s axe.
Regardless of which unhinged Jack Nicholson character he most resembles, it seems that the bulk of the American public is wholly in agreement about Gaetz’s mental state (plus we’d rather focus on a different Joker anyway). He was by no means ever quite right in the head — look to his litany of past legal issues and ongoing investigations into sexual misconduct for evidence — but it seems that each new day sees the man unravel just a little bit more.