Matt Gaetz is doing everything he can to finish himself off

| 7:00 pm EDT May 15, 2021
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Donald Trump lost the 2020 election – badly – and his life was shattered in the process. He lost his presidency. He lost his relevance. He lost his best remaining source of grifting. He lost his Twitter. And he lost his immunity from the criminal charges that are coming against him. But given how thoroughly the media is trying to convince us that he’s still waiting to jump out us from behind every corner, it’s easy to forget that he really did get destroyed.

So it might also be easy to forget that it was Donald Trump’s own failed tactics and stupid behavior that cost him everything. Every time Trump approached a serious crisis by pretending it didn’t exist, it cost him. Every minute Trump spent preening on Twitter instead of trying to figure out how to improve his non-viable approval rating, it cost him. It’s a big part of why he lost the election, and is now losing everything. But don’t tell that to Matt Gaetz, who appears to believe that Trump’s endgame strategy was a winning one.

Faced with a losing reelection bid, Trump stupidly went on a victory tour so he could feel the rush of adoration from people who were already going to vote for him. Faced with the dismantling of his entire life, Matt Gaetz has stupidly gone on a victory tour for the same reason. Faced with criminal scandals that were going to catch up to him sooner or later, Trump tried to tweet his way out of them. Faced with criminal indictment, Gaetz is also trying to tweet his way out of it.

Thus far today Matt Gaetz has tweeted deranged conspiracy theories about Dr. Fauci, attacked a CNN host, and bragged about how many people are supposedly coming to his rallies. Sound familiar? This is precisely the kind of stupid endgame behavior that finished Trump off. And now Gaetz is making the same mistake.