Matt Gaetz just handed us a huge gift
For more than a decade, dating back to the Tea Party era, the Republican Party has been elevating unhinged extremists in the hope of rallying far right voters to the polls. That led to mentally unstable criminal Donald Trump taking the reins of the party, which in turn elevated catastrophically whacked out lunatics like Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Madison Cawthorn, and Matt Gaetz.
This has proved to be a double edged sword for the Republican Party. Sure, Trump accidentally won in 2016. But his instability and self defeating behavior not only got him booted out after one term, it also cost the Republicans the House and Senate along the way. Even after Trump’s crushing seven million vote defeat, the Republican blueprint still relies on using Trump-like criminals and whack jobs as the faces of the party.
It’s taken long enough, but this is finally backfiring on the Republican Party in a meaningful way. Boebert and Greene are now putting on such idiotic performance art, it might as well be free advertising for the Democrats in the midterms. Cawthorn, who seems incapable of sticking to the party line, was finally rebuked for his attacks on Zelenskyy – which led Cawthorn to retaliate by accusing the Republican Party of being rife with hard drugs and orgies.
But it’s Matt Gaetz who has long threatened to do the most damage to his own party. After all, he’s under federal criminal investigation for alleged underage sex trafficking. And while some observers may be under the false presumption that the case against Gaetz has gone away, that’s not how things work. In reality the Department of Justice has cut formal deals with three cooperating witnesses against him, which means that once he’s indicted, he’ll very likely be convicted on some rather hideous charges.
That alone makes Matt Gaetz a walking talking midterm campaign ad for the Democratic Party. His entire life is a ticking timebomb, and he knows it, which is why his antics keep escalating. This week Gaetz melted down in nearly incoherent fashion during a House hearing, allowing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to fire back at Gaetz by saying “I’m sorry you are embarrassed by your country.”
It was the perfect soundbite if you’re trying to convince Americans in the middle that they need to make the effort to go out and vote Democrat in November, because the Republican Party is a rotten cesspool of evil. Gaetz is under federal criminal investigation for alleged child rape and he hates the military.
On top of that, House Republican leadership has done nothing about Gaetz, presumably because it’s too afraid of offending Donald Trump. That part is most crucial of all for winning over voters: the Republican Party leadership is refusing to pull the plug on an alleged child rapist who hates the military.
There’s a reason House Democrats haven’t yet removed Matt Gaetz from committees, in the way they’ve already done to Majorie Taylor Greene. Greene’s overtly violent rhetoric meant that the Democrats had to forcibly remove her from committees, over the objection of Republicans, for the sake of public safety. But the Democrats haven’t removed Gaetz from committees because every time he participates in another televised hearing, he ends up handing the Democrats another perfect soundbite for the midterms.
Matt Gaetz’s time will come. At this point it’s almost impossible to figure out this DOJ’s timeframe for bringing anything to completion. But one thing we’ve consistently seen out of the Garland DOJ is that it goes long stretches building criminal cases without a peep, leading outsiders to think it isn’t doing anything, only to turn around and arrest people like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders out of nowhere. Gaetz will be no different. He knows his time is coming. It’s why he’s unraveling in the way that he is. He’s harming his own Republican Party, and handing the Democrats a huge gift, in the process.
