Matt Gaetz

Gaetz's Congressional portrait. Also that forehead.

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“”I realize that we are occasionally given to hyperbole about the untoward nature of politicians, but let me be clear: Matt Gaetz is a sex trafficking drug addicted piece of shit. He is abhorrent. His eyes are permanently rimmed with the red rings of chemical boosters. In person, he smells like overexposed Axe Body Spray and stale Astroglide. The fact that he boasted on the floor to multiple colleagues in the House of Representatives of his methods of crushing Viagra and high test Red Bull to maintain his erection through his orgiastic evenings is perhaps the least offensive of his many crimes against womanhood and Christian faith. The man has less principles than your average fentanyl addicted hobo. He likes them underage and he’s not ashamed about it. Matt Gaetz isn’t just your average extreme Florida MAGA Man, he’s a hypocritical ass with the worst Botox money can buy, pursuing an ever-thinner nose and higher cheekbones at every opportunity like a Real Housewife gone mad for fillers. Every Republican in Washington has an opinion about Matt Gaetz, and 99 percent of those opinions are "Keep Matt Gaetz away from my wife/daughter/friend and anyone I care about."

—Ben Domenech, Fox News commentator

Matt Gaetz (aka The Venmo Lester) (1982–) is a woke-obsessed, far-right, alleged sex-pest former congressman who served as a Republican Representative for Florida's 1^st district in the Florida panhandle from 2017 to 2024, and is close allies with MTG and Lauren Boebert in the Freedom Caucus. He was also one of the Congressmen most responsible for getting Kevin McCarthy removed from his position as Speaker of the House in 2023.

Matt & Donald

Gaetz is most known for his unapologetic love of Donald Trump, once being called a "proud Trump protege" by Politico. Gaetz is such a big Trump fan he attempted to get the President a Nobel Peace Prize in 2018.

Gaetz first gained national attention through defending Trump during the investigation by Robert Mueller. Of note was his attempt to get Mueller to recuse himself because of non-existent conflicts of interest in November 2017 and his claim that the only reason then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had failed to fire Mueller was because "he's become sympathetic with his captors over there in the Deep State."

When the investigation turned to impeachment, things only got worse for Gaetz. In October 2019, Gaetz put national security at risk through organizing a "storming" of a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility on Capitol Hill along with two dozen of his fellow Republican congressmen, with the goal of hearing a deposition going on in the Pentagon related to the impeachment inquiry. Gaetz would go on to compare this actions to the Spartans from the movie 300.

Gaetz's never ending support for Trump has even caused him to occasionally clash with members of his own party, such as when he was one of the main voices calling for the removal of Liz Cheney from her high profile role within the House Republican Party because she supported the second Trump impeachment, with Gaetz even going to her home state of Wyoming for no other reason than to rally against her.

Scandal at Venmo

The main story

Matt Gaetz was investigated by both the US Department of Justice for suspected "sex trafficking", and by the House Ethics Committee for "a range of allegations … including sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, and bribery."

The story originated through Gaetz having connections with Joel Greenberg, a tax collector who was later indicted for sex trafficking. Greenberg later pleaded guilty to sex trafficking, as did an associate to both Greenberg and Gaetz named Joseph Ellicott. Greenberg would later claim in a letter to then-President Donald Trump that both he and Gaetz had sex with a 17-year-old girl they both believed was 19 at the time.

Aftermath

When accused of his actions, Gaetz cried about how cancel culture was trying to go after him. Perhaps disturbingly enough, he attended a debut screening of the fantasy satire film Barbie with his wife Ginger, who later lambasted the film for what they perceive as a "lack of family values", never mind the fact that Gaetz himself lacked the same values they claim to promote and that the theatre he and his wife attended were jam-packed with the very same age group he lusts upon.

He also tried to tie this into some weird campaign against earmarks he was doing at the time, saying it was hypocritical for people to investigate him when those exist. This is in spite of the fact that he was one of the biggest earmarkers in Congress at the time. He specifically was attempting to get a one-hundred-forty million dollar Hanger for his district in hopes of making it easier to land helicopters, this in a place with a massive homelessness problem.

His terrible friends

One notable thing about Gaetz is how he has a bad habit of buddying around with the absolute worst of society. In 2018, Gaetz invited Charles C. Johnson, who is a far-right Holocaust Denier, to President Trump's State of the Union Address. The event has previously raised money for the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.

One year later, Gaetz would yet again see controversy through hiring Darren Beattie as a speechwriter, despite him previously being fired from his job in the Trump Administration for attempting a white nationalist political conference.

In 2020, Right Wing Watch wrote an article discussing how Gaetz would commonly use social media to amplify the voices of those on the far-right, saying:

Like the other individuals profiled above, Gaetz relies on social media to solicit support from online extremists. He frequently “likes,” retweets, and follows the accounts of such far-right organizations as the xenophobic Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and hard-right media outlets like PragerU, The Next Revolution, and Blaze TV, as well as the far-right Jack Posobiec. While Gaetz’s comments are not often overtly racist, many of his far-right followers online view him to be sympathetic to their causes.

Among Gaetz’s supporters is white supremacist leader Christopher Cantwell, who devoted an hours-long podcast episode to praising him. The white nationalist blog VDARE wrote an article commending Gaetz for his defense of white nationalists under criticism for their dangerous, racist rhetoric.

Stopped clock

See the main article on this topic: Stopped clock

Gaetz has proven himself to be surprisingly reasonable on the issue of cannabis, supporting its reclassification from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule III, introducing legislation to loosen federal restrictions on the ability of non-government actors to research it, and directly calling out the government for lying to people about the medical benefits of the plant.