Matt Gaetz is a pustulent suppurating wound on the backside of American politics, an irritating boil lanced at long last.
Yesterday morning Matt Gaetz — for one surreal week the Trump administration’s nominee for attorney general — announced that he would withdraw his name from consideration for the position. (Former attorney general of Florida Pam Bondi was tapped later that same day to take his place.) To cap it off, today Gaetz also announced that he would not seek to fill the upcoming 2025–27 term to which he was just reelected, even though he might have been able to technically argue that he had resigned for only the remainder of the present term. It is the end of the Gaetz era in Congress.
Before I continue, I want to tell you something personal: I just finished a piece that may have taken a small chunk of my soul away with it. When my editor assigned me the duty of writing about Pete Hegseth’s recently unearthed controversy, I took it with the grim resignation of a Japanese pilot receiving kamikaze orders, resolved to at least go to my appointed end with dignity, maybe ironically mumbling “Banzai!” like a proper Gen X’er as I aimed my plane wide and to the right. What was already a very carefully written piece became six times more carefully rewritten in edits, because we are dealing with extremely delicate matters when it comes to the sexual assault allegations against Hegseth. I have been through the wringer, and I am tired.
It for these reasons that I want you to appreciate just how carefully lawyered the following statement is: Matt Gaetz is a pustulent suppurating wound on the backside of American politics, an irritating boil lanced at long last. His venality and nihilistically self-promoting destructiveness while in Congress were outstripped only by his personal vileness, and it was inconceivable that he ever could serve as attorney general of the United States. The Republican Party as well as Gaetz’s former Florida constituents are vastly better off for his permanent exit from Congress.
With his pasty, botoxed flesh stretched across his skull like an oleaginously skintight sack, Gaetz not only resembled but constantly behaved like the fratty younger brother of Jim Carrey’s Fire Marshall Bill. When he entered Congress, his sole goal (and legacy) was fire-starting chaos, all done with no sense of underlying principle, but rather an eye to spotlight-grabbing self-promotion. Some people want to “burn it all down” because they genuinely have principled objections to the deep and structurally rooted corruption of the federal government. Matt Gaetz wanted to “burn it all down” seemingly only because, like the Joker, “some people just want to watch the world burn.”
His (uh, allegedly, but just ask Senator Markwayne Mullin) wildly irresponsible, drug-sodden, and repulsively pornographic private life was but a dark mirror-image of his public nihilism. (Many would label his toppling of Kevin McCarthy as the most obvious evidence of this, but rather I suspect that event is best understood as Gaetz’s “panic button” reaction to the imminence of the release of the ethics report being prepared about his sexual misconduct.) With his smart-aleck ignorance and perpetually bullying and swaggering approach to every public appearance, it was transparent to anyone watching that he was covering for deep insecurities, perhaps the ones lurking inside his ethics report. I have no sympathy for those, because he transmuted his own patently visible sense of inadequacy into public ruin and private disgrace. I instead shall appropriate the words of Elvis Costello and wish him luck, with a capital “F.”
I end with this thought: I remember how Matt Gaetz looked when he first entered Congress, less than eight years ago. He was a different man back then, at least on the outside. It’s been alarming to see how much — in particular as a relatively young man — he has visibly changed. But it makes all the sense in the world when paired with Matt Gaetz’s career since that day. The alteration of his looks from then until now is proof positive that The Picture of Dorian Gray was really just thinly disguised wish fulfillment from Oscar Wilde, and that, here in the real world, everybody eventually ends up with the face they deserve.