Gaetz Will Skate

There *was* a time when allegations like this would destroy your political career.

We all knew Matt Gaetz had been a naughty boy, but until today we didn’t know just how naughty:

The House Ethics Committee found evidence that former Rep. Matt Gaetz paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex or drugs on at least 20 occasions, including paying a 17-year-old girl for sex in 2017, according to the panel’s report on the Florida Republican released Monday.

The committee concluded in its bombshell document that Gaetz violated Florida state laws, including the state’s statutory rape law, as the GOP-led panel chose to take the rare step of releasing a report about a former member who resigned from Congress.

“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” panel investigators wrote.

The panel investigated transactions Gaetz personally made, often using PayPal or Venmo, to more than a dozen women during his time in Congress, according to the report. Investigators also focused on a 2018 trip to the Bahamas – which they said “violated the House gift rule” – during which he “engaged in sexual activity” with multiple women, including one who described the trip itself as “the payment” for sex on the trip. On the same trip, he also took ecstasy, one woman on the trip told the committee.

There are only two things shocking about this:

1. A conservative Republican was caught up in a sex scandal involving members of the opposite sex; and,

2. Gaetz, well aware that this was probably going to come out, actually tested positive for trace elements of shame and withdrew his name from consideration as President-elect Trump’s Attorney General.

(That Matt Freaking Gaetz was nominated for Attorney General in the first place no longer counts as shocking, I’m afraid.)

If he’d stayed in the running and brazened it out, would he have been confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate?

Probably not. But note that I didn’t say definitely not.

Several of Trump’s other cabinet nominees, like Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard, have come under fire for personal and/or professional reasons. In a normal political environment, they might have followed Gaetz’s lead and bowed out.

But it hasn’t been a normal political environment for a very long time.

I don’t know if it started with Donald Trump - you can argue that the Bill Clinton impeachment drama was marked by truly staggering levels of shamelessness by both Democrats and Republicans - but Trump’s rise to power turbo-charged it as he pushed forward and survived a presumably “career-ending” scandal pretty much every day.

The lesson learned, especially on the GOP side, was that you should never apologize, never show contrition, and DARVO, DARVO, DARVO when sordid details about your past come to light.

It might not always work - see Mark Robinson and Roy Moore - but it’s at least worth a shot. Even if you lose you can still make good money on the Turning Point/CPAC convention circuit.

And in the age of YouTube and Substack and one cable-news TV channel for every five Americans, even the most disgraced politician is welcome in some dark corner of the media:

As of this writing, Gaetz’s show on OAN is still going ahead. Indeed, if you’re watching OAN, the “news” channel for people who think Newsmax is too liberal, chances are you’re perfectly fine with it. Even if the allegations against him are true, he hates the same people you hate, and that’s enough.

I’d say nothing matters anymore, but I’d be lying. Negative partisanship and hatred of the outgroup matters more than ever before.

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Speaking of disgraced politicians with cable-news shows…