Politics have always left one side feeling like the other has absolutely lost its mind. Even before the caning of Charles Sumner in 1856, elected officials have struggled to see eye to eye – and their constituents are right there with them.
Maybe it’s the thrill of living through these unprecedented times, but that sensation of political division feels tenfold these days — and we don’t have to scour the history books to figure out why. In a recent visit to CNN, Ana Navarro-Cárdena shared stories about why Bill Clinton’s nominees for attorney general in 1993 fell through. The sobering story left viewers wringing their hands in frustration over Donald Trump’s AG nominee, Matt Gaetz, and with the realization of just how far the present-day GOP’s standards have fallen.
Gaetz, a far-right politician, was elected in Florida’s first congressional district in 2017. By 2020 he was one of the most controversial figures in the party. He was accused of child sex trafficking and statutory rape after a 17-year-old girl claimed he had paid her to cross state lines so the pair could engage in sexual relations.
If that wasn’t enough, the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into the Floridian for allegations of illegal drug use, misusing state identification records, converting campaign funds for personal use, and accepting gifts. Multiple House members have exchanged stories about the Floridian sharing images and videos of underaged girls on the House floor. But now that Gaetz has resigned in anticipation of a juicy promotion, those investigations are dead in the water.
That laundry list of debauchery should be more than enough to keep Gaetz from consideration, but somehow Republicans are plowing forward. In a clip widely shared on social media platforms like X, Navarro lays out the clear hypocrisy around the rights push for the controversial candidate, using Bill Clinton’s outrageous candidates from 1993, Kimba Wood and Zoë Baird as an example.
They, “had to withdraw because they had employed illegal nannies. Matt Gaetz is accused of sleeping with a girl who was almost young enough to need a nanny,” Navarro quips. Both women were found to have employed undocumented immigrants as nannies, and while employing undocumented immigrants was legal at the time, they failed to pay social security taxes for the undocumented workers.
That’s right, two highly qualified women were denied the job because they didn’t pay their taxes. And yet, here we have Matt Gaetz: underqualified according to practicing lawyers, and accused of sleeping with children, and Republicans are happily banging his drum.
MAGA Republicans are the royalty of double standards. The group will rail against being called garbage by one candidate while their own spews mountains of hatred. They concoct elaborate stories about Hillary Clinton’s connection to a pedophilic pizza parlor while ignoring Trump’s connections to known sexual predators like Jeffery Epstein, and they howl against the deep state while allowing men who have been under ethics investigations to take roles in the justice department.
But that in itself is the core of the problem. Modern-day Republicans will pick party over country, no matter how bad the appointee is. Texas Representative Troy Nehls summarized the current GOP way of thinking perfectly in a recent interview, saying, “If Donald Trump says ‘jump 3 feet high & scratch your head,’ we all jump 3 feet high & scratch our heads.”
