It seems Florida’s most notable Republican House Rep. Matt Gaetz won’t be finding a whole lot of love lost among his former law school classmates.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a wide-reaching profile on the highly-controversial GOP congressman, speculating on what “the prankish and abundantly coifed 40-year-old Mr. Gaetz” will soon try to do with his newfound power in the House after his hardcore campaign to derail California House Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the Speakership of the House of Representatives.
The Times begged the question in their column, “Will he assert himself more on substance and push harder on his far-right agenda? Or is his only goal blowing things up?”
However, it seems Gaetz is already trying to push back against that narrative when he recently sat for an interview in which he openly insisted that he’s “not some ‘Lord of the Flies’ nihilist.”
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
The newspaper’s report goes on to touch on the fact that the Department of Justice’s investigation into Gaetz’s alleged involvement in an underage sex trafficking scheme is still up in the air, with the Justice Department failing to confirm whether or not the investigation is still ongoing.
But nevertheless, Gaetz’s scandals certainly haven’t staunched any of his nasty attacks against women, especially those who are angry and loud over their recent loss of abortion rights in the United States, with Gaetz dolling out nasty insults last summer: “Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb. These people are odious on the inside and out.”
But most interesting, perhaps, in the Times’ profile, was their section on Matt Gaetz’s “chubby and bombastic” adolescence — more specifically, still, on the at least 30 former classmates of the Republican congressman, who “denounced” Gaetz as “the antithesis of a citizen lawyer,” following Gaetz’ public brag about his family owning a house seen in the film The Truman Show.
The report reads:
In property law class, he brought up the fact that his dad owned the house where Jim Carrey lived in ‘The Truman Show,’ Ms. Fiddler said. More than 30 of his fellow class of 2007 law school graduates, including Ms. Fiddler, would later sign a petition denouncing Mr. Gaetz as ‘the antithesis of a citizen lawyer.'”
Gatez’s father — and, by default of course, Gaetz himself — was born into wealth and affluence, and sold off a chain of hospice programs back in 2004, for a whopping $400 million.
The Times concluded their profile of the controversial Republican with their own speculations on what we’re soon to see out of Matt Gaetz as he lauds his new power and influence in the US House of Representatives:
If Mr. Gaetz’s principal aim was to cement his reputation as the right’s pre-eminent warrior, he appears to have achieved that objective. A week after the final speaker votes were cast, the Florida congressman became the first sitting member to guest-host the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s ‘War Room’ podcast. It was the ultimate reward in the MAGA universe, a fellow Republican member ruefully observed, for Mr. Gaetz’s obstructionist antics.”
Read the full profile from the Times here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
