JD Vance Offers the Most Ridiculous Reason to Support Matt Gaetz

JD Vance arrived on Capitol Hill Wednesday with the bleak task of drumming up support for Trump’s would-be attorney general, Matt Gaetz.

“Donald J. Trump just won a major electoral victory. His coattails turned a 49-51 senate to a 53-47 senate,” the vice president–elect wrote on X. “He deserves a cabinet that is loyal to the agenda he was elected to implement.”

Trump has now named multiple people accused of sexual misconduct or consciously allowing sexual misconduct to his future Cabinet. Gaetz, a former Florida representative and MAGA hard-liner, has been the subject of ongoing investigations from the House Ethics Committee and the Justice Department regarding allegations of sex trafficking and having sex with a minor at a sex party in 2017. Gaetz attempted to end the probe by resigning from Congress last week just before the House Ethics Committee was set to release its finding. Many people now want that report released, and Senate Democrats on Wednesday requested records from the FBI’s own Gaetz investigation so that these could be considered during confirmation hearings if need be.

“This is what the Radical Left Lunatics do to people. They dirty them up, they destroy them, and then they spit them out,” Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social. “They are trying that right now with some great American Patriots who are only trying to fix the mess that the Democrats have made of our Country. WE WILL WIN!!! MAGA.”

This defense comes as evidence continues to mount against Gaetz. ABC News is reporting that the House Ethics Committee has documents that show Gaetz paying over $10,000 to two women between July 2017 and January 2019—women who later served as witnesses in the House and Justice Department probes against Gaetz.

The House Ethics Committee is spending Wednesday debating and voting on whether or not to release the report.

Donald Trump’s plan for using the military to carry out mass deportations is already drawing opposition from the Pentagon and even from at least one Republican senator. Several officials in the Department of Defense spoke to The Intercept anonymously, with one calling Trump’s proposal “absolutely insane.”

“I never thought I’d see the day when this was a ‘serious’—put that in scare quotes—policy,” the official said, adding that there were significant logistical and legal obstacles to the “unrealistic and unserious” plan. Another official called the idea “insanity.”

Senator Rand Paul told Newsmax Tuesday that such a military deployment would be a “huge mistake.”

“I’m not in favor of sending the Army in uniforms into our cities to collect people,” Paul said in a possible nod to his libertarian roots. “I think it’s a terrible image, and that’s not what we use our military for, we never have, and it’s actually been illegal for over 100 years to bring the Army into our cities.” (The Brennan Center for Justice recently published a recap of the legal problems with what Trump is proposing.)

Paul stressed that he wasn’t opposed to mass deportations but believed they should be carried out by government agencies or local law enforcement instead of the military. “I will not support an emergency [declaration] to put the Army into our cities—I think that’s a huge mistake,” Paul said, later adding that “I really think us, as conservatives who are supportive of Trump, need to caution him about sending the Army into our cities.”

Trump’s plan involves declaring a national emergency to use members of the military to carry out his ruthless deportation effort, unprecedented in its scale. Some of his senior advisers, such as Stephen Miller, have said that even some immigrants in the country legally, such as those under DACA and temporary protected status, would also be deported.

Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” has proposed that immigrants get a “grace period” in which they can self-deport, but still expects military support. At the very least, it seems that Trump is going to get significant pushback from military and defense circles. He may also encounter some resistance from fellow Republicans—although his critics there have a tendency to fall in line sooner or later.

House Speaker Mike Johnson believes in equality and justice for all—but that purported belief is seemingly not getting in the way of an effort to ban Representative-elect Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person to be elected to Congress, from using the bathroom that aligns with her gender.

“We welcome all members with open arms who are newly elected representatives of the people. I believe it’s a—it’s a command. We treat all persons with dignity and respect,” Johnson said at a press conference Tuesday.

“And I’m not going to engage in silly debates about this,” the speaker continued. “There’s a concern about the uses of restroom facilities and locker rooms and all that. This is an issue that Congress has never had to address before. We’re going to do that in a deliberate fashion with members’ consensus on it, and we will accommodate the needs of every single person.”

On Tuesday, South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace introduced a resolution that would formally ban trans women from using the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity in the U.S. Capitol. The attention-seeking South Carolina representative openly acknowledged that the stunt was a direct attack on McBride—again, who will be the lone transgender elected official in Congress—telling reporters on Monday that it was “that and more.”

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man,” Mace said, adding that the newly elected Delaware congresswoman “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop.”

In another interview, Mace claimed that the mere thought of a trans woman walking into a women’s locker room “feels like assault.”

Johnson is reportedly looking for a way to enforce the legislation, though one unidentified member told CNN that the caucus is “having trouble with how you legislate” such a ban. In the same presser on Tuesday, Johnson clarified his belief that “man is a man and a woman is a woman,” citing the Bible as the foundation for his reasoning.

McBride had her own response to the resolution, describing it in a statement as a “blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.

“We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars,” McBride said. “Delawareans sent me here to make the American dream more affordable and accessible and that’s what I’m focused on.”

Lindsey Graham is trying to rally support among his fellow Senate Republicans for Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee, Matt Gaetz.

The South Carolina senator said in a statement Wednesday that he had “a very good meeting” with Gaetz and Vice President–elect JD Vance, adding that he didn’t want Gaetz’s nomination process “turning into an angry mob, and unverified allegations are being treated as if they are true.

“I would urge all of my Senate colleagues, particularly Republicans, not to join the lynch mob, and give the process a chance to move forward,” Graham said.

Graham defended Gaetz a day earlier on CNN, telling Manu Raju that “nobody should be disqualified from a media report.”

But the allegations against Gaetz are more substantive than any single news story. The House Ethics Committee has been investigating the former Florida congressman for years over sexual misconduct allegations. On Monday, it was revealed that Gaetz allegedly paid two women for sex through Venmo, according to the women’s attorney. One of the women also alleged seeing Gaetz having sex with her 17-year-old friend.

In his statement, Graham said his fellow senators should take into account that Gaetz never faced any criminal charges despite “years of being investigated by the Department of Justice,” and promised that Gaetz’s confirmation process “will not be a rubber stamp nor will it be driven by a lynch mob.”

The allegations against Gaetz apparently haven’t convinced Graham, one of Trump’s staunchest supporters in the Senate (after being one of his strongest critics in 2016). The Florida congressman reportedly appealed to Graham to help gain support in the Senate, but many Republican senators have privately told the president-elect that Gaetz doesn’t have much of a chance. Between opposition to Gaetz and multiple strikes against secretary of defense pick Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominees are off to a rocky start.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apparently refused to believe the evidence of his eyes and ears during the Covid-19 pandemic, ignoring the freezer trucks full of bodies in favor of baseless conspiracies.

Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services toyed with the “plan-demic” conspiracy, according to an unearthed clip from a speech Kennedy gave in August 2020 obtained by The Bulwark. In the clip, Kennedy says that he felt the Covid pandemic—which killed 1.2 million Americans—was “very planned.”

“Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme,” Kennedy said. “I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.”

In the same speech, Kennedy likened 2020 vaccination efforts to Nazi testing on “Gypsies and Jews,” referring to the jab as “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.”

Kennedy has promised, under Trump’s helm, to remove fluoride from all public water systems—a 1945 public health decision that has reduced cavities and tooth decay in adults and children by as much as 25 percent, according to the American Dental Association. The vaccine conspiracy theorist also reportedly has plans to strip not just the Covid vaccine but older, irrefutably effective vaccines from the market, as well.

Vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.