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.

In two months, Joe Biden will leave office and, soon after, nearly everything he and his administration have accomplished will be undone. One legacy, however, will remain: the administration’s continued backing of Israel in its brutal war in Gaza, which will continue—and likely increase—with Donald Trump in office. Nevertheless, the administration has shown little appetite for changing direction: On Wednesday, the United States vetoed a United Nations cease-fire resolution. A bill sponsored by Bernie Sanders to block arms sales to Israel that is scheduled to go to a vote Wednesday is highly unlikely to pass.

There are, however, people within the administration who are working to change its policy. On Monday, nearly two dozen White House officials released an open letter excoriating the Biden administration for its continued support of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza and the Middle East and demanding that, in his final days in office, the president take “concrete measures” to end the war and save civilian lives. The letter calls on the Biden administration to end U.S. military aid to Israel, demand a cease-fire, provide humanitarian aid to people in Gaza, and offer full transparency explaining its continued support for a military campaign that has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and violated “U.S. and international laws.”

The signees, all senior members of the Executive Office of the President, chose to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. The New Republic spoke to three of them—two current officials and one who recently left the administration—about why they chose to sign the letter, what they think the administration can accomplish in its final weeks, and how continued American support for Israel has affected their day-to-day work.

“Ongoing U.S. support for Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank, in violation of international and human rights law, goes against our moral and professional duties as civil servants,” the letter reads. “It wastes funds on a brutal assault on civilians without benefiting public welfare, either at home or abroad. We implore you to take simple and immediate action to drastically mitigate the humanitarian crisis.”

The group had been working on the letter for several months, the signees told me, but Trump’s election victory made the matter far more urgent. The Biden administration now only has until late January to act.

For the signees, this was a deeply personal decision. “At this point, watching the genocide unfold, you realize that this is a moment where you will look back on where you were when it started to happen and ask if you did something about it,” one signee, a current administration official, said. “Looking back at other analogous moments in time, it’s important to take action now, even if it can be undone. We need to arc towards peace.”

The former administration official concurred. “When you look at history, whether it was the treatment of the Native Americans, civil rights for Black Americans, apartheid in South Africa—these weren’t solved in a year or two or a hundred or sometimes 400,” they said. “But if at any point, even after 200 years, someone [decided progress wasn’t being made and] gave up, we wouldn’t be here.”

For the signees, Trump’s victory also crystallized another important factor in their decision to release the letter. When he takes office on January 20, he will quickly undo most of the current administration’s policies. The president’s domestic legacy—one of full employment and strong economic growth with an emphasis on building manufacturing and strengthening the working and middle classes—will be ripped up more or less immediately. Gaza is what will remain.

“As the war has expanded, this is increasingly becoming the Biden administration’s legacy,” the current administration official told The New Republic. “We have to think about how the Biden administration began. Its legacy could have been entirely focused on coming out of Covid and fixing the wreckage of the economy. Instead, most likely, this crisis, this war, will be that legacy.”

“There is a small but significant opportunity to change that,” they continued. “Will it be a legacy of horror or something else?”

The signees said that America’s ongoing support for Israel has made coming to work difficult and jarring. “It is a continual fatigue, this cognitive dissonance,” a second current administration official told The New Republic. “I watch the news and then walk into work where that news happens. It is taxing and demoralizing. It is a constant struggle.”

For the first administration official, that support has also made them question the work that they do in the government. “A lot of the reason people end up in the federal government is because it’s mission-driven: It’s meant to help serve the public,” they said. “The less that happens, even outside of our own borders, the less that holds water.”

As we ended our call, I asked all three if they would keep working in government if their calls went unheeded. All three said they weren’t sure anymore.

The cloud of sexual misconduct allegations hanging over Matt Gaetz’s head grows larger every day. ABC News is reporting that the House Ethics Committee has records of Gaetz paying two women over $10,000 between July 2017 and January 2019. The same women later served as witnesses in the House and Justice Department probes against Gaetz. The payments totaled to $10,224.02 over 27 Venmo transactions. The witnesses testified that some of these payments were indeed for sex.

In the “notes” section of Venmo, Gaetz labeled the payments as things like “Cartrages,” “Refreshments,” “Gift,” or “Car deductible,” as well as “travel” and one “extra 4 u.” The payment dates also align with allegations that Gaetz flew the two women to New York City to keep him company while he appeared on Outnumbered, on Fox News. There is also a signed check with Gaetz’s name and address for $750 titled “tuition reimbursement.”

Gaetz, a scandal-ridden Trump loyalist whose attorney general selection shocked Democrats and Republicans alike, actually resigned from the House as soon as his nomination was announced, and just days before the Ethics Committee was set to release its probe—a seemingly obvious ploy to avoid the report. Instead, Trump picking him for attorney general has only made the investigation more prominent. These details of Venmo payments are the latest to emerge about the contents of the as-yet unreleased report. Earlier this week, a lawyer representing a woman who testified before the committee told news outlets that his client personally witnessed Gaetz having sex with an underage girl in 2017.

Gaetz has continuously denied allegations of sexual misconduct, and the president-elect seems to be standing by him. “The Justice Department received access to roughly every financial transaction Matt Gaetz ever undertook and came to the conclusion that he committed no crime,” said Trump spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer in defense of Gaetz. “These leaks are meant to undermine the mandate from the people to reform the Justice Department.”

Gaetz is just one of many Trump Cabinet nominees with deeply troubling sexual misconduct or assault allegations. The House Ethics Committee is expected to convene Wednesday to decide whether to release the report.

Donald Trump nominated former Attorney General Matt Whitaker to be the United States ambassador to NATO Wednesday.

“Matt is a strong warrior and loyal Patriot who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended,” Trump wrote in a statement.

A staunch Trump loyalist, Whitaker served as the Department of Justice’s chief of staff before replacing Jeff Sessions as attorney general in 2018. There, he found himself in charge of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump first took an interest in Whitaker after he distinguished himself as a major critic of the Mueller probe, insisting that there had been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to The New York Times. Trump specifically brought Whitaker in to serve as an attack dog against Mueller, and one presidential adviser told the Times that Whitaker had been sent there to minimize the investigation’s fallout. Whitaker ultimately resigned from the Justice Department in 2019.

Whitaker had already proven himself to be one hell of an aggressor as a federal prosecutor in Iowa. He sparked backlash after he brought a flimsy case against Matt McCoy, the first openly gay member of the Iowa legislature, in 2007. The evidence Whitaker’s team drummed up for “attempted extortion” was so weak the jury reportedly deliberated for just half an hour.

“Whitaker’s office clearly wanted to give the evangelical right within the Republican Party a trophy, and that trophy was me—one of the state’s most prominent young Democrats at the time,” McCoy wrote in Politico in 2018.

Clearly holding political ambitions, Whitaker went on to launch unsuccessful bids for Iowa Supreme Court in 2011 and the U.S. Senate in 2014. He also held an advisory board position at World Patent Marketing, a shady company that sold toilets for “well-endowed men” among other random things. The Federal Trade Commission ordered World Patent Marketing in 2018 to shut down its operations and pay a settlement of more than $25 million, after the company was determined to be a scam.

Whitaker also previously served as executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civil Trust, or FACT, a conservative watchdog that targeted Democratic leaders. Whitaker currently serves as a co-chair for the Center of Law & Justice at the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank chaired by Linda McMahon, Trump’s unorthodox nominee for secretary of education.

Trump has remained skeptical about NATO and previously threatened to leave the alliance if European defense spending did not increase. In February, Trump encouraged Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that was “delinquent” in its payments. That kind of attitude, plus the president-elect’s affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin, means that Whitaker will likely act as an enforcer on behalf of a hostile Trump.

Proximity to sexual abuse and scandal increasingly looks like a prerequisite for joining Trump’s upcoming Cabinet. President-elect Donald Trump made yet another surprising pick on Tuesday, naming former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon as his intended nominee for education secretary.

McMahon, along with her husband, Vince McMahon, helped turn the WWE into the pervasive entertainment product that has become intertwined with modern North American culture. Trump was a good friend to the McMahons during this time, even getting in the ring for the “Battle of the Billionaires” in 2007.

Linda McMahon stepped down from WWE in 2009 and launched herself in conservative politics, serving on the Connecticut State Board of Education and running two unsuccessful campaigns for Senate in 2010 and 2012. She then became a Republican megadonor, and was rewarded with an administrator position at the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first-term Cabinet. On Tuesday, she was rewarded once again.

“Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Trump wrote in a statement. “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”

But much like Trump Cabinet picks Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, McMahon has troubling skeletons in her closet. The WWE has long been known for its highly questionable, borderline abusive work environment.

Linda McMahon and Vince McMahon—from whom she is now reportedly separated—are being sued by five anonymous plaintiffs who served as “ring boys,” essentially teenage stagehands. The ring boys allege that they were being sexually abused by WWE wrestlers Pat Patterson and Terry Garvin. The suit states that both Linda and Vince knew exactly what was happening to the ring boys but did little, if anything, to stop it. Vince faces even more damaging allegations of sexual assault, trafficking, and more. And although these are separate from Linda, almost all of these accusations date from when Linda was leading the WWE. Trump has yet to comment on the allegations.

Linda McMahon also falsely claimed in 2009 on a candidate questionnaire for the Connecticut Board of Education that she had a bachelor’s degree in education, when she only has a certificate. Per The Washington Post’s recap of the incident, she resigned from the board as soon as she heard that local journalists intended to make her error public, but claimed the timing of her resignation was merely coincidental.

If confirmed as education secretary, McMahon will be charged with carrying out Trump’s plan for the Department of Education: specifically, to kill it completely.

The state of Texas is offering the Trump administration a 1,400-acre ranch to use as a camp for mass deportations. The Texas General Land Office’s commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, sent a letter to the president-elect Tuesday making the offer, saying that the office “is fully prepared to enter into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the United States Border Patrol to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.” 

The state bought the land, located along the southern U.S. border with Mexico in the Rio Grande Valley, in October with plans to build a border wall on it. The previous owner did not let state authorities build a wall there, and prevented law enforcement “from accessing the property,” according to the letter. 

For a state official to offer land to an administration not yet in office for the purpose of conducting questionably legal mass deportations is, to put it mildly, a big, preemptive step. Trump does seem ready to fulfill his campaign promise for mass deportations, however,  given his appointment of Tom Homan as “border czar.” Homan was the architect of the first Trump administration’s ruthless family separation policy, which resulted in nearly 2,000 children being torn from their families after being detained at the southern border. Homan appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes last month laying out precisely what a mass deportation program might look like.

Trump plans to declare a national emergency and enlist the U.S. military for these deportations, targeting all undocumented immigrants, criminal or not. Trump’s choice for deputy chief of staff for policy, white nationalist Stephen Miller, has said that the president-elect would revoke legal protections such as birthright citizenship, DACA, and temporary protected status, resulting in legal immigrants facing deportation as well. 

Texas’s action suggests that Trump will have plenty of help at the state level to carry out his unprecedented plan. “We figured, hey, the Trump administration probably needs some deportation facilities because we’ve got a lot of these violent criminals that we need to round up and get the heck out of our country,” Buckingham told Fox News on Tuesday. “We’re happy to make this offer and hope they take us up on it.”