Liberals and conservatives alike expressed shock and alarm upon hearing President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement that he intends to nominate former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to be his attorney general.
One influential right-winger, however, went a bit further in his assessment.
“Matt Gaetz is a sex trafficking drug addicted piece of shit,” wrote Ben Domenech in a Substack post titled, “Matt Gaetz is a Vile Sex Pest and Any Senator Who Votes For Him Owns That.”
Domenech, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, has gone from wunderkind blogger to a regular Fox News guest, as a co-founder of The Federalist and editor-at-large of The Spectator World. He has no shortage of conservative credentials, making his comments on Trump’s pick to run the Department of Justice particularly noteworthy.
“He is abhorrent,” Domenech said of Gaetz. “His eyes are permanently rimmed with the red rings of chemical boosters. In person, he smells like overexposed Axe Body Spray and stale Astroglide.”
He went on, repeating a story about the Florida congressman that Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) shared publicly last year: “The fact that he boasted on the floor to multiple colleagues in the House of Representatives of his methods of crushing Viagra and high test Red Bull to maintain his erection through his orgiastic evenings is perhaps the least offensive of his many crimes against womanhood and Christian faith.”
If confirmed, Gaetz would oversee the very same department that recently investigated him over sex trafficking allegations. While the Department of Justice ultimately declined to charge Gaetz last year, the House Ethics Committee’s members have been looking into the claims for years — or at least until Gaetz’s abrupt resignation this week, at which time the panel’s power to do so evaporated.
Lawmakers from both parties have called for the committee’s reportedly damaging report to be released anyway. The panel had originally expected to vote Friday on whether or not to make its findings public.
“Every Republican in Washington has an opinion about Matt Gaetz, and 99 percent of those opinions are ‘Keep Matt Gaetz away from my wife/daughter/friend and anyone I care about,’” Domenech wrote.
Gaetz’s problems ramped up when a former close friend, Joel Greenberg, took a plea deal admitting that he invited underage girls to various places where he would pay them for sex and use illicit drugs. Gaetz allegedly participated in some of the parties, though he has denied those accusations.
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Greenberg had also been cooperating with the House Ethics Committee, which said in June that it had consulted more than a dozen witnesses, issued 25 subpoenas and reviewed thousands of pages of documents for the probe.
Domenech said Gaetz represented a sort of test for Republicans in Congress.
″[I] they have a degree of independence, any kind of free thought, mindful of the fact that a presidency is four years but your career is forever, they will reject this choice so emphatically that it sends a very simple, straightforward message: you can be an absolute dirtbag wannabe pimp pounding dick pills and caffeine while you film your ‘girlfriend’ twerking on the gram, or you can be a Republican,” he said.
Read the whole thing on Domenech’s Substack newsletter, The Transom.