OWN MEDICINE

Matt Gaetz, of All People, Whines After His Preferred Speaker Is Dumped

The architect of the House GOP’s leadership crisis blamed “the swamp” when things didn’t go his way on Friday.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) isn’t happy about the way the Capitol Hill chaos he orchestrated is developing. Seventeen days after he and seven other hardliners voted to boot Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the speakership, Gaetz’s preferred replacement, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), got the same treatment as scores of Republicans voted secretly to kick him off the ticket on Friday. Gaetz fumed about the outcome online—conveniently blaming it on the “swamp.” “The most popular Republican in Congress was just knifed in an an anonymous vote in a secret closed door meeting in the basement of the Capitol,” Gaetz wrote in a post to X, formerly known as Twitter. “This is the Swamp at work.” McCarthy, in turn, told reporters that Gaetz and Co. had done “insurmountable” damage to the country, and that he was “concerned about where we go from here.”