Matt Gaetz Accidentally Insults Trump While Bashing a “Dictator”
MAGA Representative Matt Gaetz accidentally threw some shade at former President Donald Trump on Monday while trying to weigh in on Venezuela’s contested presidential election.
Venezuela’s election authority declared Sunday that President Nicolás Maduro had won the country’s presidential election, having secured 51 percent of the popular vote, while his U.S.-backed opponent, Edmundo Gonzalez, earned only 44 percent, according to the Associated Press.
The opposition party has disputed the results, claiming that Gonzalez had earned a whopping 70 percent of the vote and that they had the data to back it up. Venezuela’s voting authority delayed the release of the detailed vote tallies Monday as protests broke out across the country, and foreign leaders have been reluctant to recognize a winner. Not Gaetz though—he’s all in.
“Maduro lost the election in Venezuela badly, then simply declared victory anyway. He is an illegitimate dictator,” Gaetz wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Did that description not sound the least bit familiar to the Republican congressman, who has turned into one of Trump’s most devoted sycophants?
“We stand with the people of Venezuela and their diaspora throughout the world in calling for an end to his murderous regime. It is sad but true that a nation can vote its way into socialism, but almost always has to fight its way out,” Gaetz wrote.
A loyal Trump toady, Gaetz has repeatedly downplayed the January 6 insurrection, pushing the conspiracy theory that the FBI was involved in the attack. A year after the deadly riot, Gaetz referred to the rioters as “patriotic Americans … who had no intent of breaking the law and doing violence.”
“We’re ashamed of nothing,” Gaetz said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast in January 2022. “We’re proud of the work we did on January 6 to make legitimate arguments about election integrity,” he added.
Republican Senators Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, fellow Trump stooges, also posted their criticisms of Maduro to X, proving self-awareness is dead.