Matt Gaetz Isn’t Finished With Kevin McCarthy

According to Politico, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz is setting up his party for a messy 2024 primary season by throwing his support behind a slew of candidates who are not backed by the Republican establishment. All of his preferred candidates have one notable thing in common, however: They’re running against people who’ve been endorsed by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Gaetz and McCarthy have been at odds since the latter won the speaker’s gavel in 2022. Since then, Gaetz seems to have made it his sole mission to make McCarthy’s life as unpleasant as possible. Things came to a head in October when Gaetz successfully ousted McCarthy as speaker, plunging the House and Republican Party into chaos.

So far, Gaetz has endorsed three candidates: J.R. Majewski in Ohio, Elizabeth Helgelien in Nevada, and Darren Bailey in Illinois. He denied to Politico that he only endorsed those three candidates because they are running against McCarthy’s preferred people—but he couldn’t resist a dig at his colleague, either.

“He’s old news. Mike Johnson’s speaker now,” Gaetz said in a piece published Tuesday.

But it’s unclear what Gaetz’s endgame is other than being a thorn in McCarthy’s side until the very end. McCarthy is retiring from politics on December 31, after his humiliating ouster and a lackluster time as speaker. There’s no guarantee of how much national influence his support holds, but his endorsements have mainly fallen along establishment Republican lines.

But by endorsing different candidates, Gaetz could force the GOP into a messy season of hard-fought primaries, instead of allowing the party to present a united front. What’s more, Gaetz’s faves are all candidates who don’t have strong chances of winning in the general election. Both Majewski and Bailey, in fact, have already notched electoral losses to Democratic opponents.

Bailey ran for Illinois governor in 2022. He was defeated by Democrat J.B. Pritzker, who had an easy time tagging the Republican as too extreme. Majewski ran for Ohio representative in 2022 but ended up getting hit on two fronts. The victor, Democrat Marc Kaptur, ran a successful series of ads that branded him as an “extremist” for being on the Capitol grounds during the January 6 attack.

What’s more, an Associated Press investigation revealed Majewski had massively misrepresented his military career. Majewski, an Air Force veteran, claimed he had been deployed to Afghanistan after 9/11, where he endured grueling conditions. Instead, he spent six months loading planes at an air base in Qatar, a United States ally that is far away from the main conflict.

Gaetz’s proclivity for throwing a massive spanner into the Republican Party’s works is unlikely to do him any favors in his own career. He’s already incredibly unpopular in his district, and GOP lawmakers are frustrated with him for engineering McCarthy’s ouster. They accused him at the time of wanting attention and weren’t shy when asked about what they thought of him.

“Matt Gaetz is frankly a vile person,” Representative Mike Lawler said in October. “He’s not somebody who’s willing to work as a team. He stands up there, he grandstands, he lies directly to folks.”

Gaetz will nevertheless have a chance to prove that he has some election-year coattails—in spite of a career largely spent trolling his own colleagues.