Matt Gaetz Got Horny on Main for Tiffany Trump

You may already know Matt Gaetz, a representative from Florida, as the official butt-licker of future private citizen Donald J. Trump. He is the artist behind the following triumph, this work of incisive social commentary, this—how do you say?—masterpiece:

He takes sycophancy and distills it down to its purest form, swallows it, and washes it down with an ice-cold cup of pure, old-fashioned sucking up. So it’s not all that surprising that Gaetz would post a fire emoji, the universal symbol for “u + me = yes, tonight?” while quote-tweeting a photo of the president’s daughter Tiffany Ariana Trump.

About the photo for a second: Tiffany is the only adult child of Trump who did not emphasize the demonstrably false Republican thought experiment of “widespread election fraud” on social in the last week, but she did post a glamorous photo of herself inside the White House. I ask, as ever, what is she thinking? Perhaps, in Tiffany’s particular way, this is the same message as her siblings and stepmother’s. A photo of her wearing a red suit in the White House is her way of sneering, “count every LEGAL vote.” Or maybe it’s a farewell post, a kind of “don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” to her favorite selfie wall of the last four years, the actual White House.

Either way, what Gaetz saw, Gaetz liked. It’s almost certainly a vying-for-attention shitpost on the congressman’s part (because even if he is into Tiffany, why would he do this so publicly?). But it’s hard to read this as anything other than an attempt by Gaetz to achieve his dream, his final form: the ability to call Trump dad. And, listen, maybe they will eventually role-play Will Friedle’s best work, My Date With the President’s Daughter, and go out. They have one wealthy boyfriend to get past and 69 days to realize the dream.

Gaetz himself has noted how hard it is to date in Washington in his own book, Firebrand. He makes the confusing argument that one has to be careful about whom one dates as a politician, but also that nothing matters anymore, morally speaking, because the president of the last four years is—how to put this delicately—a real horndog. But not in a way that could be confused with, like, virility; in a sad, “the guy in table five is making the waitresses uncomfortable again, can we drop the check and see if he takes the hint?” way.

So the compass with which Gaetz navigates the dating circuit seems to be that one shouldn’t avoid shame, one should only avoid blackmail. To wit, “In Washington, safe sex means in part: no dating lobbyists, no dating your staff members, and I should have added no dating reporters, but I didn’t at first.” Guess who doesn’t fit in any of those categories?

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