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Has Matt Gaetz been punished? The MAGA modus operandi is to deny all accusations, to never admit defeat, and to welcome all disreputable characters—no matter how clammy, or predatory, or routinely indicted—into the movement. But watching Gaetz’s weirdly laminated face perched in front of a green-screened San Diego skyline, toasting the wearied few tuned into his brand-new talk show on the right-wing news network OAN, it’s hard not to think that he’s the only Donald Trump booster to have been thrown to the dogs. “I have decided to take my talents where they are most useful,” said Gaetz toward the end of his inaugural broadcast, nodding to his recently expired political career. “To give you the real story, on One America News.”
That’s one way to put it, I guess.
Gaetz was riding high just a few months ago. Trump had tapped him to be his attorney general, elevating a lawmaker best known for his theatrical feuds and showing nudes on the House floor into a position of concrete political power. It was one of our first glimpses into the second administration Trump intended to run. Gaetz’s only observable skill is his stiff-necked fealty to the president, which was most clearly demonstrated during the Pyrrhic election of Kevin McCarthy to speaker of the house in early 2023. An obstinate Gaetz, who had made McCarthy his sworn enemy, nominated Trump—of all people—for the role, dooming the caucus to several more rounds of failed votes and legislative inaction. Even so, you can see why Trump likes the guy.
Alas, no matter how chummy you get with the Trump machine, some men are unable to defeat the laws of gravity. Shortly after Gaetz’s name was floated for the AG job, his legs were cut out from under him by two forces working in tandem. Since 2020, the Justice Department had been investigating Gaetz for sex-trafficking crimes (including transactional sexual contact with a 17-year-old girl). He also happened to be extremely unpopular among his colleagues—in both parties—who were more than happy to sink his nomination on the grounds of those flagrant transgressions. When Gaetz formally announced his resignation from Congress last week, the galley burst into sarcastic applause. It’s honestly impressive: In a post-consensus world, everyone still hates Matt Gaetz.
And so, after his ousting from the administration and subsequent departure from public life, Gaetz did what every MAGA patriot would do. He joined OAN, the least prominent conservative news network in the nation, to host a Tucker Carlson–lite political salon. “His knack for connecting with grassroots Americans and shaking up the status quo makes him a dynamic and timely addition to OAN’s team,” reads the press release announcing the hiring, which later talks up Gaetz’s ability to produce content “tailored for Millennials, late Gen Z, and early Gen Xers.”
There’s only one problem with the rollout.The Matt Gaetz Show is, frankly, unreachable by most American households. I had an incredibly difficult time watching it. The last major cable carriers who still aired OAN did not renew its contracts in 2022 and dropped it from their channel listings, provoking claims of “Marxist” censorship. OAN cannot be found on cord-cutting stalwarts like YouTube TV or Hulu Live, either, but the company’s website trumpets its availability on “KlowdTV,” “GCI,” and “Vidgo,” three digital carriers that allegedly exist.
So, as someone curious to witness Gaetz’s media pivot firsthand, I was forced to fork over the five bucks—yes, five bucks—it costs to access OAN’s streaming platform, which remains the only reliable way to consume the network’s programming in the United States. But once I was a subscriber, I still couldn’t find Gaetz. His show was nowhere in the network’s TV schedule, nor its on-demand library. OAN’s inventory was surprisingly threadbare, perhaps a result of that provider blacklisting. I did, however, catch the latest entry of a show called Tipping Point, which aired on Jan. 6 this year, titled “Happy Insurrection Day!”
Thankfully (?), a bevy of highlights from The Matt Gaetz Show has been uploaded, piecemeal, to the company’s YouTube channel. From those metrics, his appears to be an inauspicious debut. The clips net anywhere from 5,000 to 40,000 views, exponentially lower than the dominant metrics belonging to people like Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro. If Gaetz intends to become the premiere MAGA gadfly of Trump’s second term, then he has some catching up to do.
The Matt Gaetz Show is many things: chintzy, low-rent, reactionary. But most of all, it is boring. The man is not a natural broadcaster, and he is not able to concoct the synapse-flaring secret sauce that makes everyone from Rachel Maddow to Jesse Watters so watchable. In one molasses-slow segment, Gaetz interviews two of OAN’s reporters on Capitol Hill about the chairmanships for various House subcommittees to zero effect. He brings on George Santos, who appears to have a lot of time on his hands these days, for some makeup advice. Santos recommends an Estée Lauder foundation and for Gaetz to avoid highlighter altogether. (The clip has accrued 5,000 views, and a top comment that simply reads, “This is creepy.”) Elsewhere, Gaetz relies on some of the few allies he has left in government to give his show a faint access-y sheen. He hosted Rep. Andy Biggs to grouse about one of their eternal bugaboos—funding for the Ukraine military efforts, which they both expect to be marbled into an upcoming reconciliation bill.
Eventually, I was able to tune into a full episode of the The Matt Gaetz Show as it “aired” and found more of the same. Gaetz constantly stumbles over his teleprompter—odd pauses, dangling clauses, botched punchlines—which is a bit odd for a guy who made his name as a telegenic troll. In the episode, his opening salvo centered on the idea that Los Angeles’ homeless population should bear the blame for the wildfires torching the region because, among other things, some of them use fire hydrants to access drinking water. Later, Roger Stone passed through and reflected on the legacy of Jimmy Carter, but as is often the case with Stone, it quickly devolved into relitigating Russiagate. Gaetz also took the opportunity to test out some stand-up material that that comes from the Rob Schneider school of comedy. (The first joke was about how Meta employees moving to Texas are going to start eating beef rather than kale.) There weren’t many commercial breaks throughout the broadcast, but Gaetz did read off some ad copy for a pharmacy that stocks Ivermectin. Use the code MATT10 for a discount.
A genuinely dark turn for the show came when Gaetz talked about a lawsuit filed by a former hairdresser at Fox Sports, accusing the company of a culture of sexual misconduct. The suit is wide-ranging, but Gaetz paid special attention to a few salacious charges centered on current Fox Sports host Joy Taylor. I think it is fair to say that Gaetz is the last person I want to hear weigh in on this story, but he still took the opportunity to, from what I can tell, settle some scores: “Remember the era of #MeToo and Believe All Women? Well, according to the lawsuit, Joy Taylor is speedrunning through different ways to discredit women,” said Gaetz, wrapping up his take. “This doesn’t just put men in danger of serious and irreparable reputation harm, but it also puts women under a cloud of suspicion when allegations are made.”
It is worth remembering that when Gaetz was first put under investigation, Axios reported that he seriously considered ditching Congress for a gig at Newsmax—the second most prominent conservative broadcaster in America. But Gaetz waited too long. His dirty laundry eventually outweighed his usefulness to the Trump cause, and that cost him his political life. One of the tragedies of American political culture in 2025 is the inability for anyone to be sufficiently put to pasture, no matter how much they deserve it. But if this is Gaetz’s punishment—alone on a dingy set, grumbling about his putrid reputation to an increasingly fallow audience, all of whom who are tuning in on “KlowdTV” while the rest of MAGAdom gradually passes him by—then, well, I’ll take what I can get.
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