The feud between Rep. Matt Gaetz and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy flared up yet again when the two men had a brief, tense encounter on the floor of the Republican National Convention.
Footage of the Tuesday incident shows Gaetz approaching McCarthy, who is mid-conversation, and taunting him.
“What night are you speaking? Are you speaking tonight, or ... ?” Gaetz asks as someone pushes him away.
He then goes up to the California Republican again, saying: “If you took that stage, you would get booed off of it.” As Gaetz walks away, someone tells him to “shut up.”
Gaetz’s instigation of McCarthy in such a public venue is not out of character for the 42-year-old Florida Republican, who is prone to trolling tactics. It also underscores the bad blood between the two, which previously resulted in McCarthy’s ousting as House speaker and weeks of disarray among the House GOP.
And the feud shows no signs of ending. When asked about the incident later in the day, McCarthy suggested that Gaetz was upset that McCarthy had not halted a congressional ethics investigation into allegations that Gaetz paid a 17-year-old to have sex with him. (Gaetz has vehemently denied the allegation and any wrongdoing.)
McCarthy told NBC News: “Well, it’s all about he had an ethics complaint four years ago that he paid an underage girl. ... And he came to me to try to leverage me to stop the ethics investigation. That’s illegal — I’m not doing that.”
Last year, federal prosecutors declined to bring charges against Gaetz in a sex trafficking probe. The House Ethics Committee announced last month that it was continuing to investigate several allegations against him.
On Tuesday, Gaetz railed against the investigation in a post on X and appeared to blame McCarthy, who resigned from Congress in December 2023.
“This is Soviet. Kevin McCarthy showed them the man, and they are now trying to find the crime,” Gaetz wrote. “I work for Northwest Floridians who won’t be swayed by this nonsense and McCarthy and his goons know it.”
In his interview with NBC News, McCarthy also seemed to suggest that Gaetz should be in prison.
“Look, everybody has different people in their party,” he said. “Unfortunately, Matt happens to be here. I think at the end of the day, he probably shouldn’t be on the streets.”