By Diane Roberts
The United States government has always been a rowdy, often nasty, bunch: fist fights, knives pulled, guns cocked.
In 1838, two House members fought a lethal duel, and, in 1856, pro-slavery Sen. Preston Brooks took out his cane and thrashed abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner.
On Jan. 6, 2023, a North Carolina congressman had to stop an Alabama congressman from punching Florida’s own Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Many in Washington and beyond would like to punch Matt Gaetz, but in this particular instance he’d just tanked the 14th vote on making Kevin McCarthy speaker of the House, offending Rep. Mike Rogers, a McCarthy supporter.
McCarthy would go on to win the 15th vote.
Ten months later, McCarthy’d been ousted and boy, was he mad!
So mad he shoved Tennessee U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett — “a clean shot to the kidneys!” howled Burchett — sparking a near brawl in a Capitol corridor.
This is what happens when Mean Girls — who don’t have to actually be girls — run your government.
Take Matt Gaetz (again). The failed attorney general nominee, Lolita-fancier, and blue ribbon jerk, set the House’s Mean Girl standard, referring to an incoming Republican senator as “Mitt Romney without the good hair” and long-time Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as “McFailure,” bringing a Holocaust denier to a State of the Union address, passing around nude photos of his exes, and calling women who favor reproductive rights fat and ugly.
Gaetz is out of the House now, but the score-settling, tantrum-throwing state Randy Fine, only recently elected to the Florida Senate, has generously decided to run for Congress, so the nation will not feel the loss of his epic nastiness so keenly.
Fine’s resumé includes calling a Brevard County school board member a “whore” and threatening Special Olympics funding because he didn’t get invited to a party.
This past October, the judge presiding over an election filing dispute found him in contempt and ordered him to take an anger management course.
Gaetz must be proud.
Such an expert hissy fit-pitcher will fit right in with the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. These two nearly launched into a slap fight over who got to try and impeach President Biden first.
Greene said Boebert “copied her articles” and called her “a little bitch.”
Hands-down winner
For her part, Boebert, famous for groping her date and singing loudly at a 2023 performance of “Beetlejuice” (she was “escorted out” of the theater), called fellow representative Ilhan Omar “black-hearted” and probably a terrorist because she is Muslim.
Impressively vile as Greene and Boebert are, the hands-down winner of the Meanest Mean Girl in Congress is Nancy Mace, R-South Carolina.
Mace used to be seen as a moderate Republican, a Donald Trump critic who demanded he be “held accountable” for lying and instigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.
But she has now executed a perfect volte-face, becoming one of his most passionate groupies, practically vibrating with spite.
This past November, Delaware elected Congress’ first trans woman, something Mace seems to take as a personal insult.
Rep. Sarah McBride, a Democrat, doesn’t make a big deal out of her gender status; Mace does, apparently convinced the minute McBride dares to enter a stall in the Capitol ladies’, Western Civilization will crumble into dust.
She trash-talks her fellow member relentlessly, too: “Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man.”
Mace has videoed herself ripping down blue and pink trans flags, snarling like an enraged hyena, and insisted Mike Johnson, whose lordly powers as speaker include regulating toilets in the House of Representatives, forbade trans women to use women’s bathrooms.
Now she’s demanding Congress ban trans people from bathrooms in all federal properties.
Does Mace think persecuting people who are four times more likely than straight folks to be assaulted, raped, or killed helps America achieve a more perfect union?
Or is she being horrible for the sheer hell of it?
Cruelty
MAGA Mean Girls take pleasure in tormenting people, especially those weaker than themselves, and causing gratuitous pain. As Atlantic Monthly essayist Adam Serwer wrote in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.”
And nobody enjoys cruelty more than Donald Trump, Mean Girl of the Century.
He kicked off his first campaign by ridiculing a disabled New York Times reporter, mocking women as “pigs,” and insulting veterans. Once in office, he delighted in images of caged migrant children, promoted police brutality, celebrated violence, and humiliated everyone around him.
Now he’s obsessed with punishing every person who has ever said anything negative about him, contradicted him, or failed to conspicuously celebrate his greatness: scientists, lawyers, teachers, doctors, journalists, judges, environmentalists, professors.
He wants to fire more than half the federal workforce.
(Hope you don’t think that tax return or that Social Security check will arrive on time — or ever — anymore).
He threatens our allies, dissing NATO, and, just the other day, trolled Canada, musing on making it the 51st state and referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “governor.”
Canada is the United States’ largest trading partner.
He wants to jail reporters who displease him and destroy news organizations trying to hold him to account.
The United States Senate just blocked a bill that would have protected press freedom.
Trump told them to.
He wants President Joe Biden investigated for supposedly stealing the 2020 election; he wants former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, President Barack Obama, and the whole Jan. 6 committee tried for “treason.”
This is what you voted for, America: ignorant bullies, junior despots, petty mediocrities who take pleasure in others’ suffering.
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Nothing they do will improve your life, make you safer or freer or bring down the price of eggs.
They’re Mean Girls — Mean Girls don’t do public service.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.
