Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) needled his rival, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), on Tuesday while the two were on the floor of the Republican National Convention, tauntingly asking McCarthy when he was slated to speak.
“What night are you speaking? Are you speaking tonight?” Gaetz mockingly asked McCarthy. NewsNation’s Joe Khalil captured the moment on video between ongoing RNC coverage.
“If you took that stage, you would get booed off of it,” he told McCarthy. “You would get booed off the stage.”
Gaetz defended his previous comments in a brief interview with The Hill, saying he was counterpunching.
“He was saying something very untrue and nasty about me to CNN. So, this is a convention floor. I thought it’d be okay to convene a little bit.”
The rivalry between Gaetz and McCarthy is well known. Gaetz was among a group of hard-liners who extracted concessions from the California Republican during the initial House Speakership race in order to deliver him enough votes to lead the House.
But one of those concessions became McCarthy’s downfall when Gaetz led seven other House Republicans in removing McCarthy from his Speakership post, culminating in several weeks of uncertainty as Republicans rushed to find a new House leader.
McCarthy later resigned from the House in December.
The California Republican has asserted that he was removed as Speaker so that Gaetz could avoid an ethics investigation into potential sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. The House Ethics Committee issued a statement last month saying it was continuing its investigation into the Florida congressman, dropping some aspects of its probe and investigating some new aspects.
“The House Ethics Committee has closed four probes into me, which emerged from lies intended solely to smear me. Instead of working with me to ban Congressional stock trading, the Ethics Committee is now opening new frivolous investigations. They are doing this to avoid the obvious fact that every investigation into me ends the same way: my exoneration,” Gaetz wrote on the social platform X following the news.
The Justice Department, however, closed its own probe into Gaetz regarding potential sex-trafficking and did not charge him.
McCarthy was asked about the exchange between Gaetz and him on the convention floor during an interview with NBC News.
“I think it shows exactly who Matt Gaetz is,” McCarthy said, arguing again it was related to his ethics complaint.
Updated: 8:23 p.m. ET