If anyone should get a motel room, it’s Senator John Kennedy and Donald Trump

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy appeared on Fox News this week to mock Barack Obama’s interview with Stephen Colbert, suggesting the two should “get a motel room” because of their supposed mutual admiration.

Kennedy’s motel room quip came after Obama appeared on Colbert’s Late Show, where the two discussed and joked about presidential powers, executive authority, and job searches, while deftly never even mentioning Donald Trump by name.

Kennedy took umbrage at two men being warm and intellectually engaged with each other. And, he ridiculously decided the appropriate response was a same-sex motel joke.

Of course, Kennedy’s bringing up gay sex is not an isolated incident. It is a party-wide fixation. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Kennedy’s own Louisiana colleague, has spent a career describing homosexuality as “inherently unnatural” and a “dangerous lifestyle.”

He has championed conversion therapy and inserted himself into the intimate lives of LGBTQ+ Americans with the zeal of a man who has thought about this a great deal more than anyone asked him to. One thinks that he might not be holding up his end of the bargain by not watching pornography.

The GOP’s obsession with what gay men do behind closed doors is by now one of the most exhaustively documented patterns in American political life.

I’ve written about how the gay-obsessed Johnson has spent decades framing homosexuality as dangerous, immoral, and socially destructive, from opposing marriage equality to invoking rhetoric linking LGBTQ+ people with pedophilia and societal collapse.

Johnson’s fixation repeatedly drifts away from talking about issues and into policing the intimate lives of gay men. That’s exactly what Kennedy did yesterday. Instead of talking about the interview and what Obama said, he tried to put them together in a motel room.

If he was trying to be funny, he failed. If he was trying to say there was something wrong with two men loving each other, he failed there, too.

I also wrote about how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth carries the same fixation with gay sex, while surrounded by all of his buff warriors. Hegseth condemns and belittles gay sex and being gay, while attacking LGBTQ+ inclusion in the armed forces and promoting a hyper-masculine “warrior culture.”

Hegseth’s repeated focus on queer intimacy as part of a broader conservative pattern suggests that there is something grotesque about the whole idea. That’s exactly what Kennedy did, trying to make the Colbert Obama relationship sound seedy.

And the history books are littered with seedy examples of members of Congress who tried to hide their sexuality, only to be exposed in scandalous ways.

Former Republican Utah Senator Larry Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after soliciting sex from an undercover officer in an airport men’s restroom, then insisted with hypocritical confidence that he was “not gay” and had “never been gay.”

I’m sorry, but as many times as I’ve read and written about Craig, I still can’t believe how stupid he thinks we all are.

Florida Republican Representative Mark Foley resigned after sending sexually explicit messages to underage male congressional pages while simultaneously leading the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children

And then there is the seedy Matt Schlapp, head of the virulently anti-LGBTQ+ American Conservative Union and major Trump ally, who was sued by a man who accused him of sexual assault, which Schlapp denies.

We can do this all day, but I’ll stop with Schlapp.

Which brings us back to Senator Kennedy and his peculiar indignation over other men being too warm with each other.

Kennedy recently, and bizarrely, appeared on Fox News to defend Trump’s foreign policy by declaring, “President Trump has oranges the size of beach balls. He truly is tough as a pineknot.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or an orange picker, to know what Kennedy was vulgarly, and perhaps passionately referring to.

In the same interview, Kennedy announced that in defense of America, Trump would “eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti,” invoking the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter as an apparent compliment.

Clearly, Kennedy adoringly knows all of Trump’s salacious secrets, including his lust for Lecter..

And then there is the taco. Kennedy told Fox News, “I love the president like a taco: don’t always agree with him, but I think he wants a better world.”

Um, excuse me, Senator Kennedy, but don’t you think it’s motel-worthy that you, as a 74-year-old man, profess your love for another man about to turn 80? Maybe you didn’t watch the entire Colbert Obama interview, because not once did they profess their love for each other, or, for that matter, talk about their gonads.

Anyone who is a political junkie knows how the GOP infighting is not about budgets, wars, or the economy. It’s about who can best declare their undying love for Donald Trump. So, Kennedy calling out two of Trump’s most hated figures, Obama and Colbert, and framing them in crude gay sexual terms, surely earned Kennedy Trump’s love in return.

Maybe not as much as Brazilian UFC fighter Paulo Costa, who Trump declared “beautiful.” “You could be a model,” Trump gushed. And as a gay man, I can tell you that Kennedy can’t hold a candle — or oranges — to Costa.

With all of Kennedy’s affection for Trump and his private parts, maybe they are the ones who should get a motel and, while cuddling, share their love for tacos?

I know Kennedy would come up in a heartbeat, but not the other guy, because Trump always chickens out.

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