Saturday Night Live has made fun of Boebert before, and deservedly so. She's the sort of political figure comedy writers love to skewer: poorly spoken, ill-informed, ineffectual, self-important buffoons who can't stop putting their dirty feet into their own drooling-for-attention mouths.
On the January 25 SNL show, the joke involved the farce that Boebert created outside a U.S. Capitol women's room last week, when the Congresswoman now representing Colorado's CD4 and Representative Nancy Mace (a Republican from South Carolina who's the first woman not only to graduate from the Citadel, but also to be sincerely jealous of Lauren Boebert's ability to make an idiot out of herself for a cause she doesn't fully understand) confronted what turned out to be a cisgender woman innocently using the facilities.
Bloomberg reporter Billy House witnessed the entire much-ado-about-nothing occurrence, describing a scene on X in which Lauren Boebert "burst out" of the women's restroom and complained loudly to nearby security that there was "a guy" in there. Boebert left and then returned with Mace, and they both entered the restroom...and left rather quickly.
Later in the day, Boebert admitted she'd been mistaken, telling the Daily Beast that "I made an error regarding a mistaken identity. I apologized, learned a lesson, and it won’t happen again." When asked by The Advocate to explain what that lesson might be, neither Boebert nor her campaign deigned to respond.
What could Boebert's lesson be? She had no epiphany about excitedly attempting to victimize a trans person, certainly. On the contrary, the whole thing was clearly meant as a "gotcha moment" aimed directly at their Democratic colleague from Delaware, Representative Sarah McBride, the first out transgender member of Congress. McBride has gone on record stating that she'll follow the House rules established by House Speaker Mike Johnson, which ban transgender people from using the bathroom in line with their gender identity.
No, McBride was not in the bathroom; nor was Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, as SNL suggested. No guy of any kind at all. "There was a rumor there was, but it wasn't true," Boebert ultimately confessed to House.
Boebert is used to getting away with her ridiculous behavior. After all, not even clear and evident carpetbagging — fleeing her original district for a safer, conservative electorate more concerned with identity politics and the Trump lies than actual political service. But even she has her limits — and one of them is apparently the clear light of day. She only apologizes when her awful behavior — handjobs at the Buell, anyone? — gets enough media traction to embarrass her staff, some of whom we assume were hired because they, unlike their boss, are able to feel shame.
The lesson Boebert is almost assuredly learning from this experience is to be absolutely positive that she's victimizing the right person, at least from the perspective of Trump and all his cultists. Within those circles, very little is untouchable anymore, let alone unbelievable. That audience — primarily Fox viewers who're still convinced what they're watching is serious news instead of the "entertainment" that the network itself has claimed to be in court — has been trained like Pavlovian dogs to salivate at the mention of anything pro-Trump, and to ridicule truth and fact when it appears at odds with the misinformation they've been presented with as gospel.
Not even weird and distasteful creepiness is against the rules in Trump-land. Look no further for evidence of that thanBoebert's post on X the day of Trump's second inauguration: "Daddy's home!!" That's with not one exclamation mark but two, as befits the diary of a middle-schooler dreaming of becoming the super-cool girlfriend of one of her favorite music idols.Daddy’s home!! pic.twitter.com/5Gx0pfRf3Z
— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) January 19, 2025
The GOP's attack on trans rights is only one of many things in the hellish handbasket of Trump's America, of which Boebert is a vociferous and empty-headed cheerleader on the sidelines who'd love to get in the game herself. The sheer volume of awfulness is in and of itself the strategy — give the rational and reasonable too much irrational and unreasonable crap to actually handle, and some of it will slip through. Or maybe a lot of it, if the despair and helplessness also being deliberately instituted do their shadowy work.
It's all by design, and like the voters in CD3 (for two elections, before it looked like they'd had enough) and now CD4 (who still need to be convinced, for some reason), Trump snowed enough of America to get back into office. Despite his promises, the country is a complete mess, the rest of the world is both laughing at us and also scared for their own existence, and eggs are almost $12 a dozen.
And Lauren Boebert cheers on, with egg on her face and one eye on the Capitol toilets.
