Good morning and welcome into the “Mount Doom” edition of Carnival of Fools. The armies are arrayed upon the field, the hour of clash has come nigh, and here we are standing barefoot and ragged near the crest of a fiery volcano, half-dead and with no certain purpose other than to see it through, come wrack or ruin. Except that, this time, the story is written by Martin instead of Tolkien, and there are no magical eagles to fly us out of Mordor at the final moment. No, this time I’m pretty sure there is no happy ending. But I’m exhausted and at the least happy to be here with you, at the end of all things. (Unless the recounts drag into December, that is.)
This Election Is God’s Judgment upon Us, Again
I’m out of wordsmithery; I now think Harris will narrowly edge out a victory (independents seem to be breaking in favor of her across all states), and, should this come to pass, I fear the outcome will be even more bitterly disputed — likely upon similarly spurious grounds — than it was in 2020. Did I write it up the opposite way last week? That indeed I did. But momentum matters, and this last week has seen undecided voters seemingly making their call for Harris over Trump. Maybe I’m wrong, in which case I’ll get on my swimsuit and enjoy a monthlong spell in the public dunk tank. But when elections come down to a flip of the coin, you’re asking even the most informed commentators to essentially guess on which side the coin will fall. And I think Trump will fall short, as much as I wish that Republicans as a party would triumph overall. There is a penalty that must be paid for renominating such a thoroughly unworthy person to be president of the United States, and whether the Republicans pay it now or advance the debt (under massive, party-crushing interest) to 2026, pay it they will.
I will instead fall back on the summation offered by a friend and colleague, Michael Brendan Dougherty, when he wrote back in 2016 for a different venue: This election is truly God’s judgment upon us. He wasn’t joking when he wrote it, though Michael could not have predicted the subsequent turn of events any more than I could have. And after he set forth all the proximal political reasons why the Trump/Clinton choice was an awful, inexplicably inseverable Gordian knot, he moved on to what was more important:
I’m not joking. This isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. I’ll give you all the technical and historical knowledge I have. We can discuss history and analyze policy options all day. But if you want my answer for what is actually going on in this election, I suspect we are experiencing God’s wrath.
I look at the headlines, our candidates, our political parties, our civic life, and mostly what occurs to me is that God has given us over to ourselves in this election, and he lets us make fools of ourselves with it. And not just this election. All the signs of God’s judgment of a nation, or a civilization, seem to be on us. . . .
So these are the last of tens of thousands of words I’ve written in the run-up to this wretched election. I have lost my illusions about my political allies. Everyone seems to recognize the world tipping into craziness, and they respond by holding on tighter to their own version of craziness. Maybe this is mine. Roll your eyes if you like. I no longer fear Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or their fans.
You should read the entire thing. It is pure coincidence — but a happy one — that we found ourselves as colleagues years later. I can only conclude with the observation that Michael put down nearly a decade ago yet has become very real for me at this late date: “This election has taught me to fear God.”
Where Were You in 2016?
But let’s have at least a bit of fun, okay? A friend of mine, Ben Dreyfuss, sent out a call for submissions to his excellent Substack with this prompt: “Where were you on Election Day 2016?” Because as you no doubt recall, regardless of what Team MAGA may have believed, the media and political world entered that night confident that Hillary Clinton would wipe the floor with Donald Trump. After having sent to him a version of what follows below, I stupidly realized that the rest of you deserved to read it as well.
I don’t know where you were on Election Night in November 2016, but I wouldn’t be surprised if your experience at least somewhat echoed my own: downing an entire 750ml bottle of cheap, store-bought bourbon. The only difference might have been that I was sitting in the (once glorious, now defunct) BuzzFeed newsroom in New York City while my team with the fledgling Decision Desk HQ was being paid by BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith to tabulate and instantly update vote counts. It was in some ways counterintuitive for Smith to bring in a bunch of folks who originally hailed from the right-leaning side of the data-crunching world for this sort of job, but Smith has always had an eye for rebel talent, and it’s fair to say that none of us on-site that day were terribly invested in Trump — or anything for that matter save, “How will this state’s region vote relative to that other one northeast of it?” — because we all assumed the race was over for the Republicans anyway.
And then, well . . . that happened. Our team leader, Brandon Finnegan, was doing live-stream hits as the data dropped for us at the desk, so I couldn’t interrupt him. I still remember walking out to the BuzzFeed newsroom, a sea of cubicles, from my corner where we were doing live number-crunching, and saying, “People, you need to start rewriting your pieces: Trump is going to win Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. He’s president now.” (Or words to that effect — you must recall that at this point I was justifiably 14 sheets to the wind.) I think at that point I went downstairs to chain-smoke and nervously laugh about how insane this all was with Tim Miller, now of the Bulwark. I remember telling a bunch of upset BuzzFeed girls, “Hey, trust me, this is going to be an utter sh**show of an administration, and you’ll LOVE what happens in 2018,” but they were having none of it. One of them, even after having the temerity to bum an (extremely expensive, non-loosie) cigarette off me, shot back, “Well it’s easy for you to say, you’re not in danger now like I am.”
Eight years later, she makes mid six figures in NYC media, and I’m still that jackass you dunk on when you accidentally click the “For You” tab on Twitter. Yet I think I won out all around, merely by keeping a sense of hopelessly detached but sincere distance from it all. All of this is something that must wash over and past us, regardless of our politics and beliefs. We can observe, and vote, and hope — but in the end we can hope only (and most properly) to understand, unless we are activists. Either way, none of us deserves what is about to happen in 2024, except <points finger> you, and you, and you specifically.
All the rest of you? God bless, see you on the flip side, and keep your mordant sense of humor.