Greetings and welcome to the 66th performance of the Carnival of Fools! It’s been a fairly placid week of minor disasters and random follies, so let’s get to discussing at least a few of them — at least before I move to Dallas temporarily to enthusiastically canvass for my new favorite Democratic candidate’s upcoming primary.
You Ask for Miracles? I Give You Jasmine Crockett
Faithful readers probably already know how pessimistic I feel about next year’s Senate election in Texas. Incumbent Republican John Cornyn has trailed ultra-MAGA state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Republican primary ever since polls began testing a matchup between the two, and while it is by no means certain that Cornyn will lose, that’s the way you’d bet it with half a year to go.
The problem is that Ken Paxton is a moral sewer, one whose endless personal sleaze and multiple prosecutions makes him singularly risky as a statewide candidate in Texas in 2026 — a year that, absent some wild external act of force majeure (on the scale of a Martian invasion), is going to see a backlash election against Trump.
For those who scoff at the possibility of a Republican losing an open Senate race in Texas, I direct your attention to 2018, during Trump’s first term, when incumbent Ted Cruz was nearly bounced out of office by progressive (and thinly veiled Irishman) Robert “Beto” O’Rourke; the closeness of the race alone had disastrous downballot consequences. And keep in mind that, whatever Cruz’s charismatic deficits, he was and remains scandal-free, whereas Paxton is infamous — and wildly unpopular among independents and Democrats in the state — for his almost theatrical corruption.
The stars have been aligning for a potential disaster: a Democratic senator from Texas. Trump is nowhere nearly as popular among Hispanics as he once was, because of simple pocketbook politics. Paxton will be toxic. All the Democrats have to do is nominate someone bland and inoffensively competent-seeming — a UT Austin tackling dummy would do — and find themselves with a prebaked 47 percent of the vote in the race, and room to grow. With an eye toward all the forces at play that are making a nationwide 2026 walloping of Republicans likely, I watched this race develop early in the year and wrote a two-word lament in my notes: “Roy Moore.”
But now there is hope — not the hope that Paxton will suddenly become a decent person, or even popular statewide, but hope that the Democrats can magically snatch defeat from the jaws of a potential Texas victory: by nominating Dallas-area Representative Jasmine Crockett for the seat.
Yes, Jasmine’s in! After disclaiming her intent to run for Senate earlier in the year, America’s favorite self-consciously trashy sass-talking gutter queen — whose many travails I wrote about before concluding that she was a genuine counterfeit — announced her candidacy for the seat at the last second in a publicity stunt just before the filing deadline. “When they tell us that Texas is red, they are lying,” Crockett claimed in her announcement. “We are not. Reality is that most Texans don’t get out to vote. The reality is that the people that I used to work with in the Texas House did everything that they could to make sure that they could suppress voices.”
Even before Crockett made her afternoon announcement, safely boring moderate Colin Allred (who lost against Cruz last year) preemptively exited the race in favor of a run for Texas’s Dallas-based 33rd congressional district. That leaves Crockett with a head-to-head matchup against state Representative James Talarico, which cuts against her; she would have had an easier time with a race split three ways. May the worst candidate win — and you can safely assume that’s Crockett.
Crockett, much like Paxton, is very popular with her hardcore base and utterly loathed by everyone else. As a lover of self-inflicted political tragedies, I think this potentially sets up an irresistible match that doubles as the answer to a grand philosophical question: What happens when a movable object encounters a stoppable force?
I will be blunt: America needs Cornyn to win the GOP Senate nomination and face off against some inexperienced but sincere flake like Talarico. (Talarico is primarily known to statewide voters for confidently claiming in a 2021 speech on the floor of the Texas legislature that “God is non-binary.”) But America deserves a Paxton vs. Crockett race, for its countless sins. We must be instructed in pain.
Paxton is beyond redemption, thoroughly unworthy as both a candidate and a man. And yet Crockett is perhaps the only candidate the Democrats could nominate who is almost guaranteed to lose to him next November, a vain and empty-headed glamour queen obsessed with her press clippings and unable to articulate any political argument outside of personal racialized grievance. She’ll go over gangbusters with Texan Latinos and skeptical moderates if she wins the primary, and I pray she does. Bring on the carnage.
No Matter What Trump Says, It’s Still Soccer
It is a well-known fact that President Trump is underappreciated by the world at large. As universally beloved and spectacularly popular as he is here in the United States, the European elite just doesn’t seem to have too much time for a man who has slapped their countries with extractive tariffs, who spews buckets of belligerent anti-continental rhetoric at the world via social media, and who keeps insisting that he is owed a Nobel Peace Prize for his failed efforts to give Vladimir Putin everything he demands in eastern Ukraine.
But he sure has a friend at the International Federation of Football Associations — known to the world as FIFA. During Trump’s first term, in 2018, the United States was awarded the opportunity to host the 2026 World Cup in a joint North American bid with Canada and Mexico. (Recall that this bid was formulated long before Trump declared rhetorical and economic war on Canada to ensure the victory of a Liberal government that he would not be politically compelled to cooperate with.)
FIFA president Gianni Infantino knows exactly how to play ball with a man like Donald Trump. Trump may be shunned around the world by everyone except oligarchic Middle Eastern oil barons, but then again FIFA is also famous for its reputation as the most corrupt institution in all of world sports — it makes the International Olympic Committee look like a panel of incorruptible Solons. So it’s no surprise that Infantino and Trump have been fast friends — “game recognizes game,” as they say.
Perhaps I’m being unfair; Trump’s chumminess with FIFA is nothing new. Infantino has long cultivated a friendship with the president. (To give you a sense of how their relationship goes beyond mere sporting concerns, Infantino was present for the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020.) Either way, Trump was bright, beaming, and happy to be at the Kennedy Center in Washington last Friday for the official World Cup “draw” — the scheduling of games across various cities in the three countries.
The truth is that it was an opportunity to see Trump at his most charming, musing enthusiastically about watching international superstar Pelé run rings around his competitors during the 1970s — and then he had to go and give away the store rhetorically:
When you look at what has happened to football in the United States — again, “soccer” in the United States, we seem to never call it that because we have a little bit of a conflict with another thing that’s called football. But when you think about it, shouldn’t it really be called — I mean, this is football, there’s no question about it, we have to come up with another name for the NFL, it really doesn’t make sense when you think about it.
This shall not stand. There is nothing wrong with soccer — an adequate diversion for small children, one which teaches them the value of performing boring and repetitive tasks — but there is only one “football,” and America stole that name from the rest of the world fair and square. Football players are elite, improbably fleshy heroes in helmets and pads who pitilessly inflict catastrophic injuries on one another on the manly gridiron. Football players are not whisper-thin matchstick men who run half-heartedly around some effetely named “pitch” and flop to the ground writhing performatively for the referees at the first hint of phantom “contact.” Those people play soccer.
After having so much faith in Trump, for so many years, I finally feel shaken in my judgment: Did I misunderstand this man’s patriotism? How can any red-blooded American sell out the NFL like this? Is it a mere coincidence that, at the same ceremony where Trump slandered America’s great sporting gift to the world, he finally received that peace prize he’s been angling for? No, not the Nobel — that will never happen. Instead, Infantino had FIFA create its own peace prize this year and awarded it to Trump, saying Trump had been selected “in recognition of his exceptional and extraordinary actions to promote peace and unity around the world.”
“This is your prize, this is your peace prize,” Infantino said. “There is also a beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go.” (Say what you will about Infantino — the man knows exactly how to flatter his mark.) For the record, I don’t really think Trump intended to sell out America’s proud football tradition last weekend — I’m just having a bit of fun with this topic — but if there is any takeaway, it’s that Trump will say anything in any room at any time to any friendly crowd if he thinks it will get him a good reaction.
Whether or Not Netflix Acquires Warner Bros., Moviegoing Is Still Dead
The world of entertainment collectively shuddered last Friday when Netflix announced its intention to acquire the legendary Warner Bros. film studio — along with its vast library of intellectual property and streaming services such as HBO Max — for the banner price of $72 billion. In agreeing with the streaming service, Warner Bros. turned down competing bids from Paramount and Comcast.
Industry insiders, movie critics, and normal filmgoers alike are singing sad songs about the news because everybody understands what it means for the future of cinema: Outside of certain “event” movies — big-budget blockbusters, IMAX screenings for fussy auteurs — it belongs to the small screen. No matter what Netflix is currently averring (before the deal has been finalized), observers universally believe that it will effectively withdraw Warner Bros.’ cinematic output from increasingly unprofitable theaters — aside from the occasional superhero film or one-week run of a movie to qualify it for Oscar consideration — and use its control over a vast library of streaming content to raise prices for subscribers.
And to be fair, why wouldn’t it? Netflix isn’t about art, it’s about profit — and the profits continue to rise. Netflix is a streaming platform that, over time, turned into a production house for some of the most generic slop to ever be served up to sedated audiences, plus Stranger Things. (Netflix tests for and funds shows that are made not to be paid attention to but rather as background noise for chores.) It has never had any interest in the theatrical experience and has in fact expressed open skepticism about its future viability.
Understand that this is all still quite contingent: Paramount Skydance (the product of another merger completed a few months ago) has appealed directly to Warner Bros. shareholders in a hostile bid to force them to overturn their board’s decision. The deal also still requires antitrust clearance from Trump’s Federal Trade Commission. Given that Trump has reportedly been pushing for ally David Ellison’s Paramount to win the bid, don’t be surprised if Netflix fails at the last hurdle. Trump is a rather . . . transactional type, and he’s already announced his intent to personally review the acquisition. Expect something delightfully sordid!
But even if Trump turns around and awards Warner Bros. to Paramount — which would also be a massive, industry-wide consolidation, albeit perhaps a more aesthetically pleasing one — it won’t save the cinematic experience. Grim as it is to say, Netflix’s theory of the case is correct: People expect their entertainment at home nowadays.
It’s not just that prices for a night out at the theater with your family have risen astronomically, or that standards of decent public behavior have become so frankly barbarous that any given theatrical experience might be sabotaged. It’s that — especially post-Covid lockdown, which rewired an entire nation’s collective habits — American society is increasingly disinclined to seek either spectacle or intellectual stimulation from moviegoing; not when so many other, newer, and more compellingly interactive technological distractions have sprung up to fill the void.
I wonder if Trump understands this at all. This isn’t the first time he has proposed to meddle in Hollywood’s affairs. Back in May, still high on his global tariff campaign, Trump proposed a “100% tariff” for all films shot outside of American territory. (This was the same day Trump promised to reopen Alcatraz; when Trump gets to relaxing on the weekends with his phone, expect serial provocation.) Aside from the folly of the idea itself — which was soon dropped and forgotten — what I wrote back then stands up well enough now as a diagnosis of Hollywood’s real problem:
The movie industry of my youth died not because other countries stole film production locations (as if this even needs saying) but rather because American tastes have permanently changed. With a multitude of modern homebound entertainment options, amidst changing cultural mores and rising prices, we just don’t have a need or desire to go to the movie theater as much as we once did. Hollywood changed accordingly, and much of its elite talent has either left or been left behind. Americans now go to theaters to see A Minecraft Movie, not Chinatown. No tariff policy will ever restore our tastes.
Just so. 2025, as it turns out, was something of a boom year for creative films that sat outside of the tiresome superhero genre and didn’t rely on IP-driven nostalgia or blockbuster budgeting. And oops! — they all flopped, pretty much. Society has irrevocably changed, and we are no longer a nation of moviegoers.
Until next week.