Greetings and welcome to this 99th performance of the Carnival of Fools! Isn’t it such an auspicious, exciting number? We’re almost there, to the Big Meaningless 100th Anniversary! (And because we’ve been running this feature a bit like a marathon, the 104th will mark two calendar years of hosing the horse manure out of America’s Augean stables here at the Carnival.) Why, it’s practically the Summer of Jeff around here, so let’s celebrate these miserable dog days of 90 degrees and 400 percent humidity with a visit to one man’s endless cycle of political torment.
Ken Martin, Stuck in a Moment He Can’t Get Out Of
Slightly over a year ago — on June 18, 2025, when Ken Martin was but four months into his tenure as chairman of the Democratic National Committee — Shane Goldmacher and Reid Epstein of the New York Times published a front-page, above-the-fold exposé about his various travails: “The D.N.C. Is in Chaos and Desperate for Cash.” Big donors and smaller activists alike were no longer giving money to the Democratic Party’s national campaign apparatus, even as the upcoming midterm elections looked likely to feature a severe backlash against Trump and the Republicans: Would a Democratic Party at war with itself internally be able to properly capitalize?
The piece came at a particularly bad time for Martin, who had just finished quelling a hilarious (delightful, disgraceful, inevitable . . . there are too many appropriate adjectives to pick just one) public insurgency by his rebellious vice chairman, David Hogg. You remember young David, don’t you? I myself miss him dearly; he had a brief, Koufax-like career as a performer here at the Carnival — a dominant peak, cut short by injury.
Hogg was a proud and open subversive, who promised to bring his particular brand of authentically whelpish, balsa-wood-armed progressivism right into the heart of the Democratic establishment. Then, once inside the tent, he immediately fragged it: Hogg started a private super PAC to fundraise for Democratic Socialist challengers to Democratic incumbents. (“It’s my nature,” said the scorpion to the frog.)
Martin first tried to plead with him, privately moaning to Hogg that he had “essentially destroyed any chance I have to show the leadership that I need to.” Faced with Hogg’s intractability, Martin eventually had the youngster’s election as vice chairman nullified on laughably contrived and retroactively applied “diversity” grounds. (Apparently Democratic stakeholders were confused about whether or not David Hogg was white.) Punch line: None of this helped those incumbents one bit come primary season — the DSA has cut like a buzz saw through safe blue incumbents all across the nation. Thanks, Dave!
Then, of course, Martin faced the problem of the DNC’s 2024 “autopsy.” All such documents are pointless nonsense — not honest analysis so much as messaging to stakeholders and media types (Message: “We care that we lost”). Martin had promised one as part of his campaign for the chairmanship, and its failure to materialize led to criticism. (“I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore,” he was heard to remark in a Zoom meeting around this time.)
And there again were Goldmacher and Epstein at the Times to write a front-page piece about it, with a headline that sounds like it was written by a certain wag, not the sober tribunes of the Gray Lady: “Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death.” (Matters were not helped when Martin finally released the poorly written, logically flawed, and comically unfinished document less than a year later — revealing that it had been quickly abandoned at an early draft stage simply because it could not really be “fixed” in any way.)
Now, everything old is new again, and the New York Times is back with another front-page feature on the dire financial straits of the DNC and the haplessness of poor Ken Martin — written by none other than Goldmacher and Epstein, who if nothing else are clearly deeply sourced among Martin’s enemies. “Inside the Phone-Throwing Drama at the Troubled, Broke Democratic Party,” reads the title, and if it feels like déjà vu all over again, that’s because (as I have shown you) this piece is basically is a remix of the old one — and by the same people, no less!
It seems that a year on from sending his rebellious vice chairman to Hogg heaven, Martin is in no firmer control of a Democratic Party apparatus that is in danger of losing its relevance to the voters (if it hasn’t already). And the signs of wear and tear are showing. According to the Times: “In a pique of frustration in early July, [Martin] threw his phone at the desk of a junior aide while upbraiding the person. The phone-tossing incident resulted in a formal complaint to the D.N.C.’s human resources department.”
Meh, that’s not so bad – sounds to me like Katie Porter on an unusually benign day. More interesting is the fact that you’re hearing about it at all, and in conjunction with a fundraising situation that might make anyone want to toss a phone in frustration: “The Democratic Party and its allies are far behind Republicans when it comes to money. Mr. Trump controls a $400 million super PAC, and the Republican National Committee is sitting on nearly $130 million. Mr. Martin’s D.N.C. is $2 million in debt.” It’s gotten so bad that vendors working with the DNC are being asked to wait until after November to submit their bills. All despite the immense head of steam Democrats have built up going into the midterms.
So I’ve had my fun with all of this here at the Carnival — and not just because, like Oppenheimer, I always toast to the confusion of my enemies. (Though there is that.) Ken Martin the man is a cipher, which paradoxically makes his travails more interesting: they’re not really about him or his personality at all. It’s about the larger crisis within the Democratic Party, whose formal institutions are beginning to crumble as their political coalition is swamped by the energy of the radical left, which associates itself (quite cleverly) with two things that are catnip to institutional Democrats: diversity and youth.
Every Republican who has lived through the past eleven years knows what a developing internal political civil war looks like. Our revolt was very different from the one theirs is shaping up to be, and theirs will have different long-tail effects.
Trump requires loyalty only to himself, not to any one particular position, so his following is almost entirely devoid of ideological content. For Trump’s most devoted followers, it’s his pugnacity that stirs their instinctive affections (“He fights!”), not his tariff policy. The Democratic revolt, however, is almost entirely about ideology. And if you want one key reason the national Democratic organs are withering, even as individual candidates like James Talarico, running for the Senate in Texas, can score massive national fundraising hauls, look no further than this: not even the national party itself quite knows where it stands — or wants to stand — on issues like Israel, nationalizing the health-care system, border enforcement, or a whole host of cultural and sociological matters that dominate the outlooks of younger Democrats.
What do Democrats believe today? What will they believe tomorrow? Several older, longtime donors look at the shocking gains of the parasitic Democratic Socialists — with their package of blatantly Marxist revolutionary demands united around the energy of anti-Israel rhetoric, and their explicit hostility toward (and determination to replace) the Democratic Party from within — and think to themselves that putting money into the party might turn out to be like buying a pig in a poke. What positions will the Democrats claim to hold once all of this ideological ruction is over?
And yet even as things begin to fall apart, internal power plays are being made. Martin is largely being made the fall guy for problems that preceded him: the insane 2024 candidate-swap campaign left the party in an enormous financial and reputational hole. Not to mention that the losing faction (as represented by partisans of Wisconsin state party head Ben Wikler) is airing its grievances in the hope that Martin can be forced out before his term is up in 2029. I once described Martin as “a semi-anonymous functionary by design, a man whose Democratic ambitions have been forever confined to the shadows, to organizational and administrative politics.”
He is the consummate insider, and this is how he won the job earlier this year over his rival, Wisconsin upstart Ben Wikler. In a hard-fought race for the chairmanship of the DNC, Wikler had the money — backed by mega donors Alex Soros and Reid Hoffman — and the “youth appeal” angle, but it was no match for Martin’s decades of relationships and acquired loyalties. Wikler, with his record of clawing swing-state Wisconsin back from Walker-era Republican dominance to the Democrats, was the buzzy, “sexy” choice — but at the end of the day the Party Man always wins out. (This is the first and last time I will compare Martin to Joseph Stalin, from whom he could have taken some tips when it comes to commanding loyalty.)
A year on from that writing, Martin’s experience as the head Party Man has apparently made him more paranoid – he took at least that much from Uncle Joe’s style – but it has failed to give him any better a true sense of actual command.
Trump Ruins the White House Correspondents Dinner for the Media, and That’s Good
Dedicated readers of the Carnival may remember that I had planned to celebrate this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner with my own gala spectacular, wherein I would torch the idea of the Washington media altogether. It was going to be a big night for Trump, as he’d skipped hosting the WHCD till this year. So I’m pretty sure that, for once, the president and I shared a true unity of purpose: to make these clowns as uncomfortable as possible.
Then, an overconfident maniac attempted to assassinate the president and members of his administration, putting an early end to the evening. This weekend, Trump got his mulligan, when a slightly smaller guest list gathered at the Washington Waldorf Astoria for the WHCD only to hear themselves belittled by the president of the United States. They were left huffing and puffing with rage at Trump’s adolescent insults and score-settling — and good.
Trump’s delivery wasn’t brilliant — his age is showing — and he often veered toward the tasteless. (Though that Bari Weiss joke was way funnier than anyone in the room was willing to acknowledge.) But let me here confess to a certain mean streak: That’s what I wanted. I loved seeing these self-impressed hacks squirm. I’ve criticized Trump’s venality, thuggish behavior toward the press, lack of underlying principle, and outright stupidity plenty often. It doesn’t matter. Even though Trump bombed harder in that room than America has in Tehran, he was striking against a worthy opponent, one that deserves to have its pretenses shattered.
After 105 years and exactly one bout of the media taking the abuse they have become accustomed to dishing out, now some are claiming they’ve had enough. It’s time to bring the entire sorry spectacle to an end. I chuckled as I read the doyen of the D.C. press, New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker, somberly tut-tut: “Our mission is to defend the First Amendment rights of White House correspondents to report on the president without fear or favor. Unfortunately last night did not advance that cause. Time to rethink the dinner.” Yes. Quite so.
Until next week.