Good morning and welcome to yet another edition of the ongoing Carnival of Fools! Much has transpired since last week’s election postmortem: One curtain has fallen as another prepares to rise, and now that the tumblers have cleared the stage and the fire-eaters have scattered off into their corners to soothe their charred throats, it’s time for a whole new gaggle of clowns to cartwheel into the limelight. I’ve already disposed sufficiently of Matt Gaetz elsewhere, and there is a larger thesis yet to be written about how Donald Trump’s obsession with Kennedy family glamour and power played a role in his offering one of the most powerful jobs in all of federal government to a fluoride-obsessed, vaccine-denying, crank nutritionist. But for now, let’s return to our variety-act roots and feature a bit more drama from the election’s aftermath. (Also, if you haven’t subscribed at this point, then why not? Things are only going to get weirder from here on out, I promise.)
Joe and Mika Make Their Pilgrimage to the Khan
Back in the mid 13th century, after Batu Khan conquered Kievan Rus’, the Mongols ruled from afar as distant overlords. For hundreds of years they required local leaders to duly collect taxes and tribute and make a periodic journey to the Golden Horde’s capital at Sarai, where their authority would formally be reconfirmed at the pleasure of the Khan. Those who refused to make the journey typically ended up on the receiving end of an invading Mongol army, with their territories seized, their heirs dispossessed, and their heads chopped off.
I raise this fun and colorful historical analogy only because it has much in common with the way everyone — for once, across the political spectrum — is bemusedly characterizing the visit made by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski to President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago for a sit-down over the weekend. Yes, Joe and Mika — hosts of MSNBC’s flagship “liberal Beltway consensus” broadcast Morning Joe — took a secret drive across Florida, that desolate no-man’s-land of MAGA country, to visit the barbarian conqueror in his West Palm Beach palace. (One wistfully envisions Trump receiving his audience while perched sternly atop a throne of skulls, but apparently he was his typical glad-handing self.)
On Monday morning, the pair read a prepared speech about this to their audience — an oddly overchoreographed performance where they traded off paragraphs like a hydra-headed duo — and for all of the statement’s amusing and poignant qualities it sounded first and foremost like a tired wheeze of surrender. Joe and Mika took great pains to reassure their panicked audience that they expressed their disagreements with Trump very sternly, so don’t you worry, gentle progressives — they haven’t turned cur on you, at least not yet. But while they did not swear obeisance to Trump, they also wanted everyone to know that, well, things were going to have to be different now. Forgive the comedic darkness of this analogy, but as Mika gently spoke through her monologue it felt for all the world like “the talk” a mother sensitively gives to a bereaved child about how “Daddy’s gone, but you have a new daddy now.”
What we did agree on was to restart communications. My father often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed. That’s a task shared by reporters and commentators alike. . . . For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back, why wouldn’t we? Five years of political warfare has deeply divided political Washington and the country. . . . But for nearly 80 million Americans, election-denialism, public trials, and January 6 were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote. Joe and I realize it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him.
Scarborough breaks in to add his piece, the obligatory dangling of the “Democrats want to work together to get things done in the new administration” carrot in front of Trump. It’s a traditional appeal Democrats make to an incoming president to try to hornswoggle him, but in this case perhaps also a canny strategic play, given that Trump isn’t running again and already seems to be positioning himself in opposition to a Republican Senate balking at his most controversial cabinet picks. Brzezinski then returns with an explanation for why Morning Joe will no longer be hitting the panic button every morning in the next administration:
Hyperbole and personal attacks will not work. My hair on fire doesn’t work; we’ve all seen that. What also does not work is threatening political opponents with arrest, harassment, and even jail. That is a failed path. Recent history has proven that impeachments and trials turn those on trial into political martyrs and only make them more popular with the American people, just ask Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. We know this will be a consequential presidency; the question is whether it will be constructive. It will take a new approach from all sides, from both parties, and a leader who can bring them together, and only time will tell if Donald Trump is that leader. As for us, we also let him know that we will continue to speak truth to power and push back hard when called for, as we have with all presidents.
Forgive me for quoting so much of this, but I find the entire statement fascinating as a window into a world that a conservative outsider like me rarely if ever sees. The first thing to note is that cable news personalities — and Scarborough and Brzezinski are royalty of the elite political media set — have become so captured by their audience that they feel the need to publicly apologize outright to them, to explain to them, following an act as mundane as having a meeting with the president-elect of the United States. No journalist with any shred of dignity — no journalist whose fortunes aren’t irrevocably lashed to the fickle passions of their audience — should ever feel the need to apologize for the opportunity to speak to the next president of the United States. In fact, I would hope that Joe and Mika feel the same way as well. (Whatever my other criticisms of them, I doubt they lack healthy egos.) But that’s what the Resistance demands.
The other noteworthy element is the clear warning to Trump not to engage in retaliatory prosecutions once he takes office. It would have been easier to dismiss Brzezinski’s warning as mere progressive hyperventilation as recently as a week ago. But alas, on November 13, Trump tapped Matt Gaetz to be his next attorney general, and by all reports he did so precisely because he wants a man who will thoroughly weaponize the office against his enemies and be his new Roy Cohn. I do not think Matt Gaetz will win confirmation in the Senate, but in any event Trump has made it clear what kind of a man he wants at the Department of Justice, so nothing about this is worthy of mockery.
Seth Moulton, Live at the Witch Trials
In the wake of the Democratic wipeout in the 2024 elections, Democratic congressman Seth Moulton, of Massachusetts’ sixth district, said something a lot of voters in the Democratic Party were waiting to hear — in fact, were desperate to hear from an elected official — so let it never be said that he isn’t paying a price simply for telling the barest truth.
You see, the day after the November 5 loss, Moulton finally sounded off to the New York Times about what a plurality of his caucus already believes but cannot say out loud: Fealty to the radical transgender agenda is killing Democrats electorally, not just at the margins but on a core level of voter trust. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
I’m sure many readers here will scoff, “How brave of him, to go out and tell the obvious truth like that!” So understand that in the Democratic politics of 2024, Moulton’s act was a brave one. Indeed, countless activists on the left have subsequently gone out of their way to try to make him “afraid to say that” ever again. He received peals of criticism from other Democrats, including his own state’s governor. The Democratic city council in his hometown of Salem, Mass., formally condemned him and announced it is searching for a primary challenger in 2026. A Tufts University department chairman blacklisted him from recruiting interns from the student body before the university overruled him. His campaign manager immediately quit upon publication of the quote. (I had to laugh at this last bit; a campaign manager quitting after the race is over — a race in a safe seat, no less? Now that’s a real Kennedy-esque profile in courage, right there.) Finally, in an act hilariously resonant with local history, Salem progressives rallied angrily this weekend outside his local congressional office to rhetorically burn the witch in an aptly titled “Neighbors Against Hate” rally.
Moulton — a former presidential candidate and Marine, and by his own confession tired of pretending to be a pushover — has said he welcomes this sort of angry shrieking and would happily face a primary challenge over it if necessary. I hope he does, not because I want to see him defeated but rather because I want to see him vindicated. He stands on eminently solid ground: The economy may collapse or rebound, America may face setbacks or successes abroad, and Trump will always be Trump — but what isn’t changing is that voters are deeply alarmed about the cultural omnipresence and acceleratingly radical demands of the transgender movement. When the Democratic Party immediately adopts all of its activist messaging as theirs as well, it causes voters to lose confidence in them as anything other than a Trojan horse for an agenda they see as directly targeting their children.
I predict Seth Moulton will survive a primary challenge in 2026, should he choose to run. But the fact that he even must concern himself with it, for the crime of speaking plain common sense, is pathetic. It is also proof enough that the Democratic Party is nowhere near through reckoning with the destructive elements driving its coalition to electoral ruin.
Until next week.