Greetings and welcome to this 70th staging of the Carnival of Fools! It’s the first performance of a big year, and it must be said that our ringleader, eternal showman Donald J. Trump, knows how to get the nation’s Semiquincentennial off to a rousingly patriotic bang. Readers, this weekend, the forces of the United States government flexed their muscles for good.
After months of fierce public rhetoric and an impressively focused demonstration of American power, President Trump finally toppled an incompetent, publicly prancing socialist long known to be working hand in glove with a coterie of dangerous anti-Western radicals to sabotage America: Tim Walz announced yesterday that he would not seek reelection as governor of Minnesota.
Tim Walz’s Way into the Political Grave
Indeed, it’s a great day for freedom. In a shocking turn of events, Governor Walz — who announced his campaign for reelection last September — is now suddenly reversing course and pulling out of the race. He is clear enough in his statement about why he changed his mind: the exposure of a massive criminal conspiracy, rooted deeply in the Twin Cities’ Somali community, to engage in widespread welfare and government-services fraud — which has been known about locally for years and tolerated because of vulgar Democratic Party ethno-politics, and whose bill may run taxpayers several billion dollars.
That’s not how the governor put it, of course. In Walz’s world, an “organized group of criminals” fleeced the state for a decade to the tune of billions, but now — even worse! — an “organized group of political actors” has noticed this. That dastardly Donald Trump “wants to make our state a colder, meaner place.” (As one well familiar with January in Minneapolis, I can assure you it is incredibly difficult to do this.)
And, for all of Tim’s plucky gumption, why, he’s just going to have to be the bigger man: “Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity.” So he’s hanging up his spurs to pass his seat in a reliably blue state to a fellow Democrat — maybe Amy Klobuchar will get into the race instead. (My proposal: Governor Omar Fateh, just to make it perfectly clear to everyone who’s really the captain now in Minnesota.)
It was almost touching to see Walz write his farewell with such feigned naïveté, as if anyone in Minnesota politics expects one of the chief handmaidens (witting or otherwise) of a massive criminal conspiracy to defraud the state to be its honest prosecutor. And I sincerely doubt he believes a word of what he wrote: Walz didn’t jump, he was pushed. There is no avoiding the blunt reality that, during a midterm cycle likely to heavily favor Democrats, and in a state as blue as Minnesota — which has not given over 50 percent of its gubernatorial vote to any Republican since liberal Arne Carlson — a two-term incumbent Democratic governor just had to quit his race because there now exists the possibility, however unlikely, that he might lose reelection to the MyPillow guy.
It’s an amazingly fast and karmically fitting end for a man inexplicably vaulted to national prominence by Kamala Harris in 2024, in her desperate search for a running mate even less impressive than her. I then described Walz — whose career I have followed since his days as a nominally centrist southern Minnesota congressman — as an instantly recognizable phony, “a Midwestern Foghorn Leghorn” with the tendencies and insecurities of a serial exaggerator. My colleague Dan McLaughlin saw immediately that his pretenses toward moderation were farcical given his record. But it was Jim Geraghty who nailed what it was that would bring Walz down: the fact that he’d been letting his state get robbed blind for nearly a decade. (Poor Jim was wrong merely about the timing.)
Can we offer any sort of praise to Walz, now that it’s over? Only ironically. The man had nothing to recommend him as a national candidate except his quiescent sub-mediocrity, to the point where I openly wondered whether Harris really wanted to win the race when she selected him. Maybe she really didn’t — maybe her heart was set on that writing career of hers.
In that case, then, Harris chose wisely: It’s safe to say that, as her official emissary to the alien world of Male America, nobody in recent Democratic politics ever “ran a meaner pick six” than Walz did. Setting aside the many scandals surrounding Walz that emerged with the campaign, he was a strategic disaster; chosen to “appeal” to white males, his selection ironically meant that Trump no longer had to worry about his margins among white males, who were more likely to warmly embrace the bathtub zombie from The Shining than an offputtingly blubbering man-child. (Trump then turned to playing for black and Latino male voters.)
The Great White North has not been liberated just yet. This is merely a cosmetic change, as one DFL governor is likely to hand the seat off to another. (And if it happens to be to Klobuchar, then I can guarantee Walz that Saint Paul actually is about to become a “colder, meaner place”). Minnesota is gearing up to meet the new boss, who is almost guaranteed to be the same as the old boss — perhaps this time wearing heels.
The Dance Dance Revolution?
In secondary news, Trump sent Delta Force into Venezuela over the weekend to arrest and extract President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. He then announced that the U.S. would temporarily “run” the country and its oil industry until such time as he saw fit. This doesn’t have quite the same local impact for me as a Midwesterner as Walz’s overthrow does, but it’s good to see other nations tasting a bit of freedom themselves.
Since I already wrote a much longer and more serious piece about the situation in Venezuela yesterday, I won’t revisit my arguments. I will note only a fascinating and disturbing factoid that has emerged from the reporting on the matter: President Trump and I are apparently on pretty much the same wavelength in some key ways.
Recall that in mid-November, I wrote the following:
So you can count me a skeptic of any war for Venezuelan regime change. Or at least you could have until Saturday, when the madman Maduro inflicted a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine” upon his people, and the world. (“Peace, peace, peace! Do everything for peace! As John Lennon used to say, right?” Then the slaughter began.) I am now fully committed to the overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, who, after committing one Marxist cruelty after another against his people, has committed an equally great one — perpetuating the memory of that damned song — against us all.
Now, I thought I was just making a joke with that. As it turns out, Trump was reacting in more or less exactly the same way. From the New York Times:
It was one dance move too many for Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro.
Mr. Maduro in late December rejected an ultimatum from President Trump to leave office and go into a gilded exile in Turkey, according to several Americans and Venezuelans involved in transition talks.
This week he was back onstage, brushing off the latest U.S. escalation — a strike on a dock that the United States said was used for drug trafficking — by bouncing to an electronic beat on state television while his recorded voice repeated in English, “No crazy war.”
Mr. Maduro’s regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance in recent weeks helped persuade some on the Trump team that the Venezuelan president was mocking them and trying to call what he believed to be a bluff, according to two of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the confidential discussions.
So the White House decided to follow through on its military threats.
There are several lessons in this. For one, “Imagine” brings nothing but ill fortune on all those who sing, play, or invoke it. (Look at what happened to Gal Gadot’s career.) But, most of all, other world leaders are now on notice to sit perfectly still; only Trump may dance.
Until next week.