Greetings and welcome to this 64th edition of the Carnival of Fools! We’re back to full force at the Carnival this week, with tumblers, twirlers, and all manner of acrobatic morons throwing themselves around the stage so chaotically that we can hardly take note of all of them. Let us begin, at least, with the two men I expect to play leading roles for the next few years.
Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani, Sittin’ in a Tree
Last Friday, dogs and cats lived together for about an hour and a half in Washington, D.C., and Peter Venkman’s famous warning proved false: The result was not mass hysteria, but mass perplexity. Zohran Mamdani, mayor-elect of New York City and avowed communist, met in the White House with President Donald Trump for a discussion about New York City’s challenges and priorities, and then held a 30-minute press avail in the Oval Office.
The minute the meeting was announced by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday, the media started to buzz with speculation as to how it would go: Would we get another Zelensky mess, with JD Vance riding shotgun to blast the smiling mayor-elect? Would we get a grand moment of embarrassment, like Gretchen Whitmer hiding her face behind her briefing book when photographers suddenly entered the room?
We got none of that. What instead transpired was a perfectly chummy chat where the two discussed their shared vision for a better New York, and Donald Trump laughed off their differences: “We agree on a lot more than I would have thought. I want him to do a great job, and we’ll help him do a great job.” Hugs and smiles all around!
Were you surprised? I wasn’t. I have written frequently about how Donald Trump is, at his core, two things before all else: a New Yorker and a showman. A White House meeting with the hottest young star of Democratic politics, to discuss a subject near and dear to Donald Trump’s heart, was guaranteed in his mind to be “ratings gold” — the sort of news-cycle-conquering story where he throws a tonal curveball to fascinate his audience. Trump hasn’t had a lot of “good” news cycles lately, and as a man obsessed with it — for good reason, because in electoral politics perceptions matter — this was an irresistible chance for him to show a more cooperative side of his personality to the public.
It was the reaction of the left to all of this that told the real tale for me. You might have expected Bluesky paranoids and sour-faced social justice radicals to have spit the bit at their progressive hero journeying to Mordor to break bread with Sauron instead of battle him. You might have looked for cries of betrayal and rage from a perpetually betrayed and raging cohort.
Instead, they weren’t angry at all! The left seems to agree: Zohran won this exchange simply by showing up and smiling his way through it. Emblematic was the reaction of Ryan Grim, the activist progressive reporter and co-founder of Drop Site News, who responded to Mamdani’s meeting with Trump by tweeting “Trump and Mamdani giving the country a vision of what bottom v. top rather than left v. right politics could look like is, if not historic, a genuinely novel development.” Vox’s Astead Herndon identified common ground the two men shared: “It’s being rooted in a value that people can easily identify/trust you on. It’s two electeds who treat politics as a collective action rather than a game played top down.”
That all sounds like a lot of bunk to me. What this episode truly reveals is that Donald Trump believes political rhetoric to be as real as professional wrestling, a work of kayfabe. Mean attacks, wild positions, bold promises — these are merely the requirements of campaign season, to be set aside once the time to govern comes. Many of Trump’s most faithful fans will congratulate him on his “hard-headed pragmatism,” and I suppose there is something to be said for that. Others have simply concluded that very little he says means anything at all.
Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani wants progressives to know that he still thinks Donald Trump is a fascist, but he thinks he can work with him. Before the meeting, Karoline Leavitt crowed that “it speaks volumes that tomorrow we have a communist coming to the White House, because that’s who the Democrat Party elected as the mayor of the largest city in the country.” Pragmatism is the order of the day!
Why, it’s practically like witnessing the Treaty of Rapallo being signed in real time. Hooray.
Twitter Holds a Spectacular ‘Location Reveal’ Party
For those of you who don’t participate in the world of social media, I want to first congratulate you on healthy living, and then, second, tell you that sometimes you miss out on quite the party. Twitter/X may take up only a fraction of the online world — most of which is occupied by TikTok, Facebook, and four different social media apps you have never heard of but which are currently warping your teenager’s mind — but its outsized role in shaping political commentary remains largely undiminished, and if nothing else it certainly has the vast majority of the world’s best joke writers. (To name but one recent example: When the Olivia Nuzzi story broke — by which I mean when Ryan Lizza wrote his simpering exposé of their lives together — the place spontaneously turned into Mardi Gras for about 72 hours, everybody uniting across political lines to party down at the expense of all these terrible people.)
Which is why you really had to be there this weekend, to experience the joy once Twitter/X unveiled its new “About This Account” feature. This was done, according to lead product developer Nikita Bier, to “secur[e] the integrity of the global town square.” More bluntly put: As many have long noted, the Twitter experience has been deformed by the constant cheep of mindlessly anonymous “MAGA accounts,” all of which seem to have mysteriously large numbers of followers and which post monetizably divisive red meat for engagement clicks. Elon & The Gang have decided that enough is enough, and in one of the few updates to Twitter that everybody is celebrating, have decided to reveal the physical location (via IP, and country of account registration) of every account on the platform.
Good news: I am provably American, despite the fact that I live in a city run by a fumbling communist. Even better news: Many of the obviously fake “Ultra-MAGA” or “Groyper” accounts are, indeed, based out of desperately poor third world countries or Eastern Europe. But ultimately I’m disappointed. These accounts were always obnoxious engagement-bait sloganholes as opposed to serious (or even seriously viral) attempts at commentary, and are treated as such by all concerned. I’ve seen no truly insane surprises yet, like, say, finding out that Ian Miles Cheong has been secretly tweeting from the United States all this time.
It is depressing how quickly a parasitic culture has sprung up under Elon Musk’s “monetization” scheme, but it is nothing if not predictable. (What did you think was going to happen when Twitter started handing out cash for clicks and making verification purchasable?) Perhaps equally as predictable — although cast aside as a relevant consideration — is how the pay-for-engagement dynamic in Twitter’s “global town square” has played a role in demoticizing, trivializing, and infantilizing our national discourse: Important political issues are now either instantly reduced to the competing clash of memes rather than serious discussion, or simply ignored altogether if resistant to such treatment.
Those whose full-time job it is to sing for their supper on social media are, wittingly or otherwise, colluding in the destruction of its value. The opportunistic foreign fraudsters — barnacles clinging to the hull of America’s boat, hoping to skim sustenance off our cultural waves — are only the most visible signs of corruption. Far worse likely lies beneath the surface. The lure of money — combined with the promise of an audience and notoriety — have warped the incentives for vast numbers of non-fugazi accounts. As my colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, “The far more insidious manipulation is people who have built organic followings now renting themselves out to messaging campaigns.” I myself fall back on the wisdom of an old and legendary cartoon: As far as I’m concerned you’re all Dogs on the Internet until we’ve met in person — and I don’t like meeting people.
Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick Follows a Time-Honored Florida Tradition
What would you do if the federal government put a bunch of money into your business’s coffers via clerical error? You didn’t earn it, you didn’t even necessarily ask for it; but there it now sits, beguiling your bank balance. You would return it, right? It’s not yours to spend, after all. Or maybe you wouldn’t.
It sounds like the beginning of a modern-day fable, and I suppose in some ways it is, because last Thursday, Congresswoman Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick — a Democrat representing Florida’s 20th district, the blue pockets of West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale — was indicted by the federal government after finding herself in this position and (allegedly) making the irrevocably stupid decision of spending all that cash on herself.
More accurately, she spent it on her political career. Before she became a congresswoman, Cherfilus-McCormick was a gadfly candidate running against incumbent Democrat Alcee Hastings in 2018 and 2020, and getting wiped out each time. According to last week’s indictment, when Covid-19 hit the nation in 2020, her health-care firm got involved in vaccination staffing work with the Florida state government and was overpaid a whopping $5 million for its services in July of 2021.
And since the aged Hastings had died while in office just that April — apparently the fate of all Congressional Black Caucus members who don’t lose their primaries — it must have seemed to Cherfilus-McCormick like the stars were aligning for her: Why, here is a free $5 million, and there is an open safe Democratic congressional seat! One she’d already tried her hand at twice, no less! So, according to the indictment, she laundered the free money given to her business into her own name, and then devoted the vast majority of it to winning a fiercely competitive 2022 primary race. She wasn’t going to get outspent this time, that’s for sure.
None of this is quite news. Cherfilus-McCormick had already been sued by the state of Florida for the $5 million overpayment back in January of this year, and in that filing the state made the same allegations. It’s the federal criminal charges that are the new development, and which threaten to put her behind bars.
Needless to say, I welcome the worst. But I also have to point out that it was arguably money well spent for Cherfilus-McCormick — well, up until the moment it led to the state lawsuit and federal charges, that is. For, dear readers, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick won the 2022 primary to replace Alcee Hastings by literally five votes. In a ridiculous eleven-person pig circus of a primary for the safe seat, she won 11,662 votes to Broward County Commissioner Dale Holness’s 11,657. Hey: If you’re going to commit a flagrant felony, at least let it be one that got you a cozy sinecure in the House of Representatives.
It’s impossible not to conclude this sad little tale of theft without noting that it keeps with the fine tradition of representation from Florida’s 20th district. I mentioned Cherfilus-McCormick’s predecessor Alcee Hastings in passing above, but I suspect that only the historically minded recognize Hastings, who first came to prominence as a Carter appointee to the federal bench in the Southern District of Florida back in 1979, as the only African-American judge to ever be impeached by the U.S. House and removed from office by the U.S. Senate. (And this only after a 1983 federal conviction for bribery and perjury.) Hastings’s revenge was to gleefully join the men and women who had impeached him in Congress. But I’m not sure where Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick has to go from here — except perhaps to prison.
Until next week.