The Year in Review, Part 2: Democrats Turn Up the Gaslight Until the Lamp Shatters

Greetings and welcome to this first 2025 edition of the Carnival of Fools! If you’re new around these parts, then congratulations: You came just in time for a funeral. Yes, today we’re finally laying the miserable, dusty bones of the Year 2024 to rest in the shabby pauper’s grave it deserves. We ended part 1 of this year in review the moment before everything that had taken place in the presidential race to that point was simply deleted from national relevance: the June 27 presidential debate. You can find my take on that in a piece published over the weekend. Consider it part 1.5 of the Year in Review, the Dry and Thematically Important Essay portion of the proceedings.

Now here we are. The end of the Biden era signals a radical shift in the tone of our politics. From the anticipated weirdness of a rerun of 2020, to the revealed incompetence of Biden, to the insertion of Kamala into the race at the last second, the entire world turned tonally on a dime in July, and toward far darker places: a denial of the original scandal, a newly slavish media complacency toward the Harris campaign’s attempts to rewrite its own history, and a blithely unreal sense that politics was a matter of “vibes” and social-media-driven “feels” rather than any substance. A new fantasy edifice was being erected before our very eyes even as the wreckage of the old one was not yet cleared away.

The tone of this concluding edition of the Carnival of Fools year in review will thus be appreciably different from the one offered on New Year’s Eve, because I believe the events of the second half of 2024 to be historically consequential in a way no other political season of my life has been. The events of the past six months will echo politically for years. That said, they were also very, very stupid.

Notes on Some Stuff I Wrote about This Year, Part 2: July–December 2024

IN JULY . . . rumors of Joe Biden’s demise are, for once, not greatly exaggerated. The month begins with the Biden administration stuck in a news cycle without end, trying to hide from a media suddenly interested in uncovering every scandalous story about Biden’s (now universally acknowledged) senescence they can rush into print behind a blind quote. The media tardily arrive at the scene of the flaming wreckage of the Biden campaign not as firefighters but as supplementary arsonists, seeking to reduce Biden to ashes quickly enough to replace him with Kamala Harris. For weeks Biden determines to hang on as the nominee, even if it means riding the electoral bomb down like Slim Pickens to a nuclear conclusion. Biden’s stubborn insistence that he is still alive is met by former Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where she gently coaxes him onto the corpse-wagon. (“Don’t be such a baby Joe, you’ll be dead in a minute anyway.”)

A madman rudely interrupts all of this by shooting Donald Trump in the head at a rally in Pennsylvania. Trump’s reaction to the assassination attempt (which took the life of one of his supporters) is so devastatingly manly that Morning Joe is canceled for a full day of emergency mourning. Later, in the lead-up to the Republican National Convention, Trump chooses Ohio senator JD Vance as his VP nominee; smart conservatives naturally worry whether Vance will hold up his end in a vice-presidential debate with the now-inevitable Harris’s running mate. Meanwhile, Trump reassures America, helping an emotionally vulnerable nation forget that he just survived a harrowing attempt on his life by delivering an RNC acceptance speech as long as a Fidel Castro dinner oration and as coherent as Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis.

Everyone forgets, because late in July, Joe Biden finally accepts the Reaper into his heart and abjures the presidential race, via tweet. He endorses Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination, via tweet. He then elects to remain president of the United States — also mostly via tweet. The Biden presidency is immediately forgotten as the media, realizing it failed at its one appointed job — speaking truth to power — strives to at least succeed in a new and more hopeful task: electing Kamala Harris, the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful vice president — and a woman! . . . a woman of color! — all of these people have ever known in their lives.

Donald Trump concludes the single most surreal month in recent American political history by attending the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists and arguing that Harris — to quote Yankee legend Gary Sheffield’s thoughts on teammate Derek Jeter — “ain’t all the way black.” Polite media is scandalized by the bluntly racialist talk. A significant number of African-American males instead nod their heads silently and ponder the point in private.

IN AUGUST . . . the month begins with former third-party candidate and recent Trump endorser Robert F. Kennedy Jr. copping to the crime of the century: Ten years earlier he surreptitiously deposited a bear carcass in New York City’s Central Park, framing it as the result of a bicycle accident. (Now it can be told — to Roseanne Barr, in a TikTok video.) Few believe RFK Jr.’s adamant insistence that he himself did not kill the bear — he is merely an amateur collector of such items, he claims — until evidence later emerges of his knack for spontaneously dismembering whale corpses. At this point questions turn not to whether RFK is lying, but rather what his private trophy case must look like, and how many specimens of the Most Dangerous Game are currently displayed there.

Having parachuted unexpectedly into Joe Biden’s Democratic nomination for the presidency, Kamala Harris spends most of August retaining not only Biden’s campaign staff but his election strategy as well, hiding from all unscripted contact with America — but for very different reasons. Chosen by Biden specifically for her unthreatening idiocy, she is ill prepared to rescind a decade’s worth of fashionably hard-left positions in 30 days; that job is delegated to staff instead, to be disseminated via press release.

After deciding that maybe she doesn’t want to win the presidential race after all, Harris selects safely mediocre fabulist and Minnesota Democrat (alas, I repeat myself) Tim Walz as her running mate. On August 20, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago lurches to life with all the speed and elegant choreography of a yolk-soaked hatchling hesitantly pecking its way out of an egg.

The most important news out of convention week is its absentees: With Harris substituted in for the failing Biden, neither the promised hordes of pro-Hamas protesters nor Beyoncé bother to show up for the event. (As a Republican, I am more disappointed by the former than by the latter. As a Chicagoan and man of taste, both absences please me immensely.) Democratic conventioneers are left instead with empty anticlimax: cheering and chanting, moving forward and never going back, and forever twirling, twirling towards freedom.

IN SEPTEMBER  . . . the Carnival of Fools stages its inaugural performance. Its author miraculously turns 44, surprising all who knew him in his younger days. Nothing else of importance happens this month.

As for matters of lesser import: Donald Trump meets with Joe Biden’s understudy for the second and final presidential debate of the 2024 campaign cycle. In a bid to revive heartland tourism, Trump recommends Springfield, Ohio, to foodies as a hidden small-town delight replete with intriguing variations on New American cuisine. Wonks the world over immediately declare this a devastating victory for the prosecutorial-minded Harris as opposed to the pet-obsessed former president. Normies head to YouTube to call up musical remixes of the night’s events instead.

The baseline temperature of the race remains unaffected by all of this — Harris’s numbers continue to cool off after a media-boosted convention bounce — to the point where the media’s frustrated analysts occasionally decide they need to go and personally adjust them after the fact. A second man endeavors to assassinate Trump — this time on his golf course at Mar-a-Lago — and is caught before he can make the attempt. He is inspired by Democratic messaging on Trump’s purported Ukraine policy. This is immediately forgotten about, because narratively inconvenient; Trump is instead blamed for provoking madmen to try to kill him.

With Shakespearean timing, the pale specter of President Biden returns from the political grave to haunt Harris’s joyful election vibes like Banquo’s ghost showing up at a dinner party bleeding from twelve separate stab wounds. Hovering on one television show after another in his post-campaign irrelevance, he troubles voters with memories of why they even have to consider Harris as a potential presidential candidate in the first place. (On ABC’s The View, he utters nary so much as a spooky “BOO!” before laying the Curse of Biden upon her: “As vice president . . . I was able to delegate her responsibility on everything from foreign policy to domestic policy.”)

In the least important news of 2024, the Chicago White Sox lose 121 games, setting a Major League Baseball record for futility and proving that clownish incompetence is not the province of politics alone.

IN OCTOBER . . . the Israelis finally get their Yahya’s out. Vance spars with Walz in the sole vice-presidential debate of the season, and the universal pundit verdict halfway through is “Stop! He’s already dead!” Vance’s defeat of the hapless Walz is so complete that smart conservatives, having doubted him up until this point, immediately begin congratulating themselves on having been in his corner all along. Harris — forced by sagging poll numbers into finally taking adversarial interviews from the unaligned press — helps matters not even the slightest bit by malfunctioning in every one of them like a poorly programmed robot asked to rhyme the word “orange.”

In response, Democrats focus on the real problem: men. Hollywood musters its top talent to prove Democratic masculinity, with predictable results. Former president Barack Obama takes to the stage, rallying for Harris in the final days of the campaign trail — and using the occasion to lecture “the brothers” about their lack of enthusiasm for Mamala. With piercing erudition, Obama determines that the problem is that black men are sexist and the misogynist pigs should feel ashamed of themselves.

Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney also throws in, joining the Harris campaign to preach to progressives in swing states about the need to come together and preserve the consensus Washington foreign-policy approach all progressives have hated since the exact microsecond they realized they were progressives. The Washington Post declines to join this final effort for Harris and announces it will not endorse a candidate; civilization ends for several hours until social media remember that it is no longer 1974 and nobody reads the Washington Post. (Meanwhile over at The Nation, the interns declare war on their editors for the crime of endorsing Zionist pig Kamala Harris.)

Donald Trump responds to all of this by working a shift at McDonald’s and riding shotgun in a garbage truck in the final weeks of the campaign. It is an omen of things to come.

IN NOVEMBER . . . Donald Trump wins the presidency, sweeping every swing state and claiming the first Republican popular-vote victory since 2004. He does this by assembling a new voter coalition for the GOP, and pulls it off not merely because the Biden administration is disastrous, or because Kamala Harris is historically terrible as a national Democrat, but also because he is a uniquely good candidate for the moment. Days later Florida senator Rick Scott attempts to capture the same zeitgeist and runs for Republican majority leader as a Trumpist. He fails, both because he is not Trump and because, more importantly, his colleagues find him weird and alienating.

In a bid to buoy the spirits of depressed progressives, a victorious postelection Trump pranks America by nominating serial Axe Body Spray–user and possible statutory rapist Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general. Gaetz resigns from Congress to seek the job before he realizes Speaker Mike Johnson is enforcing the “no takebacks” rule. He is therefore left stranded when the Republican Senate conference makes it clear that under no circumstances will they be voting for a man with a Venmo-transaction history more complicated than most federal RICO cases involving the Sicilian mob. He is now found — featured as nature’s cruelest mistake — hosting a show on something called “OANN.”

IN DECEMBER . . . after years of insisting that under no circumstances would he do something as nakedly corrupt as pardoning his drug-addict convicted criminal of a son, Joe Biden pardons Hunter Biden, his drug-addict convicted criminal of a son. In a press release to the nation explaining his actions, Biden writes several paragraphs that reduce to the phrase “#YOLO, bitches.” Distraught progressives immediately suppress their grief at Trump’s reelection and Biden’s naked corruption by focusing their affections on a psychopathic killer. Their hoped-for revolution fails to materialize after two weeks of encouraging coverage.

At this point the Wall Street Journal publishes a blockbuster article revealing that President Biden’s mental decline has been apparent to all within his inner circle since the moment he formally took office. His staff conspired to lie about it for that entire time — even as he chose to run for a second term — and counted on the benevolent indifference of the media as part of its scheme. Here, at the end of December, the press now stirs itself to report the truth it slept through all these long years. It is the fitting denouement for a presidency that was a fraud perpetrated upon the American public in all its particulars.

Until next week.