My 2024 "McLaughlin Awards" (Part 1)
Everybody ready? Here is the first installment of our year-end awards, with our obligatory nod to The McLaughlin Group television show for coming up with these categories.
As always, it's a marathon. It's really, really long. Don't say you weren't warned! And since it is so long, that's all the introduction we're going to bother with.
Ready?... everyone buckle up... here we go....
Biggest Winner Of 2024
This one's pretty undeniable. Donald Trump was the Biggest Winner Of 2024. Several people did suggest Elon Musk for this award, but he didn't so much "win" anything, instead he bought himself the job of "co-president" (we'll see how that works out...).
But keeping to a literal interpretation of the award, we have to admit that Donald Trump was indeed the Biggest Winner Of 2024, achieving something (a non-consecutive second presidential term) that has only been achieved once previously in American politics.
Biggest Loser Of 2024
If we were in a literal mood, we might have chosen Kamala Harris for Biggest Loser Of 2024. After all, she lost the biggest race in the country.
President Joe Biden doesn't really qualify, since he took himself out of the running by, well, not running. Because he didn't finish his campaign, he technically didn't lose it.
Over on the Republican side, we did consider Nikki Haley, because she was the last woman standing against Donald Trump in the primaries, and (even though the media mostly didn't comment on it) managed to get a larger "protest vote" against Trump than what was happening on the Democratic side with Biden. Then Haley, after dropping out, threw her support to Trump anyway. Which Trump completely ignored -- he never let her campaign for him anywhere. When he won, he immediately announced that Haley would not be one of his nominees for any position in his administration. Which makes Nikki Haley a very certain type of loser, to be sure.
But we have to agree with reader "nypoet22" who suggested a more abstract nominee, and say that the Biggest Loser Of 2024 was "objective reality." Donald Trump has succeeded in gaslighting roughly half of the American populace. Reality, to his followers, is what he says it is -- facts be damned!
Fact-checking Trump is a tilting-at-windmills sort of thing to do. He even started refusing interviews during the campaign whenever anyone threatened to do real-time fact-checking of anything he said. That's how much he "can't handle the truth." And he's quite successful at his flim-flammery -- he can make his followers believe anything, no matter how laughably insane it is.
There are two sayings in American politics that spring to mind: "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts," and: "Reality has a liberal bias." Neither of these apply any more, obviously, since Trump does seem to get away with his own "facts," and reality can have any bias it wants these days because it just doesn't matter.
The whole nation has gone through the looking glass. Reality is in the rearview mirror. Use whatever glass-based metaphor you want, but we find we have to agree with the suggestion. Objective reality was indeed the Biggest Loser Of 2024. And it's not going to get any better any time soon, with Trump back in office again, surrounded by his team of sycophants. Remember Sharpiegate? Expect a whole lot more of that type of ridiculous gaslighting very soon now.
Best Politician
We got two competing suggestions for this category from readers, and it took us a while to choose between them. We also considered Trump and Biden and Harris, but while they all ran political campaigns none of them really stood out as politicians per se this year (apart from the campaign, in other words).
So our runner-up comes from reader "Kick", who nominated Hakeem Jeffries, commenting: "Nothing happened in the House this year unless Jeffries negotiated and/or allowed it. Expect more of that in 2025." Which is an excellent point, we had to admit. The Republican speaker was stymied by the Chaos Caucus in his own party over and over again and it took reaching out to Democrats to actually pass all the bills that had to pass. Without Jeffries, this simply wouldn't have happened.
But we had to agree with nypoet22's nomination instead. So this is somewhat of a curveball, but we're going to hand the Best Politician award to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Mostly because he still is speaker.
Normally, that wouldn't be all that notable an accomplishment, but seeing as how the last Republican speaker (remember Kevin McCarthy?) crashed and burned, it truly was.
Johnson had many tightropes to walk, this year. He seems to have navigated all of them successfully (well, "successfully enough" at any rate). He kept the seething rage of his most radical members under enough control that they never managed to subject him to a real threat of deposal. Which is more than McCarthy managed. And more than we expected (we were predicting at the start of the year that he wouldn't last past Valentine's Day).
Of course, the House didn't get much of anything done. Which, in its own way, was a relief. The hotheads never really got to drive the bus. When crucial votes were needed, Johnson wasn't afraid to turn to the Democrats to get must-pass bills through the chamber. So there were no government shutdowns and no fiscal cliffs all year long.
We realize that is a pathetically low bar for the United States House of Representatives, but hey, it is what it is -- this is the world we live in now.
So for keeping his own Chaos Caucus happy enough not to usurp his leadership role while also working with Democrats to keep the government's lights on, we have to grudgingly admit that Speaker Mike Johnson deserves the Best Politician award.
Worst Politician
We had quite a few nominees to choose from here. Joe Biden? Kamala Harris? Nikki Haley? JD Vance ("childless cat ladies," etc.)?
Two users suggested Kari Lake, and we have to say, that is an excellent choice. She's now lost every race she's attempted in Arizona, and the Republican Party there might be in a much better place if she had just never run at all.
We almost went with Kristi Noem, since (after all) it was her own memoir that sank her chances of becoming Trump's running mate. Her charming and endearing story of shooting the family dog in a gravel pit was so horrifying that even Trump knew she was politically radioactive at that point. And it was self-inflicted harm. Noem could have decided not to tell the story in her memoir, but she went ahead and did so -- which is not exactly being the smartest politician in the world.
But we had forgotten all about Mark Robinson. The lieutenant governor of North Carolina was running for the top job this year, but his gubernatorial hopes went down in flames after CNN released a bombshell of a scoop detailing Robinson's online history.
It wasn't just that he regularly frequented a porn site. It was what he commented on the site that truly torpedoed his chances of getting elected. Robinson, who is Black, referred to himself as a "black NAZI!" He called Martin Luther King Jr. a "f*cking commie bastard," as well as a completely racist name. Want more? How about: "Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few." His view of the government under Barack Obama: "I'd take Hitler over any of the sh*t that's in Washington right now!"
That's not just bad -- that's "worst." Which is why we have to give the Worst Politician this year to none other than Mark Robinson, who we sincerely hope will never run for any office ever again.
Most Defining Political Moment
This award should have gone to what reader "Kick" suggested: the Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling. That could be a defining moment far beyond just this year, we do realize. But we've got another award in mind for that particular travesty.
Instead, we tried to choose between two rather related moments, and finally decided they were so linked that they could be spoken of as a single one. Which is why Most Defining Political Moment goes to President Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance and then his dropping out of the presidential race.
These two things (linked together) absolutely defined the entire year in politics. Historians will study the abrupt end to the Biden campaign and the incredibly foreshortened Kamala Harris campaign for decades to come, most likely. America has truly never seen anything like it -- the closest parallel was Lyndon B. Johnson dropping out of the 1968 race, but that happened much earlier in the calendar year.
Biden's debate performance was the most meaningful any of us has likely ever seen. In previous presidential debates, there may have been one moment or a particularly poignant quip that sticks in the mind, but Biden was just awful from start to finish. He looked about as far from "presidential" as can be imagined.
Here's how we wrote about it, the next day:
We even had to agree with one reviewer who used the term "slack-jawed" to describe Biden's appearance. That's how monumentally bad it was.
Biden, true to form, took forever to make his final decision. He wasted almost an entire month before he announced he would be stepping down from his re-election effort. Which set the stage for Kamala Harris to try to salvage the Democrats' chances of victory. But the decision to step down wouldn't have happened without the debate itself. Which is why both moments win the "Most Defining Political Moment" of the year.
Turncoat Of The Year
We considered R.F.K. Jr. for this award (for obvious reasons), but then found we had given him the same award last year, so we thought that was enough. We also considered Nancy Pelosi and George Clooney, for their very public push to get President Joe Biden to step away from his re-election campaign, but they felt they were acting in the best interests of their party, so while they did turn on Biden they were doing so for what they considered loyal reasons.
There was the head of the Teamsters, who appeared at the Republican National Convention, but Unions aren't technically part of political parties so while it was rather shocking it somehow didn't rise to the level of this award.
Instead, we are giving Turncoat Of The Year to the Supreme Court justices who turned their back on the United States Constitution -- after half a year's delay -- and decreed that United States presidents can do whatever they please while in office, without ever having to worry that any of it will be considered illegal. All they have to do is call it an "official act" and they've got a big fat green light to do pretty much anything they wish. Even (as was argued in court, during the case) sending SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival.
This turns the concepts of "no man is above the law" and "we have a government of laws, not men" on their heads. It bestows the president with kinglike powers that are an absolute affront to the Constitution and to the bedrock idea of America.
We are all going to rue this ruling in the future (perhaps in the very near future). At some point, some future Supreme Court is going to have to overturn this travesty of a ruling and subject the president to the same laws the rest of us have to live by -- but that's not going to happen any time soon.
For turning their coat on the United States Constitution and allowing any president to break any law he or she wishes (as long as they call it an "official act" ), the justices on the Supreme Court who joined in this ruling are definitely the Turncoats Of The Year.
Most Boring
This one is an easy one.
The 2024 primary season wins Most Boring, hands down. It was all a foregone conclusion before it even began. There was no real drama at all. Everyone know before any votes had been cast that Donald Trump and Joe Biden were going to be the two major parties' nominees. In fact, the entire exercise was so soporifically boring that there's really nothing else to say about it. This year's primaries were the Most Boring ever.
Most Charismatic
This one may surprise some people, but we are going to hand the Most Charismatic award to none other than Kamala Harris.
Was it enough? Well, obviously not. But it was impressive nonetheless.
Harris was handed an almost-impossible task. Take over a flailing campaign with just over 100 days until Election Day, put together a Democratic National Convention that got the party enthused again, and convince swing voters to back her rather than Trump. She was Joe Biden's vice president, which meant she had to share some of the baggage of his dismal job approval ratings -- and it also meant she couldn't differentiate herself effectively from "the Biden/Harris administration." She had won no primaries (they were all over by that point) and yet had to unify the party behind her with no time to spare.
Which she did, admirably well. She hit the ground running in breathtaking fashion. Within roughly 30 hours after Biden made his announcement he was withdrawing from the race, Harris had locked down enough convention delegates to secure the nomination. This precluded a big intraparty fight which could have lasted right onto the convention's floor (which would have been a very ugly thing to watch). She talked all those delegates into backing her somehow, and personal charisma had a part in it.
Harris didn't do very well in her presidential run in 2020 (other than one memorable debate moment), but she had spent the past four years getting a lot better about politicking in general. She revealed herself with a new persona, and it resonated immediately among Democrats. Harris was exciting! She was joyful! Yes we Kam! She was even pronounced "Brat" (for those who understand the reference, which we fully admit we did not, the first time we heard it).
Within a single week, she had turned the campaign completely around. Biden exited the stage and Kamala stormed onto it with a passion. She then made an excellent pick for her running mate, for many reasons (we wrote a whole article about how he was a genuine American Jungian stereotype, the Midwestern good guy, calling him "Richie Cunningham's dad" ). Her speeches were exciting, she had plenty of exciting folks on stage with her (lots of popular celebrities) and she gave off an entirely different "vibe" than the Biden campaign. This was all topped off with a joyous and exciting Democratic National Convention. After which, she absolutely cleaned Trump's clock at their one and only debate.
The only problem was that it didn't last. For whatever reason, at some point her surge in the polls and popularity stalled. And in the end, it just wasn't quite enough to defeat Trump. But does anyone out there think Biden would have done any better?
Kamala was something new and exciting, she seemed totally comfortable in her own skin, and she gave off an incredibly positive feeling at the start of her campaign. Which is why we decided she had earned Most Charismatic for the year. We only wish she could have kept it going a couple months longer, that's all.
Bummest Rap
Donald Trump certainly wasn't shy about lobbing accusations towards anyone at all, on the basis of "something he read on the internet," but we're going to tackle the worst of these in a different category.
As reader nypoet22 suggested, we could have gone with: "Joe Biden. Period." Biden got a bum rap all year, really. Combine it with Kick's suggestion: "The U.S. economy," and you get Bidenomics, which certainly got a bum rap. Post-COVID, the American economy was the envy of the rest of the world, as we came to a "soft landing" with no recession, plentiful jobs, and much lower inflation than most developed countries experienced.
Then there was the whole "impeach Biden" effort, which was just laughable from the start. They never uncovered evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden, but that didn't really matter, they forged ahead nonetheless. In the end, they couldn't even manage to convince all the House Republicans to vote for it, so they had to settle for second-best.
Which is who gets the Bummest Rap prize, because the impeachment of the first sitting cabinet member in American history -- Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas -- was a complete farce from beginning to end. Republicans impeached Mayorkas for the "high crime and misdemeanor" of being a Democrat and carrying out a Democratic president's policies, plain and simple. They impeached him because they couldn't manage to impeach Biden.
They almost couldn't even do that -- the first House vote failed, due to Republican absences. The second time around, Speaker Johnson correctly counted noses and it squeaked by, but the Senate quickly dispensed with the entire matter by voting not to even bother to hold a trial. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the time that it was "the least legitimate, least substantive and most politicized impeachment trial in the history of the United States," and he was right. Of course, the Republicans howled since they were denied their dog-and-pony show of a sham trial (which would have bred endless campaign ads for them, no doubt), but they didn't have a leg to stand on. After all, the most vociferous Republican senators decrying the vote to dismiss all charges voted for exactly the same thing during Trump's impeachments.
The whole thing was a farce, and a dangerous precedent to set. And at the heart of it was the Bummest Rap of the year.
Fairest Rap
We're going to hand out two awards in this category, one on either side of the aisle, since we found we couldn't choose between them.
The first is a label that really deserves to be used constantly, by all Democrats. Because it fits. The man who will be sworn in as president next month will forever be known to us as "Convicted Felon Donald Trump." After being found liable to the tune of over $350 million for his business fraud and to the tune of $88 million for defaming a woman he sexually assaulted, Donald Trump was found guilty by a jury of his peers on all 34 criminal counts of election interference in the 2016 election, for paying hush money to a porn star and then cooking the books to hide where the payments were going. It's a shame he didn't face juries for all the other charges he faced (all of which were very serious), but he has earned his new title of Convicted Felon Donald Trump forevermore -- it's a fair rap, in other words.
The other Fairest Rap this year is that Bob Menendez is a total sleazebag. Remember him getting caught with oodles of cash and bars of gold stashed away in his house? They were pay-to-play quid-pro-quo payments from a foreign entity, and Menendez sold his influence in the Senate quite blatantly and cheerfully -- right up until he got caught. Then it was time to heap all the blame on his wife, of course (see previous "sleazebag" comment).
There was one very good outcome to the whole fiasco, however, because Menendez going down in flames set forth a chain reaction in the state of New Jersey that went a long way towards dismantling the Democratic machine politics that had pervaded the state for decades. This happened in numerous ways, from the party machine losing the ability to rig the primary ballots to an upstart winning the nomination to replace Menendez (rather than the nepotistic candidate the machine preferred) to a Jersey political boss getting the book thrown at him later in the year.
In the end, the jury did the right thing and pronounced Menendez guilty, and he was forced to resign his Senate seat. But he'll forever be known as a total sleazebag politician, because that was also the Fairest Rap of the year.
Best Comeback
Before we get to the main award, we have to at least give a nod of appreciation for a different take on the word "comeback."
When Marjorie Taylor Greene was being as offensive as possible in a House committee hearing, one of her targets zinged her right back. After hurling plenty of very personal insults at various Democrats on the committee, Representative Jasmine Crockett decided that she had had quite enough. She raised a point of order with the committee chair, James Comer, in the following manner:
Comer responded with: "A what, now?"
Heh. Best comeback line in Congress all year long!
But more seriously, even we have to admit that the Best Comeback of the year was Donald Trump winning a second, non-consecutive term as president.
This feat has only been accomplished once before in American history, back in the 1890s when Grover Cleveland managed it. Most failed presidential nominees never get another chance, for what might be called obvious reasons. But Trump managed to pull the wool over the eyes of his own devoted MAGA personality cult, and insisted that he actually had won the 2020 election -- the Big Lie that he persists in spreading even to this day.
This was pretty delusional, especially considering that neither Trump nor any of his followers has ever produced even a scintilla of evidence of the truth of his Big Lie, but the Republican Party as a whole decided it was easier to believe the man behind the curtain than trust in their own lyin' eyes. Which set the stage for Trump's comeback.
Nothing deterred this comeback. Not getting indicted in multiple criminal cases, not getting held liable for sexual assault, not also being held liable for business fraud, not for treating classified documents as party favors among his buddies (even including nuclear secrets and war plans), and not even being convicted of 34 felonies in an election-interference case from the 2016 election. Trump is the ultimate Teflon Don -- nothing ever seems to stick to him.
All of it just seemed to make Trump politically stronger -- which defies conventional political gravity. None of it brought him down.
Trump will be the oldest president ever inaugurated, and it has shown, all throughout the campaign. He is losing his grip more and more. He flubs facts, pronunciations, names, memories, his own position on issues -- just everything. He has so many "senior moments" it is downright alarming. And none of it made any difference.
Trump, after winning the debate he held against Joe Biden, was absolutely humiliated in his debate with Kamala Harris. It didn't matter one whit.
He wound up sweeping all the battleground states and securing a second term, four years after losing an election to Joe Biden.
Even we have to admit, that is a comeback for the ages. Which is why Trump is hands-down the winner of the Best Comeback this year, much as it pains us to admit it.
Most Original Thinker
This wasn't really a great year for original thinking. Maybe Tim Walz for coming up with "weird" to describe Trump and his minions?
We almost decided to give it to the governor of Maryland for his blanket pardon of 175,000 marijuana crimes, reaching back to the 1980s, but while this was indeed impressive he didn't exactly think up the idea (other states have done so, although not in such a widespread blanket manner).
Instead, we are going to give Most Original Thinker to Los Angeles Magazine writer Adam Parkhomenko, for one very striking metaphor. In an article warning of Trump's increasingly authoritarian statements, Parkhomenko came up with an absolutely brilliant metaphor that we hadn't previously heard. It is relatable and it explains not just the public's diminishing capacity for outrage, but also the mainstream media's.
Here's how he put it:
For this excellent metaphor, we think Adam Parkhomenko deserves the Most Original Thinker of the year.
Most Stagnant Thinker
If the award just read "Most Stagnant," we would give it to Attorney General Merrick Garland. But his stagnation was in not acting, not in anything he thought up.
We considered giving it to the Arizona supreme court, for ruling that an abortion law passed during the Civil War (long before Arizona even became a state) was somehow still valid and constitutional. That was some mighty stagnant thinking, we have to admit -- so bad, in fact, that even some Republicans joined with Democrats in the state legislature to overturn the ancient law.
But we're going to give the award of Most Stagnant Thinker to all of those Republicans who want to start robustly enforcing the Comstock Act again. Here is Senator Tina Smith from Minnesota explaining why it is "ridiculous... that we're even talking about this legislative relic today."
So he made it his mission to clean up society, creating the loftily named New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and gathering evidence for police raids on places that distributed material he thought was obscene or promoted indecent living. In the early 1870s he took his crusade to Washington, lobbying for federal legislation that would empower the post office to search for and seize anything in the mail that met Comstock's criteria for being "obscene," "lewd" or just plain "filthy." Morality, as determined by Comstock, would be the law of the land, and Comstock himself would be its enforcer, appointed by Congress as a special agent of the post office.
In a fit of Victorian puritanism, Congress passed the Comstock Act into law. But it quickly became apparent that Comstock's criteria were unworkably vague. In its broad wording, the law not only made it illegal to send pornography through the mail, it also outlawed the sending of medical textbooks for their depictions of the human body, personal love letters that hinted at physical as well as romantic relationships, and even news stories.
The whole thing was very silly and impracticable, and that's why the Comstock Act was relegated to the dustbin of history.
Being silly and impracticable is no obstacle for some forced-birth Republicans, though. They want the Trump administration to start enforcing it again. Which would mean that any "article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use" would be "nonmailable matter" which "should not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post office or by any letter carrier."
Good luck defining "for any indecent or immoral use" once again.
The Comstock Act should have been overturned a long time ago, but the only time Congress did so was on a portion of it, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that contraception was legal (they overturned the parts that outlawed sending any contraception through the mails). Which means the rest of it is just sitting there in federal law waiting for any zealot to come along and attempt to enforce it again. And there is no shortage of zealotry among some Republicans.
Anyone who is thinking of reviving the Comstock Act is without question the Most Stagnant Thinker of the year.
Best Photo Op
This was another one that pains us to admit, but we have to agree with readers nypoet22 and Kick -- Donald Trump's reaction to his first assassination attempt was indeed the Best Photo Op of the year.
Maybe it's just some sort of deep-seated instinct in Trump, but he knew he was having a moment and he made the best of it.
After catching a bullet or a piece of shrapnel with his ear, Trump ducked down behind the podium and was surrounded by a "dog pile" of Secret Service agents. When word came that the shooter had been killed, they tried to get Trump up and hustle him off the stage to his vehicle.
But Trump, perhaps because he knew the shooter was dead, decided to make political hay at the best possible moment for him. He appeared, head and shoulders above the scrum of agents surrounding him and defiantly waved his fist, with blood streaming down the side of his head. "Fight, Fight, Fight!" he chanted to the crowd. As the agents finally did get him to move off the stage, Trump continued mugging for the cameras.
The whole thing was politically brilliant, you've got to admit. And totally unscripted -- as mentioned, it seemed more of an awareness that the cameras were all on him and an effort to milk that for all it was worth.
And it worked.
In the history books, the photo of Trump getting hit and crouching down behind his podium won't be shown -- instead they will show him defiantly waving his fist and chanting "Fight!" to the crowd.
Which was indeed the Best Photo Op of the year, like it or not.
Worst Photo Op
We got the suggestion that Biden's debate performance was the Worst Photo Op of the year, but we don't really consider that to technically be a "photo op" -- it was way too long for that, in our opinion. It wasn't fun to see -- Biden with his mouth gaping open, struggling to put his words together -- but it seemed a lot more than just a photo op to us.
There were the insurrectionist flags displayed in front of Samuel Alito's vacation home (and him blaming his wife) -- that one was pretty bad. And there was an ad Trump ran which had in the background a newspaper with the phrase "the creation of a unified Reich" on it... that was so over-the-top that Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote of it: "As you've probably heard, Donald Trump has once again raised a führer."
But to us, the Worst Photo Op of the year was R.F.K. Jr.'s Super Bowl ad. This was a blatant ripoff of a 1960 campaign ad for John F. Kennedy (see the original and the ripoff, for comparison), and was an absolutely shameless attempt to leverage his last name to get votes. It was so bad many members of his own family vociferously condemned R.F.K. Jr. for running it. As we called it the day after, the "Nepo Baby Ad" was an affront to everything the entire rest of the Kennedy clan has stood for and meant to the American people, and R.F.K. Jr. trying so shamelessly to benefit from his famous family was just downright disgusting.
Plus, it's a really annoying ad.
Which is all why the Nepo Baby Ad wins Worst Photo Op of the year.
Enough Already!
As always, this is a catchall sort of category, for stuff that didn't rise to the level of any of the other awards. Feel free to add to the list on your own, as we said it's the junk drawer of these awards.
Merrick Garland's endless delays -- Enough Already!
Rudy Giuliani and his Rudy Coffee -- Enough Already!
Ticketmaster's monopoly -- Enough Already!
"Dynamic pricing" for events -- Enough Already!
Hannibal Lecter -- Enough Already!
Supreme Court corruption -- Enough Already!
The Supreme Court declaring presidents kings -- Enough Already!
The insistence on Trump's eternal innocence -- Enough Already!
Trump selling every kind of cheap crap imaginable to grift his followers -- Enough Already!
Worst Lie
Perhaps some personal bias enters into the choice for Worst Lie this year, we will admit.
There were plenty of really odious lies to choose from, of course. Trump was the source of many of them (also "of course" ). Just on the subject of abortion, there was Trump repeating (unchallenged, for the most part) over and over again that: "everyone wanted Roe v. Wade overturned -- everyone!" and: "Democrats want to be able to kill babies even after they are born," neither of which was remotely true. And that's just on one subject -- Trump had plenty of other lies on every other subject he addressed (sharks... Hannibal Lecter... Willie Brown in a helicopter crash with him... the list goes on and on).
Early in the year was an absolute head-scratcher of a lie, told by credulous Republicans: Taylor Swift's success was some sort of "Pentagon psy-op" dreamed up at a NATO meeting? Or something like that? The Kansas City Chiefs winning the Super Bowl was all somehow part of this nefarious plot? That one really took the cake for bizarreness, we have to admit.
More seriously, there are two lies that we did consider for the award that were indeed of a more concerning nature. The first was suggested by reader nypoet22, that "Biden is sharper than ever." This was a lie (or "spin" if you want to be polite) that was put out by the White House (and plenty of supporting Democrats) when Biden's age and mental faculties came into question in the campaign. "No, no, he's sharp as a tack!" was the basic message. But this was proven wrong when we all witnessed Biden's trainwreck of a debate. So how many people at the White House and beyond had actually noticed Biden was slipping a few cogs and refused to publicly admit it? That is a lie with some serious implications, after all. What if Biden had won? And what if he had deteriorated further? Would all these people just continue to lie about it to the American people?
Then quite recently, Biden pardoned his son Hunter. This made him into a liar by his own action. All during Hunter's court case and legal troubles, Joe Biden insisted he would respect the findings of the court and over and over again also insisted he wouldn't pardon Hunter no matter what -- as a matter of principle. The rule of law was too sacrosanct for him to even consider such a thing. He even maintained this position after the election was over. Right up until he didn't. Biden pardoning his son will be debated for a long time to come, but at the heart of it was a gigantic lie, because he had stated so many times -- and so unequivocally -- that he wasn't going to do it.
But as we said, we have a more personal take on this award. Because to us, the Biggest Lie of the year came from Trump's mouth in his debate with Kamala Harris: "They're eating the dogs... they're eating the cats."
Like many Trump lies, this one was born of an internet rumor that Trump read and treated as Gospel truth. Even after it was pretty conclusively proven that such a thing had never actually happened. It was picked up by his running mate, and then Trump repeated it during the debate when he was backed into a corner by Harris. Harris taunted Trump for people streaming out of his rallies while he was talking, and this just incensed him no end. In the midst of a rambling blustery retort (which we provided in full, the day after the debate), Trump said:
He was referring to an internet rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were somehow on a rampage -- capturing, killing, and eating their neighbors' pets. None of it was true. But that didn't stop the MAGA army from phoning in bomb threats to elementary schools and the Proud Boys marching through the streets of the town. We wrote about it at the time, calling Trump's egging people on by its proper name ("stochastic terrorism" ), and denounced it forcefully, because Springfield, Ohio is very close to the very small town where we attended college. When Trump was asked about all this, he couldn't even bring himself to condemn the bomb threats. Against elementary schools.
This is political domestic terrorism, folks. And it is an ugly, ugly thing. Real people's lives were affected by it. Fear spread, for no reason whatsoever. And the fearmonger just didn't care one bit.
Which is why, for us, this was the Worst Lie of the year.
Capitalist Of The Year
While we did have to consider Donald Trump (for continuing to come up with new and inventive ways to grift his own followers -- gold sneakers! $100,000 watches! cologne!), his paltry efforts fell short.
A good case can indeed be made for Elon Musk, who made a $250 million investment that bought him the title of "co-president" and a role in taking a wrecking ball to the structure of the federal government, but even this was rather small in comparison.
No, the Capitalist Of The Year was none other than Taylor Swift.
She just wrapped up a two-year world tour that raked in a jaw-dropping two billion dollars.
That's billion... y'know... with a "B".
This is such a staggering accomplishment for a pop singer that it has to be acknowledged as greater than anything Donald Trump or Elon Musk did this year. Taylor Swift was, hands down, the Capitalist Of The Year.
Honorable Mention
Another category for people who didn't rise to any of the other awards.
So, in no particular order, we award Honorable Mentions to the following:
Representative Al Green, who went directly from getting an operation in a hospital to the House floor just so he could be the deciding vote to stop the impeachment of Homeland Secretary Mayorkas. Speaker Johnson didn't expect him to show up for the vote and thought it would pass with the votes he had, but it didn't (it did later on, but that's immaterial to Green's extraordinary and impressive effort).
Tom Suozzi, the Democrat who flipped a House seat after the defenestration of George Santos.
Joe Biden, for delivering a great State Of The Union speech.
Lauren Boebert's idiocy, for ranting about the "Biden Crime Family" right before her 18-year-old son was arrested on 22 criminal charges.
The United Auto Workers, for organizing an auto plant in the South for the first time since the 1940s.
The guy who lost his case at the Supreme Court, who ruled that he couldn't trademark the phrase "Trump So Small" to sell merchandise.
...and, finally, the absolute best suggestion for this category, from reader nypoet22:
Maya Rudolph, for her portrayal of Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live.
Person Of The Year
The whole path was frustrating in a lot of ways, but in the end he got there. Which is why our selection of Person Of The Year is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, because he was the only one who managed to actually make Donald Trump face justice for his crimes.
Bragg was not very gung-ho about the effort at first. When he first entered office, he considered the investigation the previous D.A. had done and decided to hold back on prosecuting Trump. Two of his lead prosecutors immediately resigned in protest, because they thought the case should move forward. But then eventually the so-called "zombie case" came back to life.
Bragg filed his charges against Trump before anyone else. The federal charges and the charges in Georgia followed Bragg's indictment, so he truly led the effort to hold Trump accountable from the start.
Plenty of people second-guessed Bragg for bringing the charges, before and during the trial. They were complicated... it was a novel application of the law... what if there's a hung jury?... what if the case just can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt?... etc., etc., etc. There was also the complaint that this was the most minor of the four cases against Trump, and frustration that the more-serious cases didn't happen first. But Bragg achieved what the others couldn't, because he successfully batted aside all of Trump's efforts to endlessly delay before the trial happened. So America was able to see Trump sitting in a courtroom, facing the music (and often nodding off to sleep) for at least one of his crimes.
In the end, the jury only took 10 hours to deliberate, which is lightning-quick for convictions on 34 separate counts. And the verdict was unanimous, straight down the list: guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty....
Alvin Bragg is now the only prosecutor to have ever taken a former president to court and convicted him of felony crimes. He will go down in history for doing so. While Trump's legal antics were successful in delaying the other three cases against him until after getting re-elected, in Bragg's case justice was not delayed or denied.
For that accomplishment, Alvin Bragg is the Person Of The Year.
[See you next week, for the conclusion of our 2024 awards!]
-- Chris Weigant
Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com
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