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M.V. Fenwick of the Politics Desk on Imperial Birthdays. Plus: Steven Spielberg, Sleuthing Vicars, Texas Floodwaters, and More…
Letter from Quebec Street NW
Dear Wags,
Birthday weekends can be stressful. You may throw yourself into an extravaganza, but past a certain number of candles, it’s hard to beat back the dread that comes with realizing time isn’t on your side. In the case of the 47th president of the United States, rest assured that he will not mark his 81st year on this planet by jotting a few musings into a gratitude journal. Whatever superlatives are slathered atop the $60 million UFC spectacle staged in his honor, it won’t be enough.
No, we suspect the Chief Executive’s thoughts will stray from the grappling on the White House lawn to events a little more than a mile away, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where, as we write this, workers are prying the Trump handle off Carrara marble.
The chiseling began under cover of darkness, after much storming, both meteorological and presidential. Over the past few days, it has drawn a modest crowd, if nothing like the throng Dana White can pull in. Trump and his enemies understand symbolism, and a clean image of that moniker being stripped away is the sort of thing apparatchiks will work overtime to suppress.
Yet it appears to be happening, this weekend of all weekends. And we can only think: Poor You! Because if there is one thing we can say with confidence about the most famous man in the world, it is this: no fawning compliment or humiliating genuflection soothes him for long. Somewhere out there, another ingrate is taking a hammer to the legacy. No one wins the news cycle forever, and no birthday, however lavishly produced, can ever be happy.
If we share nothing else as a nation, it is our intimate familiarity with a single ego: galactic, restless, and fragile. You may find this administration’s excesses entertaining, or regard them as a plague, but even the man in charge knows the curtain comes down on every act. This is the curse the White House is trying to outrun.
After all, the only American constancy is inconstancy. By the time the punditocracy diagnoses a national mood, the country has usually moved on. That being the case, the Politics Desk can say with 100 percent accuracy that this moment, endlessly repackaged and spat back onto your phone, is already over. Wokeism, circa 2020? Over. Revenge-MAGA, circa 2024? Over. Podcast-driven contrarianism? Over. Morons whacking their cheekbones with hardware? So over. Tech broligarchy, trad-wifery, and remaking the republic in one man’s image? Over, over, over!
The trick in this silly guessing game is identifying the latest national delusion while the corpse of the old one is still warm. For clues, it helps to pay attention to quotidian politics. So here is our rundown of recent events, cooked up tangy and digestible:
1) Spencer Pratt was never going to be mayor of Los Angeles.
Let us repeat that for our chums at Bel-Air Country Club: Spencer Pratt was never going to be mayor of Los Angeles! Shed no tears; he can always become Director of National Intelligence. Let’s begin with the obvious: L.A. is an overwhelmingly blue town, turning deep indigo. And if Rick Caruso—a perfectly reasonable moderate ex-Republican—couldn’t win the mayoralty in a better year for the GOP, there was zero chance a reality star running a Trumpy, meme-driving campaign could. Pratt made little effort to broaden his appeal beyond the wealthiest enclaves of Los Angeles, many of which are independent cities anyway. The Free Press crowd and bros who loved AI videos of Karen Bass as the Joker? There aren’t enough of them to carry a mayoral election in the non-virtual municipality where Democrats enjoy a four-to-one registration advantage.
L.A. is not New York in 1993, and the appeal of an old-fashioned law-and-order pitch is limited. In any case, that’s not what Pratt delivered. There are strong arguments for improving the city’s infrastructure and quality of life. Nattering about naked zombies is not one of them.
2) Just because you lost doesn’t mean somebody cheated.
One of the pitfalls of constructing your own reality is losing touch with the real thing. The latest example is the effort by the President and his fans to cast aspersions on L.A.’s mayoral race. Surely Pratt should have finished in the top two because… everybody’s talking about him! This is the best argument for broadening one’s social circle ever devised. (See above, delusional self-soothers.)
Let’s get this straight: Democrats, who are not doing a brilliant job running L.A., were somehow capable of rigging ballots to hurt Pratt. So they arranged for Bass, an unpopular incumbent, to face off against Nithya Raman, a challenger on her left who presumably has a better shot at unseating her than Mr. Naked Zombies ever would. Meanwhile, they also arranged for Fox News B-teamer Steve Hilton to emerge as the GOP gubernatorial nominee opposite the Biden-era cardboard Javier Becerra. What an ingenious ploy by the Socialist International!
The Bass campaign did whatever it could to elevate Pratt, having concluded that her best path to reëlection was facing an opponent who reminded voters of the most disliked politician in Los Angeles: Donald Trump (Pratt looks likely to finish slightly ahead of Trump’s dismal 2024 showing in L.A.). Had The Hills villain squeaked into the runoff, Bass would likely have crushed him in the general. Reality, shmeality! Guess who would still be calling it cheating?
Still, California does itself no favors. The state’s tortured voting process isn’t “crooked,” but it begs for controversy. The world’s fourth-largest economy can’t go on counting ballots for days—or even weeks—after Election Day. A well-intentioned effort to expand the franchise creates an opening for sour-grapes attacks on the process. Conservatives, increasingly averse to mail voting (wonder why?), watch their leads evaporate as later ballots come pouring in. This taps an ancient Republican suspicion of big-city political machines that predates Trump, though the President has weaponized that suspicion to stir up trouble. And more trouble is coming.
California Democrats—not a visionary crew—should hustle to modernize the state’s electoral system in ways that build trust while preserving access. In any case, buckle up for the midterms.
3) Sorry, Graham Platner has a very good shot in Maine.
The reasons are not entirely unrelated to Pratt's downfall in L.A. The old conventional wisdom held that cosseted, left-of-center national media misread voters far from coastal metropoles. The new reality is this: digitally driven media, left and right alike, speaks only to siloed true believers.
Damaging national coverage of Platner (messy love life! idiotic tattoo!) did not dent his Democratic primary victory, where he walked away with at least 70 percent of the vote. Anybody who thinks his candidacy is merely a DSA fever dream isn’t paying attention to Maine. Unlike Pratt, Platner has focused like a laser on actual voters, many of whom are considerably less animated by national coverage of his character lapses. And Maine, unlike L.A., is tiny. A lot of these voters know him.
Platner’s best line is: “You can’t have transformational politics if you don’t think people can change.” He has cannily argued that all the negative coverage proves he threatens elites (running against both the New York Times and Fox News is never a bad idea). Nobody seriously thinks Platner is a Nazi. The final judgment rests on whether he’s too sloppy. Possibly. But he may have turned sloppiness into a political strength that will enrage his critics for decades to come. Trump calling him “a thug” helps.
Whatever one thinks of the blue-collar bona fides of a man who logged time at Hotchkiss, Platner is a formidable politician and a more credible threat to Collins than the cautious standard-issue Democrats she’s spent decades mowing down. Her latest opponent is painting her as the ultimate corporatist lizard in a state trending in his direction. If he succeeds, the talent scout who just called him a thug may well be hosting him in the Oval Office.
4) The rebellion against AI is real and cross-partisan.
From rural Texas to the Upper West Side, rage at tech companies is turning into a political sledgehammer. The fear that rich and powerful interests are foisting resource-draining data centers onto unwilling communities is remarkably pan-ideological. In Michigan, where Democrats hold power, local fury is palpable; the same is true in GOP-dominated Utah.
In Manhattan, Democrat Alex Bores is trying to edge out fellow assemblyman Micah Lasher in a marquee congressional race—one that also includes callow Kennedy heir Jack Schlossberg (a limp campaigner away from TikTok) and professional anti-Trumper George Conway—by hammering the threat posed by AI. Lasher is now attempting to weaponize Bores’ stint at Palantir against him; that this consumes debate in a district that will never, ever host a data center tells you something.
Silicon Valley has displaced Wall Street as the Big Bad, and AI is shaping up to be an issue that subsumes old cultural divides and forges new political coalitions. Chart it by the heaps of money tech companies spend to smother the issue in the cradle.
5) Corruption matters.
You may have forgotten this amid all the talk of gilded ballrooms, $1.776 trillion slush funds, and crony-enabled Albanian resorts, but right-wing populism was meant to be populist. Without the gnawing realization that there was one set of rules for cosmopolitan elites and another for everyone else, Donald Trump, the unrepentant plutocrat, would never have made it to the White House twice.
Trump brilliantly channeled discontent brewing outside the fleshpots of capitalism, but those also happen to be the only neighborhoods he knows. His genius for self-promotion and self-dealing was always irreconcilable with governance. That contradiction was easier to indulge when it didn’t intrude on most Americans’ livelihoods. But on a cellular level, even supporters know he’s tanking America like an Atlantic City casino, saddling the country with unbuilt boondoggles, tacky branding, and a Denali of debt.
Recent history suggests the next American president may well be a stylistic (and generational) departure. After Bush, who figured on Obama? After Obama, who imagined Trump? Oh, we could be wrong, but don’t be surprised if a figure rises over the next two years who is more Boy Scout than bombastic tycoon: someone who spends less time on social media and more time rooting out kleptocracy.
“This is the most corrupt administration of all time,” goes the John Ossoff stump speech. “While you pay more for everything, the first family’s wealth is growing by billions of dollars—because they’re crooks, and everybody knows it.”
That is enough to send tingles up a few pundits’ spines. Ossoff may look like Kal-El, but he still has to win reëlection to the Senate. Naturally, he’s denying presidential ambitions. But after another Gilded Age, the country may well hunger for a reformer in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt—or Eliot Ness. After all we have lived through, it’s hardly a bad bet.
Yours Ever,
—M.V. Fenwick
The Vicar of Deadly
Grantchester, Season 11 (PBS). Grantchester exists only to provide padding between advertisements for Viking River Cruises, but what cozy padding it is! You know the drill: the handsome vicar (Rishi Nair, the third man of the cloth to head up this series) settles into an Oxfordshire village where the locals expire like mayflies. Gruff Detective Inspector Robson Green (Geordie Keating) seemingly cannot solve these crimes without a pitch-in from the Church of England. A cast of quirky supporting players (Al Weaver, Kacey Ainsworth, and most of all, crusty Tessa Peake-Jones) kibitz on the sidelines. The plot twists are telegraphed from six counties over, and everything gets set right by tea time. As demanding as a sentimental Ray Davies song about village greens, but it’ll do for Sunday night.
—Joyce Barnaby
They’re Still Out There!
Disclosure Day (Theaters). Steven Spielberg, the most cherished filmmaker of our era, has a genius for withholding. His best pictures work on the imagination long before It—a ravenous shark, friendly aliens, the unseen driver of a killer truck—ever appears. If we were forced to pick our favorite example of this trick, it would have to be 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the extra-terrestrials tease Richard Dreyfuss before materializing, late in the third act, looking like Victor Wembanyama.
The revelation itself is never the point; the real subject is our human capacity to fill in the blanks. That remains true nearly a half-century later. Disclosure Day, with its hidden aliens, wild-eyed idealists, and sinister operatives trying to keep them quiet, plays like a bookend to Close Encounters, with Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor sharing the Dreyfuss role. She is a television weathercaster receiving strange signals from beyond; he is a shaggy whistleblower determined to expose the Wardex Corporation, run by a menacing Colin Firth.
Wardex has spent decades suppressing evidence of alien visitors dating back to Roswell, and worse. Our heroes, joined by Eve Hewson and Colman Domingo, set out to blow the lid off the operation and liberate a few E.T.s in the bargain. Along the way, they discover their connection to the visitors runs far deeper than they realized.
If none of this is exactly new, it is, of course, dazzlingly rendered. More importantly, it is, as a Spielberg picture ought to be, profoundly optimistic. After all this time, the director remains a Boomer in the best sense: a child of American possibility who looks to the stars and comes away with an irrepressible sense of wonder.
—Claude Lacombe
All the horror and beauty in the world can be found in nature. Few people understand that as deeply as Texas Monthly senior editor Aaron Parsley, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the 2026 Guadalupe River flood, a catastrophe that tore through an idyllic stretch of Texas countryside and claimed more than a hundred lives. Where the River Took Us is the podcast retelling of that calamity, which for Parsley began as a family getaway and ended with the loss of his nephew. It is masterful, devastating, and deeply moving.
—Claude Batiste
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