A Johns Hopkins doctor with 12 years in the Maryland legislature didn’t know Maryland law. Or maybe Trump is just his daddy now.
One of the great mysteries of my life is how I keep getting introduced to the supporting cast of idiots running Trumpworld. These people could have lived perfectly comfortable lives in relative obscurity, keeping their name recognition safely confined to their congressional districts, hometown newspapers, and the occasional Rotary Club luncheon where somebody introduces them as an important person. I wouldn’t know them, they wouldn’t know me, and we’d all be better off. But no. There’s something about proximity to Donald Trump that makes otherwise obscure politicians and political hangers-on believe the entire country deserves a front-row seat to their stupidity. I’ll go years without knowing these people exist, blissfully unaware of whatever carnage they’re helping inflict on the American public, until one glorious afternoon when they decide to humiliate themselves so spectacularly that their names become permanently lodged in my brain. It’s like watching somebody walk into a room full of strangers, pull down their pants, and introduce themselves by their government name. Congratulations, asshole. Now everybody knows who you are.
Take Eric Schmitt, the defanged MAGA senator from Missouri, whose greatest recent contribution to American political discourse was demonstrating that a grown man can serve in the United States Senate without knowing the difference between professional basketball and women’s college basketball. At the Jack Smith hearing a few weeks ago, Schmitt strutted in convinced he had caught the former special counsel attending an Atlanta Hawks game. He had his evidence, his talking points, and a foam-core poster, because nothing says serious congressional oversight quite like a grown man arriving at a hearing with the supplies for a seventh-grade science fair. There was just one tiny problem: the game was actually the Iowa Hawkeyes playing women’s college basketball in Maryland. This man was so confident in his investigative brilliance that he managed to confuse the NBA with the NCAA and believed nobody would notice. He showed up prepared to expose Jack Smith and ended up getting posterized by a women’s college basketball box score. Somewhere, a middle-school basketball fan was watching this spectacle and wondering how the hell this idiot got elected to anything. I wrote about Schmitt at the time, and I’ll repeat what I said then: I could have lived another 45 years without knowing Eric Schmitt existed. Instead, he introduced himself to me as the United States senator who needed Caitlin Clark to explain his own evidence to him. That’s one hell of a political legacy.
Then there’s Natalie Harp, whose peculiar relationship with Donald Trump has somehow become a national conversation despite the fact that I had absolutely no idea who this woman was. Senator Jon Ossoff made a joke at a campaign rally that Trump would rather build his ballroom and “travel with Natalie” than actually do his job. That was it. A passing joke. The sort of line that ordinarily would have received a few laughs before everybody moved on to the next political absurdity. But MAGA, being a political movement whose members possess the emotional regulation of toddlers denied a second juice box, decided this was an international incident requiring immediate intervention. Suddenly, the right was screaming about how inappropriate the joke was, how unfairly Natalie was being treated, and how everybody needed to leave this poor woman alone. And naturally, millions of people who had never heard of Natalie Harp responded with the same question: Who the hell is Natalie Harp, and why are these people acting like somebody insulted the Virgin Mary? These geniuses could have allowed the joke to disappear into the political ether. Instead, they effectively rented a billboard on the interstate that read, PLEASE DO NOT ASK ABOUT NATALIE HARP AND DONALD TRUMP. Well, congratulations, dumbasses. Now we’re all asking. MAGA told the entire country to leave Natalie Harp alone and, through sheer stupidity, guaranteed that nobody would.
And then there’s Amir Hassan, another man who could have enjoyed a perfectly respectable career in political anonymity if Trumpworld hadn’t transformed his congressional campaign into an episode of The Twilight Zone written by somebody suffering from a severe head injury. Hassan received Trump’s coveted “Complete and Total Endorsement” in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, which came with everything except the ability to convince Trump’s own supporters to vote for him. His primary opponent dropped out in July and endorsed somebody else. Ordinarily, having your opponent quit the race would be considered a fairly encouraging development. You’d think the next logical step would be winning the damn election. But Hassan was running in MAGAland, where logic goes to die and nobody bothers checking the death certificate. Although Hassan’s own campaign website identifies him as Christian, Trump’s supporters flooded the endorsement announcement insisting he was Muslim anyway. Imagine being endorsed by the leader of your political movement, only to discover that his followers have decided you’re practicing an entirely different religion and won’t be accepting corrections from you. And then, in a development so spectacularly ridiculous that even Hollywood would reject the screenplay, Hassan lost the primary to the guy who had already quit, 50.4 percent to 33.2 percent. The man got Trump’s endorsement, watched his opponent withdraw, and still somehow managed to lose to a political ghost. That’s not a campaign defeat. That’s an exorcism gone wrong. Once again, I had no idea who this man was until he made political history by getting his ass kicked by somebody who wasn’t even actively running anymore. Trumpworld produces these people faster than I can learn their names, and frankly, I’m beginning to think obscurity might be the greatest gift they keep refusing to accept.
Now we can add Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland to the growing collection of Trumpworld personalities whose greatest contribution to my life has been introducing themselves through acts of spectacular public stupidity. Until Tuesday night, I couldn’t have picked Andy Harris out of a police lineup if you gave me three guesses, a congressional directory, and a photograph of the man holding his own driver’s license. And frankly, after watching what happened in Cambridge, Maryland, I think I preferred it that way. This man managed to distinguish himself in a political movement already overflowing with people who routinely confuse ignorance with confidence. That’s a remarkable achievement. Being the dumbest person in a room full of MAGA politicians is like being the drunkest person at an open-bar fraternity reunion. The competition is fierce, the standards are nonexistent, and somebody is eventually going to end up on the internet doing something they’ll never live down.
After a debate against his Democratic challenger, Dan Schwartz, Harris stood before a gaggle of reporters, nearly all of whom were recording, and inexplicably decided that one particular journalist was committing a crime by doing exactly what everybody else was doing. “You do not have my permission to record,” he informed Cat Murphy of Capital News Service, under the impression that the First Amendment contains a special provision requiring journalists to obtain Andy Harris’s personal blessing before operating a camera. When Murphy refused to surrender her rights simply because a congressman was having an emotional episode, Harris escalated. “Take her camera,” he demanded. “Get an officer in here.” This fool actually wanted law enforcement summoned because a journalist was recording a politician speaking to journalists at an event where journalists had gathered to record politicians. Harris invoked Maryland’s two-party consent law, threatened to involve prosecutors, and then delivered the single funniest line of the evening when his knowledge of the law was challenged: “Actually, I’m a legislator.” Oh, you’re a legislator? Well, shit, Andy, why didn’t you say so? Somebody get this man a powdered wig, a gavel, and a copy of the Constitution printed in extra-large font. The law becomes whatever Andy Harris says it is, provided he announces it with enough confidence and there’s a police officer nearby willing to play along. The problem, of course, is that Maryland’s consent law protects private conversations, not a congressman holding court in front of a room full of cameras after a public debate. People actually tried explaining this to him, but Harris was operating on a legal theory best summarized as I’m important, you’re annoying, and therefore you must be breaking a law. He eventually walked away, blaming Murphy for ruining everybody else’s opportunity to question him, which is a particularly creative way of announcing that your own tantrum is somebody else’s fault.
