Dingus of the Week: Karoline Leavitt

And Dingus Madness is down to the final two: Elon vs. JD

Maybe you are just opening this email and you are shocked, outraged and confused. Why is Chuck Schumer not the Dingus this week? you ask yourself, furiously clicking through to read the post anyway, but feeling betrayed. Is Lyz a Schumer apologist? Did Lyz, too, decide to betray the party? Can we not have ONE SCHUMER DINGUS? you shout as tears well in your eyes. Well, my friends, be of good cheer. The Schumdinger is forthcoming, but this week, we have a guest dingus written by Felipe Torres Medina, the author of the new book America, Let Me In. Felipe is an actual funny person (I just play one on this newsletter) who writes for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

And this is truly one of the funniest DOTW posts I have ever read. Buy Felipe’s book! It’s so smart and funny and the perfect counter-narrative to the immigrant story being told by our country’s leaders right now.

– Lyz

What a time this has been for dinguses. Having the honor to bestow this week’s dingus is something I do not take lightly, and there have been many contenders of late. From Chuck Schumer’s brave stand last week against taking a stand; to the dinguses who keep arresting immigrants for reasons they seem to make up on the fly; to the even bigger dinguses who detained a U.S. citizen (among many others) in Chicago in recent weeks, it’s been a hell of a time for dingus-watchers worldwide. But ultimately, the title of the week’s biggest dingus goes to White House Press Secretary and Kirkland Brand Hawk Tuah Girl Karoline Leavitt.

You gotta Hawk Tuah … spit on that thang. The thang itself? The Constitution.

If you’re not familiar with Leavitt, that must be pretty nice for you. What do you do all day? I assume it has something to do with listening to the Kelce brothers’ podcast. Leavitt is one of those characters in the MAGAverse who will eventually be discarded for some kind of disloyalty, or else she will hang around long enough to divorce her weird husband and marry some minor Trump and run the Republican party (don’t google “minor Trump party”; that will just show you the manifest for the Lolita Express).

Karoline Leavitt is everything MAGA wants out of a spokesperson. She’s young, she’s blond, and she’s full of stupid statements and quippy troll lines that they can clip out into the manosphere to show they’re delivering on their one true main policy goal: owning the libs.

This week, Leavitt made her usual share of hateful statements with her signature, uh, let’s call it charisma. Here she is calling the horrible videos the White House has been posting about the deportations of people the administration — by its own admission — cannot confirm are or are not criminals “cute.” EPIC troll sauce, m’lady. She’s like if a Twitter thread got a crap nose job. Yeah, my mom’s a plastic surgeon. I can spot your shitty work. Shoulda let an immigrant work on that face, Karoline.

But that’s just yet another callous, cruel, and troll-y statement from the ones we have come to expect from this administration. The real proof of ultimate dingusability, the statement that gives Karoline the honor of being our dingus this week, the one that shot our dingus-o-meters into a frenzy, was her response to Raphaël Glucksmann. Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament, is a man so French that every other picture of him looks like he’s inviting you to have a threesome.

“Oui, oui. It would be the trois of us.”

Glucksmann pissed off the whiny babies of MAGA on Sunday when he told a joke to a crowd at a party convention that the U.S. should return the Statue of Liberty to France. He said:

"We're going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: 'Give us back the Statue of Liberty, [...] “We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home.”

Look, Raph — can I call you Raph? I feel like I can call you Raph — I agree that the U.S. government seems to despise the values the statue represents, but asking for a gift back is in poor taste. This is very not chic of you, France. And if we’re talking about giving back stuff, maybe give back those territories you have in South America and Africa?

That said, in a classic example of being able to dish it out but not take it, the White House didn’t like Gluckmann’s trolling one bit. Which brings us back to Leavitt, who was asked about it and had her own little troll response here:

Reporter: So, is President Trump going to send the Statue of Liberty back to France?

Dingus Queen Karoline: Absolutely not. And my advice to that unnamed low-level French politician is that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now. So they should be very grateful to our great country.

Oooh, great dig, gurl. Yassss. You’re a Girlboss. A Girlfasc. You tell ‘em. You hit ‘em with that joke you plucked out of a dad joke book published in 1987. It’s the perfect canned answer to an obviously softball question designed to be clipped and shared by your radicalized uncle whose Twitter profile picture is him in the front seat of his car. Does he live there? You don’t really know where he lives since Aunt Sherry kicked him out of the house.

Leavitt’s statement isn’t just a bad joke. It’s also really, really dumb. Sure, maybe the U.S. is the reason the French aren’t speaking German, but the French are the reason you’re speakin’ American and not the king’s English, ya dingus. France is our best bud! It’s our first bud! We are supposed to be BFFs. We can’t fight the French! They gave us baguettes, Alexis de Tocqueville, and French’s Crispy Onions.

France was literally our first ally. They were the first to recognize us as a country when we decided we were breaking up with England. Lafayette was an essential part of our liberation. They wrote a whole musical about it and he rapped really fast!

This administration’s reign is one of cruelty, yes, but also one of sheer and proud ignorance. One where the only truth is eternal thanks and submission to an America they invented in their heads, which knows no before and no after. An America that has no friends and no flaws. It came out perfectly formed, pure, white, and dumb out of George Washington’s splooj. From JD (which I believe stands for Jackedoff in a Divan) Vance yelling at Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not thanking Trump personally to Karoline Leavitt, we are governed by the world’s sorest winners. The most “Do you know who my father is?” people in the world. Trolling is not a way of government, it doesn’t fix the deficit, it doesn’t make the world a better place, it doesn’t lower the price of eggs. Sorry, Karoline, but people can’t eat smug. But maybe you don’t care about the cost of food. Maybe you don’t eat food. It would explain the shit-eating grin.

– Felipe Torres Medina

Paid subscribers are why I can hire guest contributors like Felipe. Because “exposure” doesn’t actually cover the rent. (Writing books doesn’t, either, in my experience.)

If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards for you right now, maybe you’d consider forwarding this newsletter to your richest friend?

Dingus Madness: Dingusy Duo

Well friends, here we are. The final round of dingus madness. The final matchup pits two of the most dingular individuals in America against each other: Elon Musk v. JD Vance.

The competition is tough, so vote now. Vote multiple times. And next week, we will crown our Dingus Maximus.

In a shocking upset, both the Supreme Court and Pete Hegseth were eliminated in the last round. But thank you to Dingus Madness Commissioner Beau Anderson for bringing them back for a “turd place” championship round.

And now for something good:

This is Lyz again. And I have some good news!

Tesla is recalling nearly all cyber trucks because the rims are falling off the vehicles! And I don’t know if the news could simply get any better. Seems like we are at peak good news here. But no, wait, there is more. Teslas also seem to have terrible resale value.

Anyway, the CEO of that company is now gluing shit rims onto our Democracy. Hope this doesn’t backfire.

A crowd in Nebraska chants, “Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” And GOP Rep. Mike Flood, thinking he’s gotten them, is like, “So your proposal to solve this is to tax the rich?” And the crowd cheers. I love you, Nebraska. Runzas are great. I take back everything I ever said about your state being a desolate prairie full of cow farts. I was wrong.

I am glad the astronauts are back, but if I were them, I’d take one look at the news and launch myself back into space.

A judge rules that the National Park Service must rehire employees. The Trump administration is fighting this ruling, but it still qualifies as a Good Thing™.

Sarah Inama is a teacher in Idaho who is fighting back after her school district told her to remove a “Everybody is welcome here” sign.

Federal judge Ana C. Reyes, who has been a Good Thing™before, continues to be good, after blocking the Trump administration from firing trans people from the military.

Something I am enjoying

This week, I got the chance to go give a talk to the students of Niagara University. It was a lovely trip and I got to see the falls. I gave a talk to the students about resisting the narratives that make us afraid and how to make ourselves louder, messier, and more obstinate in the face of power.

On my trip I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing about the IRA and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it is excellent.

I also finished Dry Season by Melissa Febos, which is a funny, and deeply insightful meditation on a year without sex.

And I had a mezcal cocktail this week on the one warm day before it snowed again. And I was looking up a recipe for that cocktail (which was basically a hibiscus margarita with mezcal), but then I found this recipe for a mezcal negroni titled “Thou Shall Not Be Named” and I realized I had found a plan for the weekend.