Kamala Gets an Emmy Nomination and Trump Casts Himself as Pope

Tell me we’re not living in a sitcom.

In case you missed it, there’s been more drama on the political playground this week than you normally get in an entire season of Real Housewives.

The opening credits rolled back in October, when then-VP Kamala Harris sat down for a pre-election interview with 60 Minutes. When the segment aired—neatly trimmed of the meandering, grammatical gibberish Harris is famous for—the cackler came off sounding borderline-articulate. People noticed. Calling the selective editing a “fraudulent remix” and accusing the network of election interference, Trump filed a fat lawsuit, demanding a jury trial and $10 billion in damages (later doubled to $20 billion). The suit, which led to the resignation of the show’s executive producer, is still pending.

In this week’s edition of Clownworld News, the very episode at the heart of the hoopla has been nominated for an actual Emmy Award. I am not making that up. The category isn’t Best Performance by a Broadcaster Pretending to Be Captivated by a Human Salad Spinner or Most Dramatic Cut to Commercial Before a Non-Reveal; the clip was nominated for Outstanding Edited Interview.

EMMY COMMITTEE CHAIR: Okay, who submitted the Kamala Harris interview for Outstanding Edited Interview?

EMMY COMMITTEE CO-CHAIR: I did. And before you ask—yes, I was sober. But come on. That wasn’t just editing. That was a digital resurrection.

CHAIR: Be honest—was this before or after you took your THC gummies and decided that bending time and space was a real thing?

CO-CHAIR: Look, when you take an hour of verbal spaghetti and end up with three minutes of vaguely intelligible optimism? That’s not polishing. That’s witchcraft. Give those producers a cape and a union card.

CHAIR: Outstanding Edited Interview is supposed to be for journalism.

CO-CHAIR: It was journalism! Which in this case involved redacting every mention of “Venn diagram” and cutting out twelve references to “this moment in time.”

CHAIR: This is going to trigger a lawsuit.

CO-CHAIR: Already did. Trump’s suing CBS for turning Kamala into someone who sounds like she’s ever won an argument in a group chat.

CHAIR: Should we at least pretend this wasn’t about politics?

CO-CHAIR: Fine. Throw in a nod to the interview with the Pope. But between us, Harris’s interview was harder to clean up. The Pope doesn’t say “circularity” four times in one sentence.

CHAIR: Ugh. Okay. Just make sure we have a backup category in case this blows up.

CO-CHAIR: One step ahead of you. If it doesn’t win Outstanding Edited Interview, we’ll slide it into Best Use of Post-Production Lighting on a Tuesday.

In response to the lawsuit, 60 Minutes’ reply wasn’t “Sure, fine, we might have spit-shined her a little.” It was “Actually, we’d like a fancy paperweight for that.” And in all fairness, finessing a coherent soundbite out of a talking Roomba is indeed relatively trophy-worthy.

In case you’re curious about this award you’ve never heard of, last year’s Outstanding Edited Interview went to a moving 60 Minutes sit-down with an Israeli woman who was kidnapped and held hostage by Hamas in Gaza for fifty-six days. No wonder the network cut a half dozen cliched, cringe-worthy Harris convolutions like, “We are people who have ambition and aspirations and dreams and optimism and hope. If you look at the character of who we are and how we have achieved the strength that we have achieved, I believe in large part it is because of our character and our belief in the promise of America.” Prestigious purveyors of awards have a bar, people.

The result? Emmy nomination unlocked! (Read: “Damn, dudes, you actually made her sound halfway intelligent! Nice work!”)

Never one to let the limelight be cast elsewhere even for a blink, Trump gave the internet kettle a violent stir by posting an AI image of himself as the Bishop of Rome just as the Vatican searches for a new pontiff. If cojones were confetti, this guy would own the rights to New Year’s Eve.

He’s literally already called himself the King and AI-generated a Swifties for Trump fan club. Why are people even shocked by this?

SNL called the move “a one-way ticket to hell;” Italy’s left-leaning la Repubblica accused Trump of “pathological megalomania;” VP Vance dismissed the papal post as a joke (before bashing a Bush administration chief of staff who advocated for the 2003 Iraq invasion for calling him out).

Related: I would stand in a two-hour line in the rain to see this Trump impersonator in real life.

The mainstream news naturally was a swamp of indignation and fury over the blasphemous post. QAnon cultists insist it was Trump sending a metaphorical message signaling the end of the global satanic cabal. And X was a hotbed of snickering conservatives LingOL and pointing out the left’s genuinely bottomless hypocrisy.

“Political theater” used to refer to the performative posturings of elected officials; think kissing (*not sniffing) babies and cozy Fireside Chats. Today, it’s a literal descriptor of American leadership 24/7. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan commissioning an oil painting of himself as Moses bringing down the Berlin Wall? Or JFK mailing out doctored Polaroids of himself on the moon, captioned: “Long Live the First Catholic Commandronaut in Chief”? Or Biden winning a Grammy for some kid’s “Come on, Man” compilation that went viral on TikTok? Actually, the last one wouldn’t even surprise me at this point. We’ve clearly got the circus; who’s bringing the bread?

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