Hail Barron Trump, prince of NYU

Congratulations to Barron Trump, the Paul Atreides of Mar-a-Lago, on his enrollment at the private, excruciatingly progressive New York University this week. Barron has found his tribe immediately, joining all the college’s other Republicans at the Stern School of Business. If he’s not too busy chugging Miller Lites at Phebes after using Eric’s old ID to get in, the Trump scion could find himself taking some intriguing classes. 

Were Barron to stick around to do an MBA after, he could study Professional Responsibility with Spectator favorite Jonathan Haidt. Or he could find himself taught by Scott Galloway, a regular guest on Real Time with Bill Maher who made some rather unsavory jokes about the Trump assassination attempt on his podcast with Kara Swisher earlier in the summer. If young Barron is in need of some cultural enrichment, he could always check out the End of Democracy in Five Acts exhibition over at Gallatin…

Reliable divorces

Oliver Darcy took a career gamble last month, leaving behind CNN and his media-centric “Reliable Sources” newsletter to go independent. The former Blaze writer who defected to liberal media has a new project called “Status,” a paid newsletter. CNN announced they had found someone to take over the “Reliable Sources” newsletter, but we weren’t told who until this week.

Enter Brian Stelter.

That’s right: the founder of the Reliable Sources show and newsletter who was fired by CNN two years ago amid Chris Licht’s takeover is rejoining the network. What a scab! Reports indicate that Darcy’s departure was sparked by pay disputes with CNN leadership and he left the network assuming “Reliable Sources” would die in his absence and he would take its audience with him. He was certainly not anticipating that his former mentor, who built “Reliable Sources,” would be there to take his place.

Stelter has kindly referred to Darcy’s new newsletter as a “complement,” while Darcy described Stelter as a “competitor.” Me-ow!

The vagueness doctrine

How do you conjure up a Kamala Harris manifesto from nothing? The Democratic nominee still lists no specific policy objectives on her campaign website — visitors to the page can instead buy a “Throwback Doug Mug” or read a fairly carefully worded biography of Tim Walz: “Governor Walz and Mrs. Walz struggled with years of fertility challenges and had their daughter, Hope, through reproductive health care like IVF — further cementing his commitment to ensuring all Americans have access to this care.” Hope was conceived by IUI, a procedure far less controversial and not that much “like” IVF as it doesn’t entail discarding unsuccessful embryos. 

Well, it turns out the best way to find out where Kamala currently stands on the issues is to ask her campaign about a policy position she held in her 2019 presidential run and get them to quietly confirm that she’s dropped it. Axios’s Alex Thompson is out with the latest such story, where Team Harris distances itself from the unpopular ban on plastic straws that their candidate committed to five years ago. 

“She doesn’t support banning plastic straws,” a campaign official told Axios. “She joked even then about how crappy paper straws are and the need to come up with better eco-friendly alternatives.” 

Thompson’s story follows in a series where Team Harris has shuffled away from Kamala’s desire to ban fracking, implement the Green New Deal and stop the building of the border wall. An enterprising wag could compile all these abandoned policies in one document and call it something like “the Harris platform.” A radical idea for an historic election…

Thank God: someone made an Adam Kinzinger documentary

January 6 was just like a bad hangover, former Congressman Adam Kinzinger says in the trailer for his upcoming documentary, which is modestly titled The Last Republican.

The aftermath of the attack on the Capitol “was like Saturday morning, when you had a giant party at your house Friday night, and now you had chickens flying around, you have a bad headache, you know, you’re only wearing a shirt and you’re like, ‘what did you we do last night?’” Kinzinger says in the trailer, evoking images of The Hangover franchise, even though his colleague in this movie is best known for having directed the Hot Tub Time Machine series.

The film debuts tomorrow at the Toronto International Film Festival. “During the hardest year of his life, Kinzinger opens up to left-wing Hollywood director Steve Pink, despite their opposing political views,” its promotional materials read. “Their shared appreciation for a good laugh bonds the unlikely duo at a time when sectarianism is tearing apart traditional allies.”

For those for whom this is an insufficient amount of Kinzinger content, the former lawmaker also has a book out, called Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country.

While the film follows Kinzinger around the Capitol during his final months in office, it’s unclear the extent to which it will delve into the efforts by Illinois Democrats to gerrymander the onetime Republican rising star out of office. It is also unclear if Kinzinger ever located the fictional “#ghostofkyiv” he has tweeted about in the past.