Harris Melancholy & The Infinite Sadness

joe biden kamala harris
If the Harris staffers should have been more honest about anything, it was blaming Biden. Photo: Michael Reynolds/EPA/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Peter Hamby
December 3, 2024

I saw many surprising and galling things on the internet last week, including a clip of my guy Joe Burrow committing holiday heresy by declaring that his favorite Thanksgiving dish is… ham. (Ham!) Joe can be forgiven, of course, but I had less patience for the army of know-it-alls on social media who lost their minds over an episode of Pod Save America in which senior members of Kamala Harris’s campaign team attempted to explain why they lost and what went wrong. Democrats are making a concerted effort to banish annoying campus language from their vernacular—as they should—but “triggered” is probably the best word to describe how listeners responded to Jen O’Malley Dillon, Quentin Fulks, David Plouffe, and Stephanie Cutter recounting how the joy of brat summer ultimately gave way to a decisive Donald Trump victory in November.