Cockburn’s Diary

If DC wants to eschew its reputation as being “Hollywood for ugly people,” politicos could start by dressing better. While the Senate has been in a marathon session that’s included several late-night votes, the breakdown in dress code has been remarkable in recent days — and the problem goes beyond Senator John Fetterman’s reluctance to wear a collared shirt if civilization depended on it. Much of the blame can be laid at the feet of “Derek Guy” — a pseudonymous self-styled menswear expert who is more reply guy than Louis Vuitton reincarnate. In his latest missive, Guy rated the best-dressed members of Congress... and named Senator Bernie Sanders as one of the most fashionable in the upper house.

Massie hysteria: CR holdout branded ‘Congress’s Keith Olbermann’ President Donald Trump and House Republicans have seemingly written off their maverick colleague Congressman Thomas Massie for any help when it comes to funding the government. The party is wrangling with Massie over his opposition to the latest continuing resolution, which would avoid a government shutdown if passed. “I’m not voting for the Continuing Resolution budget (cut-copy-paste omnibus) this week. Why would I vote to continue the waste fraud and abuse DoGE has found?” Massie explained. “It’s oppositional defiance disorder,” one veteran House Republican staffer speculated. “He is Congress’s Keith Olbermann — who was sued by Al Gore and fired by Rupert Murdoch.

Who could have predicted that a pair of (accused) sex-trafficking British-born brothers could cause such a stir in the Sunshine State? The brief return of manosphere influencers Tristan and Andrew Tate to Florida has become a flashpoint in state politics. Governor Ron DeSantis has directed his attorney general, close ally James Uthmeier, to investigate the brothers. DeSantis is thought to favor his wife Casey as a potential successor when he leaves office in 2026, as opposed to Congressman Byron Donalds, who served as a Trump campaign surrogate.

Welcome to Cockburn’s Diary, a new newsletter from The Spectator sent twice a week from the nation’s capital. Your intrepid correspondent will keep you informed about all the whispers circulating around town. Coming to your inboxes on Tuesdays and Fridays... President Donald Trump is addressing a joint session of Congress tonight — but don’t you dare call it a State of the Union; that term is reserved for speeches given in non-inauguration years. The president is expected to tout successes from the first forty-three days of his second term, while some Democrats are expected to skip it — or to protest by holding up props like egg cartons to spotlight the high cost of groceries.

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” wrote billionaire Jeff Bezos in a Wednesday note to the staff of his newspaper, the Washington Post. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” The missive from on high sent shockwaves around the capital. David Shipley, the Post’s Opinion editor, stepped away from his role over the new directive. Libertarian magazine Reason had a field day: “If this sounds like something you might want to read, may I suggest @reason where we’ve been doing this since 1968?” wrote editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward.

National Harbor, Maryland Cockburn has been poring over ostentatious Elon Musk fan art, reexamining that guide to which salutes are allowed and playing a mental game of “what’s that nice lady done to her face?” He is, of course, addressing you from the press pen of the Conservative Political Action Conference across the river from DC. The crowd seems older than previous years, with fewer college students milling around. Cockburn feels like the only person who wasn’t in the Capitol on January 6, 2021: he saw a couple of gents in Proud Boy attire rolling around, beers in hand, at 3 p.m. on Thursday — and while on his way in he was behind one recently freed prisoner and his four-month-old service dog in training, Whitney.

Love is in the air at Casa Cockburn this Friday — it’s Valentine’s Day and politicos are pairing off. The most shocking? The revelation in the New York Post that divorced former mayor Bill de Blasio is dating Nomiki Konst, a Democratic activist and former host of HillTV’s Rising.  “Nomi and I have started a really lovely relationship, just in time for Valentine’s Day. We’ve known each other for a long time and are very kindred souls ❤️,” the mayor texted the Post. “We’re going to cuddle up and watch romantic movies and drink Greek wine, in honor of Nomi’s heritage.” Cute. Forty-one-year-old Konst previously interviewed de Blasio and his then-wife Chirlane McCray in 2018.

While some Fortune 500 companies are dropping DEI programs like hot cakes, many in the Democratic Party are not so eager. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, who was almost the official face of the House Democrats’ messaging, has been taking her message that “mediocre white boys” are the ones complaining about DEI to the airwaves of cable news.Now the Democrats’ Senate committee is rolling out a job application form with an optional DEI section where applicants can pick between five sexualities and five genders, with options including “trans* woman / Transfeminine” and “pansexual.” This form was one of the first actions that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s (DSCC) new chief diversity and inclusion officer.

Source: Trump appointee struggles for coherence before TV hit Which top Trump pick caused concern — bordering on panic — at a major news network this week, by turning up in a daze, slurring their words so heavily employees couldn’t understand them? The appointee claimed to have slipped on the ice and was moving “like a cripple” around the studio and spilling food, a source tells Cockburn. “To me,” the tipster says, the pick “seemed addled on pain meds. Could barely stand.” Cockburn of course wishes nothing but the finest health to the incoming administration — they need to stay safe if they’re serious about taking on the Big Pharma cartel!

A very Special Relationship On Friday night, Cockburn began at the British Embassy for send-off drinks with outgoing ambassador Karen Pierce. Several foreign correspondents were present, along with the Washington Post’s John Hudson, Robert Costa and Fin Gomez of CBS. They all tucked into sparkling wine and beer and fish and chips hors d’oeuvres.Britain was also on the agenda for Cockburn’s next event, the Stars and Stripes and Union Jack Celebration thrown by the Gunster Group, Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore on the roof of the Hay-Adams. Upon hearing an accent, Natalie Winters of the War Room podcast asked of one British guest, “so, groomer or groomée?”Cockburn watched the esteemed Dr. Sebastian Gorka exiting in a long military-style trenchcoat.

Brett Cooper, former host of The Comment Section on the Daily Wire, has sparked rumors after liking a controversial Instagram post by former colleague Candace Owens. Speculation follows a clip from Piers Morgan Uncensored last month in which Owens accused Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being a war criminal with “genocidal ambitions.” Owens told Morgan, “I want to use my platform to say that I believe they are intentionally executing a holocaust.” Cooper liking Owens’s post raised questions: does Cooper agree with Owens’s take on the war in Gaza? Could this be tied to her departure from the Daily Wire? And does she plan to collaborate with Owens moving forward?

In one of the grubby little hypocrisies that have come to characterize Joe Biden’s single term, the president awarded Jose Andrés the Presidential Medal of Freedom last weekend — at around the same time as signing off on another $8 billion weapons sale to Israel. A previous lot to head off to our top Middle East ally may well have played a part in the air strike that killed seven people working for Andrés’s World Central Kitchen in Gaza. Such complex contradictions may explain Andrés’s muted reaction to receiving the honor: one of Cockburn’s sources saw the chef dining with his family and friends at Nobu after the ceremony. When the spy approached Andrés at the bar the chef was ebullient — yet upon being congratulated he turned solemn.

What a difference a lot of snow and a Donald Trump victory makes. January 6, 2025 is shaping up to be vastly different from January 6, 2021, thanks to weather forecasts of almost a foot of snow in the DC area and a beaten-down Democratic Party that couldn’t steal an election if it tried to.Despite some left-wing fever dreams, Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to certify Trump’s victory as planned on Monday; the only potential hurdles will be whether Republicans can get a speaker of the House in time, and just how bad the snow fall ends up being. If it is substantial, Cockburn is happy to report, there will be a snowball fight on the grounds of the US Capitol, just like there have been in days of yore.

Who’s in charge of the executive branch? That question has been on many lips throughout the duration of President Joe Biden’s term, and has been asked even more often since his decision to stand aside as Democratic nominee in July. Perhaps the White House itself offers some visual clues to the answer: a source who has been heading in for transition meetings with the outgoing administration notes that virtually all of the jumbo portraits inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue feature Vice President Kamala Harris — visiting foreign countries, making speeches and the like. Biden, meanwhile, is barely featured. Perhaps all of his impressive pictures are displayed in the basement at Rehoboth Beach...

Gay-PMG Grüezi from Switzerland, friends. A Cockburn spy was recently hoping to enjoy a quiet lunch at an Irish pub in Zurich’s Old Town when he was sat next to a large group of somewhat intoxicated KPMG Switzerland employees. It was quite the liquid lunch, with beers and wine flowing for hours and one staffer suggesting a round of shots, a move that was quickly rejected from the already too-far-gone group. One American employee of the firm was waxing lyrical about KPMG’s alleged hopelessly bigoted management.

Lincoln in the Bardo “The economy has never been better,” top Democrats and their surrogates told voters during the 2024 elections. It turns out that’s because the economy was doing just fine for a lot of the party’s top vendors. After all, Kamala Harris’s $1 billion of campaign expenditures had to wet some beaks, if not win votes. One series of outlays stood out in particular: the millions of dollars spent by the Lincoln Project, despite the Democratic Party’s top infrastructure rolling out focus groups showing that the group’s work had zero impact on the 2020 presidential election. “Tragic,” elections analyst Rob Pyers wrote on X. “After raising $15.5 million for the year and burning through $16.

Elsewhere in the world, they just call Thanksgiving “Thursday.” But in the addled minds of some on America’s progressive left, it’s something far worse. Joy Reid aired her “Thanksgiving message to MAGA trolls,” in which she discussed her “alternative” Thanksgiving idea for those who voted for Donald Trump: “Make your own dinner, MAGA, make your own sandwiches, wipe your own tears, troll among yourselves with Elon and leave us alone. You’ve got your heart’s desire: the president you dreamed of, and worship instead of Jesus.

Nancy Mace has embarked on her newfound crusade against the trans employees of the Hill — a group of people so uncomfortable in their own skin that many undergo plastic surgery in order to feel more like their true selves. Mace’s campaign to ban biological men from the women’s restrooms of Congress marks a change in tack for the congresswoman — not the first one, obviously. “I strongly support LGBTQ rights and equality,” the South Carolina congresswoman told the Washington Examiner back in 2021. “No one should be discriminated against.

A new betting pool emerged on the Hill at the tail-end of this week: who will get fewer votes in his confirmation hearing? Matt Gaetz or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?So far, most of President-elect Donald Trump’s staffing announcements have prompted either jubilation or downright astonishment — and that’s only among his supporters. When Matt Gaetz was announced, some suspected a typo: surely Trump had meant to tap his former attorney general, Matt Whitaker? One top Judiciary Committee staffer compared Gaetz’s bid to helm the DoJ to that of Neera Tanden to helm the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget: an effort that was doomed from the start but meant to reward a Twitter-happy loyalist of the new president.

The flawed logic of the anti-Trump sex strike No one really knows what a second Trump administration will hold for America — given the breadth of his coalition of contradictory factions, some of his voters are bound to be disappointed. But the prospect of the Donald’s mere presence back in the White House has led to a spasm of outrage on social media, with young women and members of the LGBTQIAA+ community fearful of the erosion of “rights” in case Trump, J.D. Vance and the Republicans eschew the campaign manifesto and draw instead from the Heritage Foundation’s more hardline Project 2025 agenda.Drastic measures are being mooted.