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George Santos is frustrated. In an hour-long interview with The Spectator, Santos tried to make it clear he came to Washington with the hope to get things done. But he’s been “slapped in the face” with the reality that there is so much red tape. “Washington, DC is performance art,” he says. “This is a master course on performing arts... everybody here is acting.” Santos of course knows a thing or two about acting; his exploits have been well publicized since his election. Perhaps the most well-known of his roles took the form of his popular drag performances in Brazil. A fan of drag for many years, it’s surprising to learn that Santos only began watching RuPaul’s Drag Race only once the coronavirus pandemic hit.

As the Republicans' on-again-off-again, will-they-won’t-they romance with Kevin McCarthy drags on, Cockburn has found refuge in a genuinely entertaining drama. Each day offers another layer to the George Santos tall-tale trifle — and as the mainstream media purports to be shocked that a politician would lie about something (gasp!), Cockburn is gobbling it up. Just yesterday, for instance, Cockburn learned the Republican congressman from New York lied about being a “‘star player’ on the volleyball team for a college [CUNY Baruch] that he did not attend” (per Business Insider). Cockburn also enjoyed hearing how Santos was involved in a Ponzi scheme fewer than two years ago.

Start spreading the news. As party leadership for the upcoming 118th Congress shapes up, we now know that Democrats will have not only New Yorkers but Brooklynites as their top men in both the Senate and the House. Chuck Schumer is poised to maintain his position as Senate majority leader after Republicans’ miserable results in the upper body. And with the departure of Nancy Pelosi as House head honcho, it will be Representative Hakeem Jeffries taking her place and hoping one day to be speaker himself. So what will an all-Empire State Democrat leadership mean for the rest of the nation? To get a sense of this, it's worth looking at the unexpected and outsized role that New York played in the recent midterm elections.

New York attorney general Letitia “Tish” James has a lot on her plate just now. Sadly none of it has anything to do with fighting the surging crime throughout the state and the nation’s largest city. Instead James has her sights narrowly set on a civil lawsuit against Donald Trump and his family. She even found the time last week to fire off a tweet angrily complaining that a Yankees game was not being broadcast live. Clearly keeping New Yorkers safe is not on James’s agenda. In fairness, James’s persecution of the Trump clan is a campaign promise kept. On the night she won the AG race in 2018 she told her adoring crowd that, “I will be shining a bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump, three of his adult children, and other senior members of the Trump Organization on Wednesday. Her suit alleges business and insurance fraud as well as conspiracy for the same, and marks the end of a three-year investigation into Trump and his business. The civil suit is basically a civil version of the criminal indictments the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and the Manhattan and New York State attorneys general have failed to generate at the federal and state levels.

Throughout the Covid shutdowns, I felt like Wendy Kroy in The Last Seduction. If you’ve never seen the movie, the only thing you need to know is that a running theme is that the protagonist, hiding out upstate after stealing a lot of money, has got to get back to New York. Even the alias she uses is “New York” spelled backwards (sort of). For nearly two years, every morning I’d wake up thinking, I’ve got to get back to New York. Well, I’m back, and this isn’t what I meant at all. I wanted to be in the city that never sleeps, where I could walk around carefree, even at night, take the subway, and live within a few blocks of every possible convenience. Instead, this happened.

I saw the look on the Uber driver’s face as he dutifully started putting on his mask. “You don’t have to do that for me, buddy,” I let him know. “Thank God,” he smiled, and we were off. Sitting on the parking lot we New Yorkers ironically call the Brooklyn Queens Expressway I thought back to a hungover morning in the winter of 2020, when an email popped up amid my coffee and cigarette. It was from Lyft: there was a picture of me in it, maskless, and a stern warning not to do it again. What a difference two years makes. Today in Gotham, for all intents and purposes, Covid is over. To any sane person, this sounds like good news, but not to the New York Times: the Gray Lady is worried.