Politics has become so unrelentingly strange in recent years that it’s hard for stories that once would have been considered jaw-dropping to stand out from the pack. But even in 2023, it was still possible for an avid news consumer to be surprised, scandalized, and yes, even shocked. Here, in no particular order, are the year’s most bizarre stories that we swear really did happen.
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By Kevin T. Dugan
It’s not very often that you see Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, crack a smile. To be fair, he has one of the hardest jobs in Washington; trying to keep inflation down without wrecking the economy demands a certain soberness. But Powell’s aura of gravitas made him the perfect target for a Russian prank caller, who pretended to be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in January.
Was this a dreaded Russian disinformation campaign? Maybe. There was certainly potential for Powell to slip on his words, or tell the purported Ukrainian wartime president something the public didn’t already know. But if that was the goal, it was kind of a bust. Nothing of real importance was revealed. The most intimate knowledge that anyone got out of it was that Powell has a Zoom background of a cozy-looking breakfast nook, outside of a calm-looking forest. Maybe this is where he jams out to Grateful Dead bootlegs when he isn’t pondering when to cut interest rates.
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By Eric Levitz
Few people know this today, but popular Cameo performer and noted criminal George Santos once served in the U.S. Congress. During his brief and improbable time in political life, Santos did many odd things, such as spend campaign funds on porn and botox injections, falsely claim his niece had been kidnapped by Chinese communists, and argue that his consequent pariah status on Capitol Hill made him a lot like Rosa Parks.
But the most sublimely disorienting moment of Santos’s political career came in October. Confronted by activists protesting America’s support for Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the self-described “Jew-ish” congressman erupted into a furious tantrum, deriding the agitators as terrorist sympathizers. Santos’s tirade was so volcanic, it took some observers a moment to realize that the representative was holding a two-month-old infant as he shouted. Asked whether the baby was his, Santos said only, “not yet.”
Although the remark was likely in jest, it was difficult to be sure. After all, if Santos’s various compulsions and personality disorders hadn’t stopped him from securing a seat in Congress, why would they necessarily prevent him from securing guardianship of someone else’s baby? Hadn’t he demonstrated his capacity to achieve the unthinkable through sheer audacity and determination? The moment therefore perfectly encapsulated the Santos moment in miniature: It was hilarious for such an absurd scoundrel to hold something as precious as a human infant (or political power), yet also, for that reason, vaguely menacing.
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By Jonathan Chait
In September, the Denver Post reported that Representative Lauren Boebert — a Colorado Republican known mainly for publicly feuding with Marjorie Taylor Greene for the unofficial title of Craziest House Republican, Female Category — had been ejected from BeetleJuice the musical.
The Post reported that Boebert was “accused by venue officials of vaping, singing, recording and ‘causing a disturbance.’” Not long after, video of the disturbance — very, very graphic video — emerged.
I recall hosting a dinner with some friends, who had heard the report but (apparently) hadn’t yet seen or heard about the video. One of them remarked dejectedly that Donald Trump does things like this all the time and it doesn’t seem to hurt him. I replied that, in my opinion, Trump would probably face some real political blowback from his base if he was caught on tape giving somebody a handjob in a public theater.
And that is how it is possible to write a social media post suggesting forest fires were secretly set by a space laser controlled by the Rothschild family in order to profit from a rail project, and be seen as only the second-most-controversial House Republican, Female Category.
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By Matt Stieb
As I kept tabs on convicted FTX fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s journey this year, I kept asking myself the same question again and again: Why is he doing that? Why test the limits of your cush house arrest by using a VPN to watch the Super Bowl, the most easily viewable of all events? Why testify if you’re not actually going to say anything (and when your public persona does not exactly inspire empathy)? Why would you mock the people prosecuting you? And why would you leak the contents of your ex-girlfriend’s diary, which Bankman-Fried did, to the New York Times in July? If he thought it could help his case by undermining his ex, an exec in his crypto empire, it did not work out. Prosecutors were furious by the apparent act of witness tampering, and revoked his bail — putting him in jail a few months earlier than expected. After being convicted on seven counts in November, it appears he’ll be there for quite a long time.
I do not have an answer to the above questions. Maybe the best theory comes from Attorney General Merrick Garland: “Sam Bankman-Fried thought that he was above the law.” And apparently basic standards of etiquette.
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By Ed Kilgore
Being from Georgia and all, I am an avid observer of Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who parachuted into an open House seat in 2020 with big sacks of money and has since been horrifying and entertaining us all regularly with her mega-MAGA hijinks. My favorite MTG moment of 2023 was in June when her erstwhile friend and Beetlejuice fan Lauren Boebert jumped the gun with a performative Biden impeachment resolution even though she knew Greene was preparing her own. As my colleague Matt Stieb reported, MTG was none too pleased:
In an exchange on Wednesday night, Greene called her colleague out on the House floor. “I’ve donated to you, I’ve defended you,” Greene told Boebert, according to a source on the floor who spoke with the Daily Beast. “But you’ve been nothing but a little bitch to me. And you copied my articles of impeachment after I asked you to cosponsor them.”
But the best part was Greene’s explanation for using this profane term of abuse for her esteemed colleague from Colorado: “She has genuinely been a nasty little bitch to me.”
That cleared it up for me.
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By Nia Prater
In New York City politics, 2023 might be best remembered as the year everyone learned that Eric Adams likes Turkey … a lot. His friendly ties to Turkish politicians, multiple public flag-raising ceremonies for Turkey, and several visits to the country had largely flown under the radar as his political career advanced. While Adams was borough president, he formed sister city agreements with two Turkish cities and even filmed a short cameo in a Turkish rom-com where he called Brooklyn “the Istanbul of America.” He once boasted that no other New York City mayor had visited Turkey as much as he has. It all seemed innocent enough.
But Adam’s interest in Istanbul soon came under increased scrutiny following the news that his 2021 mayoral campaign was under federal investigation for potentially conspiring with the Turkish government to direct illegal donations to the campaign. Though the FBI did temporarily seize Adams’ electronic devices, the mayor has yet to be officially implicated or accused of any wrongdoing, and is adamant that he’s done nothing wrong. Nevertheless, the looming inquiry has already dragged down his approval numbers and has sparked conversations about potential 2025 challengers. But at least Adams got some cool trips and maybe some tasty Turkish delight out of the deal.
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By Margaret Hartmann
One thing I did not expect from 2023 was to write the headline “Ron DeSantis Eating Pudding With His Fingers Will End His 2023 Bid” — and see it come true.
When you cover Donald Trump for a living, you learn to expect the unexpected. While cutting up his mug-shot suit so he could sell the pieces on trading cards was particularly weird, at this point I’d be more unnerved if he went a full week without doing anything strange or outrageous. To paraphrase John Mulaney’s iconic “horse in the hospital” sketch, sometimes the creepiest days are when you don’t hear from Trump at all.
But at the start of 2023, few people viewed Ron DeSantis as a guy likely to get freaky with any kind of foodstuffs. The Florida governor was seen as a more competent wannabe MAGA dictator, and many pundits believed he had an excellent chance of beating Trump in the Republican primary.
Then in March, two sources told the Daily Beast that DeSantis once “enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert — by eating it with three of his fingers” on a private plane flight.
Now, I’m no genius political prognosticator. The headline was mostly facetious, and I’m not saying the tale of Pudding Paws DeSantis is the main thing that caused the apparent implosion of his presidential campaign. But it put a significant hole in his macho man facade, and seemed to pave the way for dozens of people to come forward with damaging complaints about DeSantis’s lack of social graces. Were many of these accusations petty? Sure, but I’ll admit that seeing the second-biggest bully in the GOP field felled in part by a dessert for children was pretty delicious.
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