November 2016 was traumatizing, not just to me but lots of others, and as a result I can’t be entirely comfortable with any political race until every vote is counted. 2020 did more damage, so now I want everything counted, certified and the swearing-in completed before I can really be chill about it. And even then, it’s not easy.

But Abdul El-Sayed is tempting me into enthusiasm, a dangerous place to be for a politician. But he is most certainly something new under the sun.

The dig on AES is that he’s arrogant, a charge that concerns me not at all. Many smart people are arrogant, and he’s not only smart but inordinately successful. I can handle arrogance if it’s tempered with enough humility and smarts to know that he doesn’t know everything, that other people may be just as smart but in a different way, and that their ideas may be as good as yours, or even better. But only time will tell that tale. In the meantime, he is amusing me in new ways. Check out this excerpt from his post-election appearance on “Pod Save America.”

So, you know, we have this expectation for decorum that for whatever reason, Democrats seem to want to keep up. I think it’s because all of us all of us came up watching “The West Wing.” And then Donald Trump rolls in and is the most unserious fool and then we’re still out here trying to be like, well, he doesn’t fit into an episode of the West Wing.

And I think I think there is a responsibility that we have to engage with him as the unserious fool that he is. And I say that because if you’ve ever watched a bully in a room, if you don’t stand up to the bully, it’s not like the bully will just go away. If you don’t stand up to the bully, the bully just gets stronger for two reasons. because they think they can get away with it and they always want more.

Like they don’t bully because they they take what they want. It’s because they like to oppress people and so they get stronger and then other people around them who might be willing to stand up too see nobody standing up and say, “Well, it’s impossible to do.” And I just think there’s a responsibility for us to walk out of the West Wing episode that our politics used to feel like and into the reality of where we are.

That is a truth bomb that everyone who’s ever dealt with a bully knows. And I like how he keeps calling Trump not a dictator, a fascist, but a fool. The only descriptor I like better is the one he uses for JD Vance. You ready?

Cur.

There’s a Victorian word. It’s a descriptor for a certain kind of mongrel stray. And it describes Vance to a T. Both have a whiff of translated-from-Arabic to them, and perhaps they are.

But I like the idea of doing away with “the gentleman from Wyoming” and “my gentlewoman colleague from Ohio.” I mean, if Donald Trump set the rules of this game, you’re foolish to play by the old ones. They want the old decorum back? We’ll see about that.

Another detail I love? Amy Acton letting Vivek Ramaswamy’s concession call go to voicemail. The human mosquito deserves nothing less.

I’m so accustomed to Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory I can’t entirely relax. But so far, so good.

I don’t know what else to say about the weekend. I worked, I shopped, I cooked, I watched “Wag the Dog” for the first time in forever, and it is still excellent. How was yours?