Liz Cheney’s martyrdom, Kanye West’s Mar-a-Lago dinner, Herschel Walker on werewolves, and more in 2022

From the State of the Union to the midterm elections, Vox’s political team has listed many of the political winners and losers of 2022.

With the year almost in the rearview, we want to take a moment to single out some of the most remarkable achievements by current and future public servants, and revisit some of the biggest flops and failures. Here are the best, worst, and weirdest political moments and phenomena of the year.

worst dinner ever

One of the most recent innovations in holiday celebrations is “Friendsgiving,” where millennials have a Thanksgiving-style dinner with friends before the holiday, which is celebrated with family. The day before Thanksgiving, former President Donald Trump participated in something like this at Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club: He had a Thanksgiving-style dinner with two famous antisemites, rapper Kanye West and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

The food was apparently good enough that West had a second helping of stuffing, but it generated a lot of headlines that were difficult for Trump to digest. Just weeks after Trump-backed candidates had disappointing results in the midterm elections and shortly after he announced his third presidential bid in a desultory speech at Mar-a-Lago. News of the leaked dinner only made Trump look worse.

The former president equivocated for the day about having eaten with the two but could not bring himself to punish him (he denied even knowing who Fuentes was). In the meantime, West and Fuentes basked in the attention and went on a media tour together, where West repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler.

The most willful political martyr

Liz Cheney set her political career on fire this year and has never let up. Wyoming Republicans put themselves in committee on January 6th and burn every last bridge the Republican Party has. Cheney’s continued opposition to Trump after Jan. 6 led to his removal as the No. 1 Republican. Cheney didn’t think so. He lost the primary in the landslide, without really trying to win.

Instead, he is a guided missile, pointing directly at Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. He even endorsed the Democrats elected in the midterms of 2022. Like Samson, he can bring the temple down on his head as long as he takes out Trump and his acolytes as well.

Cheney will never become irrelevant in American politics. His last name, his former position as House Republican No. However, barring the state-recognized Sunday event green room by Congress, his electoral career is over for the foreseeable future.

Worst political speech ever

There are many reasons that Herschel Walker lost the Senate race to incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock this year. Pundits can point out that he ran a flawed campaign while Warnock ran a good campaign. They can also point to the plethora of scandals swirling around Walker’s personal life, including what seems to be the steadily increasing number of children the father has and the steadily increasing number of times he allegedly paid for his partner’s abortion. There are also new allegations of domestic violence, in addition to what he wrote in a memoir that describes his struggles with mental illness.

Compared to this, speech is not the biggest problem. But Walker encapsulated all the political challenges in a speech he gave in November during the Senate runoff, where he discussed the various benefits of vampires versus werewolves in combat.

The Republican Senate hopeful and former college football star told the crowd, “I don’t know if you know, but vampires are some cool people, right? But let me tell you what I mean: A werewolf can kill a vampire. What you know? I never knew.”

Walker continued, “So I don’t want to be a vampire anymore. I want to be a werewolf.”

The clip was used in a closing ad by Warnock, mocked by Barack Obama when stumped in the Peach State, and became part of Walker’s political legacy.

The best rap videos

Linda Paulson, an octogenarian running for state Senate in Utah, went viral for releasing a campaign video about rapping — or at least doing something resembling hip-hop — in September. Paulson is running as a Republican against a Democratic incumbent in suburban Salt Lake City. He lost by 15 percent but at least got more attention than the state legislative candidates did.

The strangest sex scandal

An ISIS bride who is a member of the Congress backbench would not make for a good romantic comedy. However, it makes for an interesting political story this year.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images

Van Taylor is a two-term Republican from the suburbs of Dallas with a seemingly perfect pedigree for a Republican: two degrees from Harvard and one tour in Iraq as an officer in the Marines. However, despite a strong conservative voting record, Taylor faces major challenges for heresy such as the vote to uphold the 2020 Election and to create a bipartisan commission to investigate January 6.

Taylor looked like he was going to skip the primary – where a candidate needs 50 percent to avoid a runoff – until just two days earlier, when a far-right website published allegations that Taylor had an extramarital affair with Tania Joya, a woman previously known to be the widow of a member ISIS is famous and gets a lot of coverage in the British tabloids as the “Bride of ISIS.” He eventually fled the Islamic State and moved to Texas, where he met Taylor and had a relationship.

As a result of the allegations, which has been stoked by one of the opponents, Taylor finished just shy of the 50 percent mark needed to avoid the runoff and two days later dropped out of the race after publicly confessing to the relationship. The result essentially handed the congressional seat to Keith Self, who finished second in the primary.

The strangest food scandal ever

New York Mayor Eric Adams has long touted a vegan diet, which he claims has brought him countless health benefits, including reversing blindness in one eye caused by diabetes. This is something he said repeatedly during the 2021 mayoral campaign and even wrote a book.

Turns out Adams isn’t vegan – he eats fish a lot. Although the New York mayor’s spokesperson originally lied and claimed that Adams had never touched seafood, Adams eventually confessed and admitted his personal pescetarianism.

The best work-life balance

Democratic Congressman Kai Kahele took a long time to get from his home in Hawaii to the Capitol in Washington, DC, but he made it easier by not showing up.

The first-term Hawaii Democrat quits at the end of 2021 and uses proxy voting instead of going to the Capitol. As Civil Beat reported at the time, in the first few months of 2022, he cast only five personal votes while exploring a gubernatorial bid. Kahele finally decided to run and was lost in the explosion. In the meantime, his concentration on the gubernatorial campaign has led to a House Ethics Committee investigation into whether he misappropriated official resources for his campaign.

The strangest corruption scandal ever

The late Baltimore businessman Russell “Stringer” Bell was shocked when a friend “noted a criminal conspiracy.” Rep. Marie Newman (D-IL) isn’t just writing about criminal conspiracies. He signed a formal contract to do so.

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

Newman promised a job to a political rival during his 2020 primary campaign against incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski so he wouldn’t run against him and split the anti-Lipinski vote. He signed a contract with Iymen Chehade in which he promised to hire him and pay him a six-figure salary as a “foreign policy adviser” in exchange for him not fighting him. During the negotiations, they also agreed to take an anti-Israel position at Chehade’s behest, although that language was not written into the final contract. After he beat Lipinski, he didn’t hire Chehade, so he sued him.

Newman defended himself by citing the House general counsel’s opinion that the contract was unenforceable because it was “opposed to public policy.” A settlement was eventually reached, and Chehade appeared on the campaign payroll under the title of “foreign policy adviser.” The effort is still called the Office of Congressional Ethics, which found in the investigation “substantial reason to believe that Rep. Newman may have promised federal jobs to his primary opponent to gain political support.”

The whole imbroglio has led to an investigation by the House Ethics Committee. However, the investigation will not resume until 2023. After all, Newman lost to Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) after the two were dismissed together.

Alliterative fish advocacy at its best

In her victory in Alaska’s special election in September for Congress and in the following November’s election, Mary Peltola made a fortune as a Democrat on the Last Frontier.

Peltola benefits from the state’s ranked-choice voting system as well as a divided Republican field with former reality television star Sarah Palin and businessman Nick Begich running against him.

But they also have a major advantage: fish. Peltola ran on a three-pronged platform of “Fish, Family, and Freedom” and made advocacy for the Alaskan salmon fishery one of the cornerstones of his campaign. It worked, and Peltola will represent the most pro-Trump district (according to the 2020 election results) of the Democrats in the next Congress.