Lenny DeFranco

The race is on to narrativize everything that has led to the election of Donald Trump. On the right, a hero has improbably emerged to lead the party where Priebus and the old guard had no idea it wanted to go. On the left, everything that took place leading up to his victory is ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

Last night, a British friend of mine asked me if I found this election “incomprehensible.” The answer, if only in retrospect, is no. Not to those of us who know that a candidate running on a platform of reinstating slavery would win a few states. After all, someone running just ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

Unless national polls have been wrong to a Brexit-like degree, Hillary Clinton will be elected president tonight. (Make sure it happens! Get out there and vote!) And when she does, all eyes will turn to her challenger, Donald Trump. For weeks, Trump has been slinging reckless ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

A Reuters piece Thursday afternoon carried the headline, “In blow to Trump, U.S. court denies Republican poll monitor request.” The article reported on a federal judge’s decision to uphold a Pennsylvania state law requiring party-registered election monitors to only serve in the ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

Last Friday, FBI director James Comey shocked the world by writing a vague, innuendo-filled letter to Congress about his agency’s discovery of emails pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s server scandal. Around the country, people looked at one another and scratched their heads. Did ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

A few days ago, I was surfing YouTube when I came across a video of Barack Obama I’d never seen before. According to its title, neither had anyone. “Never Before Seen Video: Obama Whines About White Privilege,” it said. The thumbnail looked grainy and old, and was that really a ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

As an election full of improbable events draws to a close, there could be no more fitting an end to all of it than if two of the most improbable events in American culture took place within a week of each other. Which is, of course, exactly what’s happening. After 240 years as a ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Dec 20, 2018

Things are finally turning around for Donald Trump! After a year and a half of offending the intellect of anyone with a grip on reality, and with plenty of time until the presidential election, the Republican nominee has finally secured his first major newspaper nomination. On ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Oct 25, 2016

Donald Trump’s bid for the White House has taken a turn for the hideous. For much of this campaign, I didn’t fear Trump. I was pacified by his buffoonery and entertained by the spectacle of it all. Sure, he was woefully unfit to be president, but he wasn’t going to be. Actually, ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

Not too long ago, I oriented my week around watching football on Sundays. I used to plan weekends so that I could fall asleep as late as possible on Saturday night just so I would have to spend as little time as possible in a pre-football world on Sunday. I was the prototypically ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Dec 20, 2018

For any of you out there with video editing skills, I have a request. Please mash up the audio of Donald Trump talking about his proclivity for sexual assault with this video: You don’t need to change the footage. Just intersplice the audio. I want to belly laugh at the ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

At 9 p.m. EST, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will attempt to engage in political debate with Donald Trump, a man who once invented a fake name so that he could pretend to be his own publicist on phone calls but then forgot to speak in a different voice when he did ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

We’ve always known the first Clinton-Trump debate was going to be a shitshow, but this is something special. On Saturday evening, Donald Trump publicly made plans to seat Gennifer Flowers, Bill Clinton’s longtime mistress, in the front row at Hofstra University. Right in front ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

When the NeverTrump movement began last year, it gave some of the more principled voices in conservative media a thrilling way to gain attention while opposing party orthodoxy — something rarely seen in our era of ironclad partisanship. The holdouts against the GOP nominee were ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

Alexander Hamilton once wrote that of the government’s three branches, the Supreme Court was to be the “least dangerous.” The judiciary, he explained, would have “no influence over either the sword or the purse,” and therefore a limited capacity to “annoy or injure” the rest of ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

It’s always risky to make the first movie about a recent cultural event. The temptation to cash in on a living piece of the zeitgeist is obvious, but the results are almost never good. Films like World Trade Center, Ashton Kutcher’s Jobs, and the surreally shitty W all stand in ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Sep 6, 2016

It doesn’t have to be like this. This string of constant scandal that the Clintons find themselves deflecting does not have to be a part of American government. It is not a function of Republican hatred. The Clintons’ ever-present mess is their fault, time and time again, and it ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

In late 2012, ESPN got involved in a strange controversy. Rob Parker, a black sports reporter, was appearing on ESPN’s First Take when the conversation turned to Robert Griffin III’s statement that he didn’t prefer to be defined as a black quarterback. Parker was asked to ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Aug 30, 2016

Being Donald Trump’s doctor is hard. Imagine being responsible for the well-being of one of the most important men in America. A man who possesses at least four extra chromosomes in case the others try to unionize. A man whose body is so perfect — so masculine — that it defies ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

You’ve probably seen this photo. It went viral Wednesday. It depicts a female Muslim beachgoer in Nice, France, being forced to take off her clothes at the command of three armed, white policemen. It’s an ugly image that raises your hackles on first glimpse. In addition to being ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Aug 25, 2016

Being that I am more than three years old, I’m old enough to remember when it was cool to hate on Gawker. The news site, which did its share of great reporting and hosted its share of great writing in its time, was also frequently “problematic,” to use the lingo of a much more ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Aug 24, 2016

So this story definitely starts in October 2015, not Sunday. It was nine months ago that Aroldis Chapman, a man strong enough to throw the fastest pitch in Major League Baseball history twice, decided that he was so irritated by his girlfriend that he needed to take matters, ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Dec 20, 2018

In the last couple of weeks, Donald Trump has done everything in his power to prove his ineptitude for the presidency. Luckily, people noticed. With less than three months to go until the election, dismal chances of success, and most importantly, an attitude of fatalistic ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018

At this moment, Donald Trump has an 85% chance of losing the election. A few days ago, he made a threat on the life of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, that was replayed endlessly since. I think those two facts have a lot to do with one another. Not because Trump is feeling ...read more

• By Lenny DeFranco
  Nov 9, 2018