The celebration of truly horrible campaign ads has long been a fan favorite during the TPM Golden Duke season. In 2008, you all voted on the Sleaziest Campaign Ads of the year, which featured an iconic appearance from the John McCain campaign. That year, the late senator’s campaign put out an ad insinuating that Barack Obama preferred sex education for kindergarten students.

Ten years later in 2018, TPM celebrated the Worst Campaign Attack Ads of the year, complete with the National Republican Congressional Committee being super racist in its attacks on Antonio Delgado.

We’re bringing a 2022 version of the category back this year as part of our ongoing celebration of those who did the worst the best: it’s time to vote on this year’s most Cringe Campaign Ads, which in 2022, also includes memes.

Prepare yourselves. It’s going to be hard to choose.

As I mentioned the other day, things are busy over here at TPM this week. If you don’t know why, this should explain it.

But also you can read more here.

Anyways, it’s still Golden Dukes season and we are relentless in our devotion to celebrating our favorite filth. So far you’ve voted on the the best scandals of the year, on a local and national scale. Now it’s time to move onto one of the most competitive categories of the 2022 Golden Dukes: Meritorious Achievement In The Crazy.

There are a lot of other exciting things happening at Talking Points Memo dot com this week.

But just because we’re launching a massive exclusive series after months of work that reveals some of the most dramatic details yet about the scope of Republican members of Congress‘ involvement in trying to overturn the election does NOT mean we’ve forgotten that it’s Golden Dukes season.

Gotta give the people (you) what they want (opportunities to celebrate those weirdos who did the worst best).

As my colleague David Kurtz hinted in Morning Memo today, we’re about to drop the first of a series of exclusive stories we’re planning to publish over the course of this week about the 2020 election-overturning effort.

It’s based on a pretty massive log of unreported material. I won’t give away much more than that here, but make sure you stick around at TPM this afternoon.

Really great stuff, guys. I asked and you certainly answered. Now, it’s voting time.

For those of you just tuning in, welcome to the 2022 Golden Duke awards. This is TPM’s version of the Oscars except we celebrate all the horror-show politicians and delightfully abominable public figures who kept us in business this year.

In 2020 we brought you the Duke of Dukes Golden Duke ceremony, a March Madness style winner-takes-all quest to answer the year’s most burning question: Who is the most brazen political buffoon of all time (errr… the last 20 years or so that TPM has been celebrating this kind of debauchery)???

We asked. You answered. Rudy Giuliani, in all of his rotten glory, was knighted the one Duke to rule them all.

To let old Rudes really marinate in his swamp of celebration, we took a year off from TPM’s annual fête-ing of the year’s scummiest trash holes and greatest grifters. But we’re back.

The midterm elections gifted us something we didn’t even know we were craving: a new cast of craven characters to revive our broken spirits, and a new standard by which to judge and luxuriate in their absurdity.

So without further ado, welcome to ✨Golden Dukes 2022✨ Clinking our glasses to craziness is what TPM does best.

There are about a hundred Donald Trump-related investigations happening at the moment, so today I’ll save you the Google with this brief rundown of the Trump Organization criminal tax fraud case, which is wrapping up closing arguments either this evening or sometime tomorrow morning. The jury will then begin its deliberations.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk has been going off the deep end with the best of them the last several days, hyping various conspiracy theories oozing out of the public comment section of a Maricopa County meeting that took place before election officials certified the midterm results in Arizona’s most populous county this week.

Republicans and aides surrounding both Donald Trump and Herschel Walker’s campaigns apparently don’t want the former president touching Georgia’s runoff Senate race with a 10-foot pole.

The Justice Department wants to question former veep Mike Pence as part of its criminal probe into Donald Trump’s efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election, two people familiar with the matter told the New York Times in a piece published this afternoon. Pence is reportedly considering the request, breaking from his outright refusal to cooperate with the House Jan. 6 Select Committee’s probe into the matter.

A DOJ investigator reached out to Pence’s team before Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Friday that he was appointing Jack Smith as special counsel to oversee and weigh charges in the DOJ’s criminal probe into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, as well as the department’s classified records case.