In case you missed it, we kicked off Golden Duke 2025 voting last week and the competition is heating up. Some of you have reached out with your complaints about the exclusion of ne’er-do-wells such as President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) from this year’s awards. We hear you! They suck! They can re-earn their places in the Duke competition when they start sucking in a less demonic and more lighthearted way ❤️

If you haven’t had a chance to participate in selecting 2025’s most admirable vermin please follow this link and vote before time runs out! As you’ll see, we’ve added some new categories this year to meet our uniquely maniacal moment 🙃 Early voting shows that Trump’s $300 Million White House Ballroom might easily take the cake for Best Scandal but the competition to win a Meritorious Achievement in Grifting or Best Supporting Hatchet Man remains tight.

Vote here!

P.S. If you submitted the nomination we ended up publishing for Lindsey Halligan, Tom “Cashbag” Homan or Signalgate, please reach out! We don’t have your email address and want to send your complimentary TPM merch.

To all of you readers who submitted noxious nominations for the 17th annual Golden Duke awards, we thank you for your service. It’s not easy to sift back through the grime that’s caked atop the first year of President Trump’s second term to elevate and celebrate the scandals and the creeps who remind us of the real reason for the season (honoring depravity).

Some of you sickos have been waiting all year for this 🫶🏻

TPM’s 17th annual celebration of our beloved Golden Duke awards — the season when the TPM community comes together to celebrate those who gave us new highs (lows) in the field of public betrayal, political corruption, venality and nonsense — is special this year. Not only is it TPM’s 25th anniversary as an independent news outlet that grew out of our coverage of the George W. Bush administration’s lawlessness, but it is a special, albeit sad, year for those who have grown to love TPM’s annual toast to our nation’s most tenacious political trolls.

The competition was fierce. Voter comments got messy. Some of our winners only eked out a victory by a few percentage points. But after a free and fair election, and more than 12,000 votes cast, we’re ready to announce 2022’s greatest losers.

What better way to round out the year than by toasting the scoundrels who did the worst the best? It’s TPM tradition, after all. Ever since Duke Cunningham — in all of his shameless glory, complete with bribe menu, lava lamp, and yacht party — brought us into a new era of public corruption, reveling in the moments when public figures reveal their true, often corrupt and comically grimy colors is what we do best.

Without further ado, join us in our celebration of this years winners — one of the most cartoonishly dishonorable cast of characters we’ve raised a toast to yet.

As the Oscars holds its in memoriam each year, so too will the Golden Dukes this year, complete with a bit of dark spin. We would never dance on anyone’s actual graves (probably), but their political graves are fair game.

2022 gifted us a lot of losers who we can now celebrate as winners — in their unscrupulous, unhinged, and ultimately unelectable glory. Introducing the Golden Dukes Forgotten Heroes, an in memoriam to all of our favorite scoundrels who never quite made it to elected office. The 2022 midterms, in all its Big Lie-fueled insanity, gifted us hundreds of options for whacky candidates we will miss the most. Some may run for office again. But in our hearts they’ll always be losers.

The last several years have offered especially fertile ground for conspiracy theories big and small. Some have become so engrained in our collective consciousness that it’s hard to remember they were once just whispers in the swampiest corners of the internet.

Others are just downright dumb, so memorable in their convoluted chaos that they’re worthy of several celebratory cheers.

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.