Rolling Stone55%
Anthony Constantino Is Everything Wrong With Politics in MAGA Era 31%
By Bill McKibben0%
7/31/2026, 6:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Framing Effect, and Horn Effect, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 21.2% saturation with 178 hits. Analysis detected 944 faulty-reasoning hits from 839 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38.8% and a BS Rank of 31% (15,808 of 22,840 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 69.20% of the article peer group.
A crucial question — maybe *the* crucial question — for America is just how successful Donald Trump has been in poisoning our collective brains.
Are we past the point of no return, or is there a chance of meandering back to something even remotely normal?
One place that will provide a clue, come November, is New York’s 21<sup>st</sup> Congressional District.
It’s the biggest district in New York state, sprawling across the Adirondacks and the St.
Lawrence Valley, and stretching down the Hudson as far as Saratoga Springs.
It’s not prominent on the list of possible seats Democrats might flip in November because it’s heavily rural, overwhelmingly white, and has long voted Republican.
Its current congressperson is Elise Stefanik, who decided against reelection in order to make an (unsuccessful) bid for governor, and who has crushed a series of Democrats in recent campaigns, winning last time by 25 percentage points.
Ordinarily, it would be a shoo-in win for the GOP.
What makes this year less ordinary is that the Republicans, at the instruction of President Trump, bypassed a standard-issue Republican state legislator for the seat and elected Anthony Constantino in a contentious primary.
Constantino may be the closest thing to a Trump mini-me that our political system has yet produced.
He is a millionaire sticker magnate (you read that right), and he is a name-caller.
He refers to his opponents, publicly, as “corrupt pieces of shit.”
He calls reporters “dipshits” and “scumbags.”
His primary opponent, a Marine veteran, was a “fucking coward.”
But much as he despises anyone who disagrees with him, he loves one person.
His 10-song rap video tribute to President Trump opens with a number called “Thank You Donald Trump” that begins, “Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump” and continues with AI slop depicting Trump in Italy, Mexico, Africa, and other locales where they “love Donald Donald Trump.”
This isn’t true, by the way.
New polling data released in June shows that around the world respect for America has fallen sharply during Trump’s second term.
In Italy, to use Constantino’s example, 73 percent of Italians thought the U.S. was a reliable partner in 2022, and 34 percent of them think so now.
It’s the kind of erosion you’d think Constantino might understand, since his district shares a long border with the country — Canada — where that reversal in opinion has been the sharpest, and where the president’s tariffs have done at least as much damage to small-town New York businesses as to the nation Trump would have you believe is our enemy up north.
But Constantino is all in.
He promises to “work with President Trump to stop drugs, crime, terrorism, and low-wage labor from crossing our northern border,” which is almost as silly as the president’s complaints about wildfire smoke infiltrating the lower 48.
Nothing can shake his faith in President Trump, who he gifted a giant bronze statue of, of course, President Trump.
He likes Rudy Giuliani too, and the affection is returned.
Constantino, the disbarred attorney announced in a video on his campaign website, is “exactly the kind of person we need involved in politics.”
The only thing standing between Constantino and further glory is the general election in November, when he takes on a dairy farmer from the northwestern corner of the district, Blake Gendebien.
I talked to Gendebien the other day, because Third Act — the coalition of older Americans working to defend democracy that I helped found five years ago — had endorsed him.
He seemed to me…utterly and entirely *normal.
* Here, for example, is the bio on his campaign website, which you should read to remind yourself of how Americans might have described themselves back in the olden times, i.e.
BT:
*I grew up working on the farm, earned a degree in agriculture, and later worked for a farm equipment manufacturer.
For the past 22 years, I have owned and operated Twin Mill Farms along with my family – my wife, Carmen, and my three boys, Miles, Truman, and Noah.
We’ve come long way, and Twin Mill Farms currently has over 1,000 acres of land, 500 dairy cows, and 12 full-time employees who work on the farm.
*
Maybe the district’s old moderation will push up through the cracks, and voters will turn toward Gendebien.
What little polling there is shows it’s a real possibility.
But it’s hard to compete with a millionaire’s self-funded campaign, and maybe it’s hard to compete with the constant brain-warping aggression and spite that’s come to define too much of our politics.
Constantino is a perfect representation of this ugly moment — here, for instance, is a cheerful video in which he’s printing stickers giving people an “R-word pass” so they can call others “retarded.”
It’s possible that seriousness is no longer something we want in politicians, that we’ve grown so used to the idea that Congress is a circus that we willingly elect clowns.
If so, Constantino is definitely the guy.
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.