As if the state of modern American politics couldn’t get any dumber, Republicans are now attacking Democrats using Seinfeld references.
Although politicians aren’t calling each other “ASSMAN” or challenging each other to masturbation contests (yet), former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who was famously forced to resign in 2023 after just two months, recently spoke to CBS News and name-checked the iconic NBC sitcom while discussing the current government shutdown.
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“I call it the Seinfeld shutdown because it’s a shutdown about nothing,” McCarthy stated. Host Major Garrett pushed back against this characterization, pointing out that “Democrats say this is about something. It’s not Seinfeldian because it’s about Obamacare premiums.”
This isn’t the first time this year that right-wing politicians have tried to use Seinfeld jokes to get their points across. North of the border, Canada’s Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre recently attacked Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney by arguing that Carney’s summer in office was a “Seinfeld summer” meaning that it was “a big show about nothing.”
He later claimed that Carney was “almost as busy and as useless as George Costanza.”
McCarthy wasn’t even the first American conservative to use this exact phrase. During the 2023 government shutdown, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President Neil Bradley, who, perhaps not coincidentally, once worked as McCarthy’s deputy chief of staff, similarly referred to it as the “Seinfeld shutdown.”
“It’s really not very clear what, if anything, they’re fighting over, other than fighting,” Bradley said.
Weirdly, the phrase may have actually originated with Democrats. Political reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell posted a Tweet in 2019 revealing that Democrats had been privately texting about the “Seinfeld shutdown,” meaning a “shutdown about nothing.”
Of course, McCarthy’s recent statement makes no sense — not just because the potential expiration of Affordable Healthcare Act subsidies, which affect “more than 24 million” Americans, is at the “heart” of the shutdown, but because Seinfeld was never a show “about nothing.”
Jerry, the sitcom within the sitcom, was pitched as a show “about nothing.” But Seinfeld was originally envisioned as a series about “how a comedian gets his material.” And it quickly became jam-packed full of wacky, frequently interacting storylines that could hardly be described as “nothing.”
That being said, it was perhaps inevitable that the GOP would become the party of Seinfeld references, considering that so many of President Trump’s unhinged rants make far more sense with synthesized slap bass musical accompaniment.
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