New York

Amidst the political Sturm und Drang imposed on us over the past decade by an adjudicated sexual assailant and hamburger hog, we Americans must supply our need of feel-good endorphins from news of uplifting events that coincide with the chaos, corruption and cruelty that oozes daily from a White House soiled by a porcine cryptocurrency grifter who equates the workaday struggles of us ordinary folks—skyrocketing costs of food, clothing, and shelter—with little more than a “big yawn,” as he told reporters in a June 29 press conference.

Lucky for us plebeians, rejuvenating joy has come on a regular basis courtesy of noble events, including these recent items—

• April 1, 2026: A crew of four American astronauts launched a ten-day flyby around the moon, passing the lunar far side and breaking the record for  distance traveled into outer space at 252,756 miles (406,771 km), and breaking the record for total mission distance at 695,081 miles (1,118,619 km) before splashing down safely in the Pacific Ocean.

The nation was transfixed by television coverage of this achievement.

• June 13, ‘26: The New York Knickerbockers won the National Basketball Association championship in a 94-90 victory over the San Antonio (Texas) Spurs, marking incredible comebacks after trailing San Antonio by as many as 29 points in the penultimate game of a series. Scoring nearly half the Knicks’ tally in the fifth and final game was Jalen Brunson, the team’s point guard. The exciting drama of the Knicks’ athletic success was paralleled by literal dancing-in-the-streets jubilation that, as I write, has not yet fully subsided here in New York.

Phew! We so needed that!

• June 19, ‘26: The Barack Obama Presidential Center on the south side of Chicago opened to the public after ten years of planning and five years of construction. Rather than a traditional government-operated presidential library, the Obama Center is a privately-funded cultural and community hub. Donald Trump, the aforementioned sexual abuser and burger glutton, was explicitly not invited to a June 18 dedication ceremony.

• November 4, 2025: Zohran Kwame Mamdani—a 34-year-old Uganda-born immigrant of Indian heritage—emerged victorious in the New York mayoral election to become the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century. Young as he is, Mr. Mamdani championed the progressive spirit of New York’s most revered political leaders of the 1930s and ‘40s—President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (1882-1947).

Among accomplishments to date, Mayor Mamdani established the so-called Pied-à-Terre Tax, a five percent levy on luxury homes in Manhattan occupied on a part-time basis by millionaires and billionaires; won state funding of $1.27 billion (€1.2 billion) for the beginning phase of universal free child daycare for working parents; launched a construction schedule to build 200,000 new low-cost homes over the next ten years; and prohibited Donald Trump’s thuggish hirelings at the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) from entering city properties without judicial warrant.

Wonderful and welcome as these developments are—they being necessary ingredients to soothe an angst-ridden polity awaiting a mad king’s swan song—we must recognize that Mayor Mamdani’s progressive promise will soon collide with the regressive intentions of a man living in the shadow of contemporary history’s most horrible crime.

That man is Gregory Bovino. His fascist snarl is frequent. He could become the next president of the United States.

A man of brief stature—Fully erect, Mr. Bovino stands at 5’4” (1,625.6 mm), though he is often heightened by lifts inserted into his combat boots—he is the walking, talking stereotype of a small fellow afflicted with a Napoleonic complex.

So, too, Herr Bovino is the embodiment of a regrettable contemporary style called “Fash,” a portmanteau of fashionable and fascist. The term applies to a growing movement whose young and fevered adherents see themselves as tiki torch bearers in a determinedly authoritarian march unto a lily white Christian paradise.

The sorry times and alarming movement coalesce in the person of Gregory Bovino, a peppy 56-year-old customarily enrobed in a double-breasted, olive-green, brass button Nazi-era military greatcoat (mantel) paired with a black shirt symbolic of Italian fascism and a Sam Browne shoulder-strap belt. His chosen aesthetic is completed by a hairdo in the Nazi vogue known as inselhaarschnitt—sides buzzcut to the scalp beneath a scruffy topknot.

Until recent political embarrassments—e.g., news media film of his one-armed salutes reminiscent of fealty to Adolf Hitler and his leadership in January’s occupation force of masked government goons deployed to the city of Minneapolis, resulting in the slaughter of two civilians—Herr Bovino was “commander at-large” of the U.S. Border Patrol. Likewise, he led violent occupations of other American cities. During his thuggery in North Carolina, he was filmed screaming at Governor Josh Stein, “The blood of innocents is on you…You continue choosing illegal aliens over Ma and Pa America!” In Los Angeles, he was filmed screaming encouragement to his brutes in balaclavas , “This is our fucking city!”

In the Bovino lexicon, “innocents” are presumed to be monolingual English-speaking Aryans, whereas “illegal aliens” apply to The Other—Hispanics, Latinos, Asians, Africans, Muslims. Following a federal misconduct investigation, Mr. Bovino was reprimanded for referring to undocumented immigrants as “scum, filth and trash.”  

Even Donald Trump, who famously describes dark-complexioned immigrants as people from “shithole countries” who eat pet dogs and cats owned by regular Americans could not abide Kommandant Bovino’s over-the-top, racist-driven deportation goal: the round-up, imprisonment, and forced removal of one-hundred million “illegals,” or close to one-third of the three-hundred forty-nine million residents of the U.S.

After an indecorous exit from federal employment, Gregory Bovino announced his candidacy for president on June 8 via an appearance on NewsNation, the cable television network. Then followed a posting on X (formerly Twitter), in which he declared his chief priority: “If running for president is what it takes to actually get [mass deportation] done, then all options are on the table.”

Soon thereafter a website was created—www.bovino2028.com—with taglines that reflect a peculiar attention to perceived manliness: “Men fight back” and “Bovino knows what America needs—America’s men.”

The website offers the candidate’s well-wishers the chance to purchase campaign caps and T-shirts, plus assorted gewgaws, whilst admiring the pungently stated worldview of Gregory Kent Bovino, a/k/a The Commander—

“Following The Commander’s maximum effectiveness in quelling the foreign hordes that have subsumed our nation’s cities, both large and small, the American people witnessed what true leadership, powered by a warrior mindset, actually looks like as The Commander endeavored to restore order and national sovereignty…[and liberate America from] the foreign global one-world hellscape ushered in by Barack Hussein Obama…”

—NOTE: Mr. Bovino’s enthusiasm for deporting one hundred million “illegal aliens” is detached from statistical reality. Fact: The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the maximum number of undocumented residents now living here at only eleven million, or precisely one tenth The Commander’s claim.

Having debased themselves by selling their souls to Donald Trump, the two most widely assumed Republican Party top contenders in the presidential race that begins two years hence—Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance—may be seen by partisan voters as girly-men who pale by comparison to the kommandant’s testosteronic turbo force.

There was a time when both Messrs. Rubio and Vance were soft-spoken gentlemen of the Congress with sense enough to despise the man who, absurdly, became president. Back in 2016, the year that kicked off the Age of Trump, Mr. Rubio warned, “Donald Trump is a serious threat to the future of our [Republican] party, and our country.” Mr. Vance voiced stouter regard. In a social media message to his former law school roommate, he wrote, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

Following the interregnum of 2020, when Mr. Trump failed to win reelection after a first term at the White House, the Rubio-Vance hesitations collapsed into wishy-washy acceptance of appointments to the Trump regime, which made its absurdly triumphant return to Washington in the election of 2024. Today, both former Trump critics obligingly appear with the president in staged Oval Office settings; both grin obediently as they serve up encomiums to a man they detested a few years ago.  

In the fierceness of politics generally, and especially nowadays as vicious rumors easily supplant objectivity in a media environment drifting ever further into irresponsibility, wishy-washy does not stand a chance in the Fash zeitgeist. This, as Greg Bovino surely realizes, is a ticket back to prominence: bloviate your way to back to government employment.

In normal chapters of U.S. political history, Mr. Bovino’s soft spot would be the nature of those within his inner circle. Today, however, it is hardly worth mentioning the baggage of his presidential exploratory committee—co-chaired by Jacob Engels and George Riley.

Rather than face trial for wrecking a hotel quarters near Walt Disney World in Florida, Mr. Riley, a top official of the state Republican organization, opted to make a public apology for several days of urinating and vomiting all over his room. In a statement published by the Tampa Bay Times, Mr. Riley said, “I am deeply sorry…I have been dealing with alcoholism and mental health issues…I will be seeking help soon.”

A mix of felony and misdemeanor charges are pending against Mr. Engels, in connection with his arrest in Hudson, Wisconsin on May 21 of this year. Allegations against the veteran right-wing provocateur, associated with the Proud Boys street brawling gang, include methamphetamine possession, resisting a police officer, and disorderly conduct.

Perhaps all of the foregoing will become grist for the movie mill of legendary film satirist Mel Brooks. (That is, if Mr. Brooks, who turned 100 years of age on June 28, is quick to inspire his many protégés.)

With the release of “The Producers” back in 1967, perhaps Mr. Brooks had a premonition of unthinkable absurdities to come, what with the election—twice!—of Donald Trump, a man who stowed a collection of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside nightstand, according to the first of his three wives.

Mr. Brooks’ movie was a brilliant dark comedy, in which a failed theatrical producer (played by the late Zero Mostel) and his timid accountant (the late Gene Wilder) rather off-handedly come to a mathematical observation: By taking advantage of certain legal loopholes, a producer could raise millions from investors for a Broadway show, spend barely anything, have the show close on opening night, and keep the leftover cash—no questions asked.

Thus a musical spoof featuring, among other numbers, the song “Springtime for Hitler: a Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.” At the end of the uproariously funny number, an ensemble of sturmtruppen sings, “Be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party!”

Naturally, things go awry for the producer and accountant. Their play not only survives opening night but becomes a smash hit with standing room-only audiences.

In these Fash times, with a Republican comer strutting about in Nazi gear, can it be absurd to imagine President Gregory Kent Bovino?        

THOMAS ADCOCK

U.S. correspondent

His essays with us: click here.