In the desolate expanse of Wyoming—a state where the wind has more personality than the electorate and the political landscape is as varied as a bucket of red paint—Representative Harriet Hageman has decided that her current level of irrelevance in the House is simply not prestigious enough. On Tuesday, the woman who effectively ended the Cheney dynasty by leaning into the collective fever dream of the MAGA movement announced her bid for the United States Senate. It is a move as predictable as a sunrise and twice as blindingly irritating to anyone with a functioning frontal lobe.

Hageman, currently a two-term representative, has mastered the art of the political pivot with the terrifying agility of a gymnast whose only moral north star is a poll number. Lest we forget, before she became the anointed vessel for Donald Trump’s vengeance against the apostate Liz Cheney, Hageman was a critic of the very man she now treats as a secular deity. But in the modern American political theater, consistency is for the weak and the soon-to-be-unemployed. To survive in Wyoming, one must not only kiss the ring but offer to polish it with one’s own dignity. Her announcement is less a campaign launch and more a formal declaration that she has successfully completed her training in the school of performative sycophancy.

The House of Representatives, for all its flaws, is at least honest about its chaos. It is a mosh pit of short-term thinkers and social media influencers pretending to write laws. The Senate, however, is where narcissism goes to age in oak barrels. It is the 'World’s Greatest Deliberative Body,' a title so ironically detached from reality that it makes the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea sound like a bastion of transparency. By seeking a seat in the upper chamber, Hageman is signaling that she is ready to transition from the shrill, localized shouting matches of the House to the more dignified, expensive, and ultimately more useless stagnation of the Senate. It is the ultimate promotion: more staff, a longer term, and a higher-quality mahogany desk at which to do absolutely nothing for the actual citizens of the United States.

From the perspective of the American Left, this will be heralded as another horsewoman of the apocalypse, a sign that the 'threat to democracy' is tightening its grip on the throat of the Republic. This, of course, is the standard hyperbole from a group of people who believe a strongly worded tweet is a form of activism. They will use Hageman as a fundraising bogeyman, milking their donor base for every cent while offering no viable alternative in a state they abandoned decades ago. Meanwhile, the Right will hail her as a 'warrior,' a term they have degraded to mean 'anyone who can recite talking points without choking on the hypocrisy.' They see Hageman as a vanguard of the movement, oblivious to the fact that her 'warrior' status consists entirely of ensuring that the status quo remains undisturbed while the rhetoric gets louder and the results get thinner.

Wyoming politics is essentially a closed loop, a feedback chamber where the only competition is to see who can be the most 'unapologetic'—a word that has become shorthand for 'unwilling to engage with complex reality.' Hageman’s bid is a symptom of a deeper rot: the total professionalization of grievance. She isn't running to solve problems; she is running to inhabit a brand. In a state with the population of a medium-sized shopping mall, the political machinery is tuned to produce exactly one type of product: the ultra-loyalist who views governance as a zero-sum game of cultural dominance.

There is a certain bleak comedy in the historical parallel here. Like the Roman Senate in its twilight, our own upper chamber is increasingly populated by individuals who are more interested in the aesthetics of power than the exercise of it. Hageman is a perfect fit for this era of decline. She is a creature of the primary system, a product of a political environment where the only way to prove you are for 'The People' is to show how much you despise the people who live in different zip codes. As she moves toward this new seat, she carries with her the crushing weight of modern American stupidity—a bipartisan achievement where the Left provides the drama and the Right provides the nihilism. We are all forced to watch this charade, not because it matters, but because we have nothing better to do while the ship goes down. Congratulations, Harriet. The Senate deserves you, and frankly, you deserve the Senate.