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10. Kellyanne Conway, media commentator and
President Donald Trump’s former adviser
Guests: Jesus, her grandmother
This is Jesus’s first cameo at one of these
dinners! It will not be his last. Kellyanne Conway has a lot to ask him,
and she anticipates that he would also have a lot to ask her. (Speaking of
people trying to go directly to the Roman-Catholic source, we got a new
Chicago-style pope this year! Note that he is not invited to this dinner.)
This is the first episode to introduce what will become a persistent
problem: the debate over whether Jesus counts as a dinner guest who’s dead
or alive. Theologically this is a rich question, I feel! I am Episcopalian,
though.
9. Kash Patel, FBI director/influencer
Guests: the entire Miracle on Ice men’s
hockey team from 1980
“Who are you?” I picture the men’s hockey
team asking. “I’m Kash Patel, children’s-book author and
director of the FBI,” Kash Patel responds, through a mouthful of
chicken-parm hero sandwich (his meal of choice). “Recently I’ve been in the
news because the FBI keeps detaining the wrong people of interest in
high-profile cases, and I keep making agents provide security to
my country-singer girlfriend.” I feel that the conversation would trail off
quickly after this point.
8. Cheryl Hines, actor and wife of Robert F.
Kennedy Jr.
Guests: Her grandmother Ruth, Carol Burnett,
and Maya Angelou
I am arriving at the theory that if your
grandma is going to your imaginary dinner, it should just be all family.
I’d love to have my grandma at such an event, but I think if Carol Burnett
were also at the dinner, she might clam up.
In case you’re wondering why Cheryl Hines is
getting interviewed—her husband is the current health secretary, who is
diligently working to reintroduce the measles virus to its original habitat
(inside of people’s respiratory systems), where it had been hunted almost
to extinction. It is rare to have a measles conservationist in this sort of
position, but that’s the Trump administration for you: trying things that
have never been tried before. What if the conspiracy theorists were
inside the FBI instead of outside it? What if we didn’t have an East Wing?
7. Adena Friedman, Nasdaq president and CEO
Guests: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, and the astronaut Sally Ride
I’m getting worried about the stock market!
It kept going up this year, largely because we keep spending more on AI in
hopes that this certainly-not-bubble will lift all boats and eventually
result in profits. The architects of AI even got to be Time magazine’s
Person(s) of the Year. STOP PUTTING AI INTO ALL OF MY THINGS! I don’t want
it there. It’s like the letter u that British people are
always dropping into words: It adds nothing and leaves me unsettled.
Friedman’s dinner features three
“trailblazers” who would be eating a Thanksgiving dinner. She said these
might be very different conversations, but I can actually see this meal
going well! As long as they don’t discuss the stock market—having led the
country through the Great Depression, FDR might bring up some questions
that could kill the mood.
6. J. D. Vance, vice president
Guests: Isaac Newton, Donald Trump, and
Abraham Lincoln (a popular pick)
Given that Trump described Abraham
Lincoln as someone who “did something that was a very important thing to
do, and especially at that time,” I think it is likely that Trump does not
know who Abraham Lincoln is or what he did, and the possibility of a dinner
party where Trump is forced to reveal this in real time is intriguing to
me. My sense is that he would try to bring up that his uncle was a
professor at MIT and then compliment Lincoln on his height. He might be
disappointed to hear that Lincoln spent so much time fighting against the
Confederacy. I don’t know what Isaac Newton would do; maybe drop an apple.
Including Trump in this dinner when that seat
could go to literally any human being living or dead is the kind of
pandering we have come to expect from the vice president, whose other 2025
highlights include complaining to Europe about the “enemy within,”
being one of the last to see Pope
Francis alive, and suggesting that he
hopes his Hindu wife will awaken to
Jesus one day.
5. Jillian Michaels, fitness influencer
Guests: Maya Angelou (again!), Albert
Einstein, and Ozzy Osbourne
This one gets points subtracted for the menu,
which is: French fries, red wine, peanut butter, hot sauce, and ice cream—I
have to assume not together, but Michaels did say that this was all that
they would need, so, who knows! “What is The Biggest Loser’s
trainer doing on this podcast?” you ask. This year, she came out swinging
in defense of Trump’s directive to the Smithsonian to say nicer things
about America and stop harping on about slavery.
“Do
you realize that only less than 2 percent of white Americans owned slaves?
You realize that slavery is thousands of years old?” she said on a CNN panel. “I’m
surprised that you’re
trying to litigate who was the beneficiary of slavery,” the CNN host Abby Phillip responded.
Have fun at your dinner with Maya Angelou, Jillian.
4. Mike Johnson, speaker of the House
Guests: Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, and George
Washington
Mike Johnson calls this dinner “very
American-centric,” which raises some questions for me. Did I miss important
information in the Bible about Jesus’s nationality, or, conversely,
important information about the establishment of religion in the Constitution?
Will Jesus bring a translator with him? In Johnson’s episode, he sounds
stressed, as he should be—he’s had a busy year: passing the One Big
Beautiful Bill Act and as few other bills as possible, shutting
the government down, and blocking and then reluctantly allowing the release
of the Epstein files. An ambitious brief for anyone! And that’s not all
that he has to worry about: In the course of this interview, he agreed that
his brain (and, perhaps, the brains of all men?) was like a waffle.
3. Pete Hegseth, defense secretary
Guests: Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, and
Vladimir Putin
When he hasn’t been ordering the
extrajudicial killings of people in boats or kicking the press out of the
Pentagon, Pete Hegseth has spent most of 2025 lecturing people who have
better things to do about how much he hates beards.
I wonder if he will be able to restrain himself from doing so at this
dinner. (Then again, the Ukrainian president is used to being lectured on
his appearance in lieu of any progress on the war engulfing his country.)
Knowing Vladimir Putin, he may skip the dinner entirely, forcing Trump and
Hegseth to pursue him down the tarmac to his plane, with their steak
(well-done) and Thousand Island dressing in hand. (That’s the menu Hegseth
picked. “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable,” as Oscar Wilde put
it.)
2. Elon Musk, CEO of too many companies to
name, former DOGE honcho
Guests: William Shakespeare, Nikola Tesla,
and Benjamin Franklin
Elon Musk imagines that his guests would
enjoy an epic 12-course meal of probably not cheeseburgers,
but maybe little, tiny cheeseburgers, which never taste as good as the big
ones, but if someone really tried, they could be made to. (He riffed, if
that is the word I want, on this cheeseburger question for what felt like
ages.) Having to hear from Musk and be subject to his whims has been,
unfortunately, a feature of 2025. His DOGE efforts are why we don’t have
USAID any more—resulting in an estimated hundreds of thousands of
preventable deaths, providing him with a new first
line in his obituary, and forcing Tesla owners to buy a little disclaimer
bumper sticker for their car.
I have put this dinner pretty high on the
list because I think that if Nikola Tesla had the whole Musk situation
properly explained to him, fisticuffs would almost certainly ensue. The
idea of Tesla and Musk fighting each other over tiny cheeseburgers while
William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on … to me, this is an ideal
party.
1. Katie Miller, podcast host extraordinaire
Guests: Queen Victoria and ???
As far as I can tell, we never hear who is
joining beyond the “Grandmother of Europe.” Katie Miller starts to tell
Senator Katie Britt about her own dinner picks and never finishes!
Tantalizingly incomplete. Who would the other guests be? Perhaps Stephen
Miller, who, allegedly, “only eats mayonnaise.” (“With french fries, or,
like, period?” J. D. Vance asked during his episode. “Period,” Miller said,
later elaborating: “It’s whatever.”)
The only dinner worse than one where Elon Musk fights Nikola Tesla while
William Shakespeare and Ben Franklin look on is one where Katie Miller and
Queen Victoria try to carry on a conversation while Stephen Miller sits
silently next to them, eating mayonnaise.
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