Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump carries a pair of his new signature shoes before taking the stage at Sneaker Con at the Philadelphia Convention Center on February 17, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Campaign catchphrases aside, we can probably all agree that this was a very weird year in politics, particularly in Pennsylvania, the swingiest of swing states. Before we look ahead to 2025 let’s review the ways Pennsylvania’s politics and politicians got a little (or a lot) weird in 2024.
Gold Trump shoes at Sneaker Con
As unlikely as it may seem, President-elect Donald Trump did, in fact, take the stage at Sneaker Con in Philly back in February to unveil an official sneaker: gold high-tops with American flag logos, available for pre-order at $399 (limit three pairs per customer). Reporter John Cole had to convince his editor it wasn’t a social media joke, and ended up with a front row seat despite little advance notice from the campaign about where and how to catch Trump’s appearance.
Trump admitted the sneakerhead crowd was “a slightly different audience than I’m used to,” but also said launching the shoe line was something he had wanted to do for “a long time.” He did not wear the shoes on stage. And further proving that politics make strange bedfellows, we discovered that according to filings with the Federal Election Commission, the president of Sneaker Con made donations to Trump’s 2024 campaign and a Trump-affiliated PAC, although in relatively small amounts.
Tracking UFOs over Pennsylvania
During a budget hearing in February, the head of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) talked about the agency tracking UFO sightings, to the surprise of committee chairperson Jordan Harris. It took a while to receive them, but senior reporter Peter Hall sought records on the sightings, which showed PEMA investigated more than a dozen incidents over the past decade.
The sightings included mysterious lights following a motorist on a dark country road, a saucer-shaped craft hovering over a suburban subdivision, and a flaming orb falling into the woods, the records show. Many of the incidents are reported to Stan Gordon, a Westmoreland County resident who operates a 24-hour UFO, bigfoot and cryptid reporting hotline, who said the line has “never stopped ringing” since the Kecksburg UFO incident of 1965.
“We’ve always taken these cases very open mindedly,” Gordon told the Capital-Star “We approach them scientifically.”
GOP staffer fired after reporting mold
Mold in a government office does not seem like the kind of situation that would require a whistleblower, but here we are. A staffer at Rep. Eric Davanzo’s (R-Westmoreland) district office in West Newton complained of foul odors, and bought tests to check for the presence of mold. That didn’t go over too well when the tests came back positive, and she was later fired. She sued for wrongful termination and the Commonwealth Court ruled she could move forward with a whistleblower lawsuit.
Amending the state’s cloud seeding law something something chemtrails
First things first: If you want to try to modify the weather in Pennsylvania, you need a license — but since the law took effect in 1967 no one has applied for one (we asked).
But state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Franklin), former GOP nominee for governor, claims that new technology and a proliferation of weather modification patents “owned by a combination of Federal Government Agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations, and large multinational corporations” have brought forward the need to update Pennsylvania’s law. He wrote a memo seeking co-sponsor for legislation he intends to introduce.
The legislation would ban the release of substances within the borders of Pennsylvania to affect the temperature, weather or intensity of sunlight, and appears to be rooted in the false belief that condensation trails left by high flying aircraft are actually trails of chemicals — aka chemtrails — released by the government for nefarious reasons, that has become conflated with techniques being explored to reduce the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere.
Communist tampons
It’s not often you get the opportunity to write a story with so much potential to use the phrase “red wave.” Alas, it only occurred to our headline writer much later (which, truly, is probably for the best). In June, Rep. Stephanie Borowicz (R-Clinton) objected to a bill to create a grant program that would make pads and tampons free for public school students. She didn’t like that the bill’s cosponsorship memo referred to menstruating women as “people,” and claimed the bill was “just another step by the governor and Democrats to have government provide everything for you, which leads to communism.”
One of the bill’s prime sponsors, Rep. Darisha Parker (D-Philadelphia), said the bill would serve to “restore the dignity to these women and girls who have gone unsupported far too long.”
The bill passed the House by a vote of 117 to 85. It did not advance in the Senate.