In the premiere episode of The Franchise, HBO’s warts-and-all satire of the movie business, an assistant director named Dag has a brief existential crisis about the wisdom of spending her life (and someone else’s fortune) on hacky comic-book adaptations. “What if this isn’t a dream factory?” Dag wonders aloud to a colleague. “What if it’s an abattoir?”

It’s a question that many Democrats are suddenly asking about a different brand of slaughterhouse billed as a dream factory: the Kamala Harris campaign. A week after Team Kamala’s electoral flop, the postmortems are rolling in, and they’re brutal. As one anonymous Biden staffer told Axios, “How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the f***?”

WTF indeed. Despite outspending Donald Trump by hundreds of millions of dollars, Harris-Walz got crushed by the former president, and staffers are in angry finger-pointing mode, some blaming Joe Biden for the result. Other party operatives are loudly resigning or complaining to the media about the campaign’s failures. That list of discontents includes Lindy Li, a member of the Democratic National Committee finance committee, who says Biden’s unceremonious campaign dropout was a “f*** you” to Democrats and the Harris campaign was a “$1 billion disaster.” “We lost all the swing states,” Li said. “This is just astounding. This is not some like blip. This is an avalanche.”

Avalanches, however, are acts of God, whereas the Harris-Walz campaign counts as a man-made disaster.

To recap, the Harris campaign did one thing really well: it raised a boatload of money in a short time, roughly $1 billion in three months after the Democratic National Convention handed Kamala the nomination in early August. That’s not counting the $650 million raised by PACs and other outside groups. They more than doubled Trump’s campaign funds in July and nearly tripled it in August, according to the New York Times — $361 million to Trump’s $130 million.

The problem is that they spent that cash like Nicolas Cage on a Las Vegas bender. Much of it was spent on ads — over $654.6 million worth — from July 22 through Election Day. I can certainly attest to that; I’ve joked that I could wallpaper my entire house with the glossy Kamala flyers that piled up on my porch this fall. Another massive haul — $56 million — went to staffing, compared to only $9 million for Trump. According to federal filings, more big bucks went to a virtual army of social media influencers to hype Harris online, including $1.9 million to Village Marketing Agency, which bills itself as a “performance-driven influencer shop.”

What’s harder to stomach is the steep price tag for celebrity cameos and pop star concerts, including $15 million in event production alone: from Lady Gaga performances to Beyoncé speeches to Oprah endorsements. (Winfrey’s Harpo Productions got paid $1 million for its role alone, though Winfrey claims it was for production costs, not a personal payment.) The day before the election, I was puzzled to see actors Martin Sheen, Robert DeNiro, and Law and Order’s Sam Waterston together in a union hall a block from my house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They weren’t shooting a movie — just stumping for Kamala for a few hundred voters. It seemed the Harris campaign had decided to deploy Hollywood stars like troops into swing states.

Harris’s team also spent $100,000 on the set for her appearance on the relatively obscure sex-and-relationship podcast Call Her Daddy — while at the same time, refusing to appear on the Joe Rogan Experience over her staff’s fears of a backlash from progressives. That’s even though Trump’s ambling three-hour interview with Rogan has racked up nearly 50 million views, 20 million more than watched Harris’s nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention.

My favorite misstep was a Harris-Walz custom map made for Fortnite, the online video game. So as not to endorse violence — even of the cartoonish virtual kind — all gunplay was removed from the ironically named “Freedom Town, USA” level. Instead, players were directed to roam around collecting campaign promises (“Kamala Harris’s $50,000 small business tax break made it possible to start up our new construction business!”) to background music from Harris surrogate Megan Thee Stallion. At one point, sixty-one players were found playing Kamala’s Fortnite world, compared with over 200,000 for a popular ranked map.

But “Game Over” was not a message the campaign heeded. Not only did Kamala and company spend all $1 billion it had in the bank, but it ended up $20 million in the red, with staffers saying they hadn’t gotten paid for work done from previous months. (It’s rumored that ’90s pop queen Alanis Morissette got cut from a rally roster because the campaign’s check didn’t clear). Trump even trolled them on social media, suggesting he could cover the $20 million debt to show “unity.”

Since last Tuesday’s loss, criticisms have rolled in from Democratic senators as far apart as Bernie Sanders to Chris Murphy. But for my money, the most damning testimonial is from Evan Barker, a campaign operative and fundraiser who aired her disgust in an essay for Newsweek after attending the DNC in Chicago and satellite parties like the “Hotties for Harris” event, where one could drink a cocktail served in a coconut and snag “F*ck Project 2025” condoms. I felt submersed in a hollow chamber whose mottos were “Brat summer” and “Joy’”— totally out of touch with regular, every-day Americans and their pressing needs,” wrote Barker. “Instead, the most elite people in the world chanted in unison that, ‘We’re not going back!’ I found myself feeling disenchanted, lost, sad, and alone.

Maybe we should have seen this spendy, starfucking campaign coming all along. After all, “brat summer” is a reference to the Charli XCX album Brat, whose virality caused trend chasers to plaster the puke-green color of the album cover everywhere. The British pop star later explained that “brat” is meant to be a girl who “is a little messy, and likes to party, and maybe says some dumb things sometimes.” Or, as she coos on her hit track “360,” brat is “666 with a princess streak.”

When Charli XCX famously tweeted that “Kamala IS brat,” most everyone in Democrat Land saw it as a ringing endorsement. But maybe, in the end, it was a warning.