The great advantage of writing satire is that when you tell the truth, nobody believes you. This is fortunate because it means that no secret service people whisk me away to interrogate me about who’s leaking all this top secret stuff.
So when I tell you how the next month is going to play out in the USA, you can sit back and say that’s quite a story and if we believed you for a moment then we’d be very scared but as if such things could happen in this day and age. After all this is 2020. Then, of course, you’ll go: “Shit!!! It’s 2020, of course it’ll play out like this.”
Let’s start with the fact that Trump is refusing to concede defeat. This is no surprise and people are just moving on and working on the reasonable assumption that eventually he’ll have to face reality and accept the idea that he lost the votes in enough states and that merely winning a court battle in one or two, doesn’t do much because he’s behind in too many. And, let’s not overlook the important point that – even if a court found that there’d be irregularities – this doesn’t prove that they benefitted the Democrats. For all we know, if dead people were actually registered, there’s no proof that they voted for Joe Biden.
Even the more plausible attack that Attorney-General Barr is now mounting has its problems. The latest argument isn’t about voter fraud. It wants to stop Pennsylvania from certifying Biden because there’s a “two track” system which the Trump camp alleges applies a harsher standard of proof on those voting in person, than those voting by mail. Because, they argue, this unconstitutional, then it will go to the Supreme Court and nudge, nudge, we just appointed Amy Bony Carrot and two other judges so we should be set. Ok, in the unlikely event that they chose to disallow all mail voting, they could hardly suggest that it was legitimate to then declare Trump the winner. I mean, if you turn up at a polling station and they handed everyone voting there a pen because they had no pencils, it wouldn’t be regarded as fair when the electoral commission all votes from that polling station because they suddenly decided that only vote in pencils would be counted. You can’t change the rules after you’ve told people that it would be legitimate to vote this way.
However, anyone using such logic overlooks the important point that Trump and his cronies operate off alternative facts. So let’s look at the most recent event through the prism of King Donald’s sense of entitlement.
Trump had just sacked his Defense Secretary, Mark Esper with whom he had clashed over the use of troops to quell protesters. Now, I don’t know the views of the replacement but my best guess is that they won’t be clashing with Donald about anything. So, we now have the potential for the army to be used should riots break out. And I would imagine that a riot could be defined as such things as wearing a T-shirt with the words, “Resign, You Orange Clown!”, or energetic dancing to any non-approved tune.
Of course, the media have recently taken to do something rather unusual. They’ve taken to interrupting Trump campaign press conferences and pointing out that these have no basis in reality. Ok, we’ve probably been arguing for quite a while that it’s about time the media stopped this idea that balance is always ok, and if they’re not balanced, well, that’s okay too because they’re usually private companies and free speech and all that; sometimes there’s an obligation to report the actual truth. Of course this is not as simple as some would like, because sometimes the difference between a fact and an opinion is just someone’s opinion of a fact.
The trouble is that this makes Trump’s narrative that the media is fake news and trying to censor him just that little bit more plausible to anyone already believes that Trump is a good, clean-living man whom God has appointed to stop America’s decay because, while God was happy to let the Greek, Roman, British and every other Empire go by the wayside, the Supreme Being takes a special interest in the United States.
So, we have a little bit of action in the courts which leads to a few protests. Then we have various Trump supporting militias firing the odd shot. Trump announces that we can’t have this chaos on the streets, declares martial law and refuses to let the Electoral College vote on the grounds that there has been no decision by the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court has made a decision not to his liking, he declares that it’s corrupt and we need to remove the judges that voted against him.
At this point, we’ll all be waiting to see which way, Rupert jumps. If Fox News actually starts being critical of King Donald, then we may see an attempted takeover of all media by the government.
Yes, yes, it’s all very far-fetched and nothing like that will happen…
But, like I said, it is 2020 so would you be prepared to bet against anything?
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He is utterly incapable of accepting defeat of any type, his psyche and internal reality is so warped and twisted it is virtually impossible for him to even consider losing.
What a great post, rossleigh. The man is a proven cheat and a liar and to suggest that the only way he can lose is by some cheating and lying better than he is the method of his madness.
We americophobes are wetting our pants on what he will do next to subvert the result and win.
ps
Unaarrimin should be known by all cricketers and he is on the ABC at 2030 hours tonight a must watch.
well… if i can’t have it, then nobody can have it, so there!
it is all so unfair, i have been treated really badly
and now this fraudulent election…
lots of deceit there, everyone knows,
dead people voting, lost Trump votes,
mysterious 80% swing in the postal votes
please send money so we can pay our bills…
oops i mean fight this attempt to STEAL the election
so SEND MONEY to Donald Trump enterprises right now
and god bless
Related to quoting Presidents, leaders and politicians is how it reflects the dependence upon free (entertainment) content from (often live) press conferences, media releases/drops, clubby conversations, programs like Q&A etc. but avoidance of broad scrutiny and analysis; especially the issues avoided by MPs and parties (which do not appear in news cycles therefore are not real or important?).
It’s easy to to quote The Donald: “Gollum, gollum…my precious…”
And if by chance it was discovered that massive voter fraud had been committed by the Democrats to get their man up, would you believe it? I bet you wouldn’t.
I am not suggesting they did but it is possible, yes?
Now that the Democrats are batting on the same team as the Intel agencies and the rest of the establishment who pushed the ‘Russia did it’ bullshit you’d feel comfortable in the smugness that your side is as pure as the driven snow? Am I right?
If fraud there is it would be on both sides.
This is a brilliant article. Satire can’t compete with the lunacy. Juvenal knew about that long ago.
Meanwhile our leaders past and present believe themselves to live in a banana republic, because they do
I miss Downer still, that crook who escaped prosecution while collaery and witness K cop it for exposing neocolonialist bullying . Never mind the international Court of justice our justice er trumps theirs.
You can’t imagine such horrors. But they are happening.
Biden is not the answer , tho he is not a lunatic at least. Biden is business as usual. The war machines roll on as the plagues continue, one being a virus the others big business buying up governments and yet fools vote for the same greedy crooks time after time because they themselves are selfish and greedy. Here is free rego , here is a sports stadium, there some more gambling machines.
One day huge lizards or flies will have evolved and they will be scheming and bribing too. Pass the wine bottle, at least governments allow limitless booze sales during an epidemic.
Bread and circuses.
@mark delmege
And the massive voter suppression that has been carried out in plain view by the Trumpsters is, of course, entirely irrelevant?
If the Dems have been attempting a massive fraud thhey are damned bad at it, because
a) Trumpery’s vote increased
b) The Senate has not been flipped.
Lots of things are possible, Mark. It’s just that in the absence of anything other than a delusional man claiming that there must have been fraud – after telling us that there would be because that’s the only way he would lose – I tend to think that there haven’t been enough dead people voting to sway the election.
There was a very compelling video of someone marking lots of ballots for Biden. This was very helpful of the person committing the fraud. Not only did they film themselves doing it, but they managed to ensure that it got into the hands of the Republicans. I was totally convinced…
There are great, great numbers who believe that EVERYTHING that happens here on Earth can be traced back to an all powerful Being. Think Religions of the world and those who pray for divine intervention on a daily and ongoing basis despite no linkage to a desired result. Yet they are not regarded as insane (by most).
Then we have the so-called master-mind, manipulative Democrats who are so incompetent apparently they even managed to lose some HoR seats. But perhaps that loss was just for reasons of plausibility?
Come January, there will be just this grumpy old bloke wandering around the white house with a few aides helping him keep his shit together, scaring the visitors and being kept away from the children, whilst the government goes about it’s business of trying to get things done while being thwarted by a different old fart who is determined to prove that in fact he is the most important person the Great Pumpkin ever shoveled shit into, in a different old building in Washington, with his own entourage of aides trying to keep his shit together and stop him scaring the visitors and away from the children.
The only difference is, back at the white house, no-one will be able to differentiate between the president and donald trump.
The Washington Post reports that a Pennsylvania postal worker whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities recanted to U.S. Postal Service investigators – it never happened.
He installed himself as King of Egypt because he is full of De Nile.!