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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