Category: Hindsight 2020

And so we find ourselves waiting for the impeachment trial of one Donald John Trump, 45 president of the United States. Though there’s credible evidence that he was at least aware of Robert Hyde’s intentions to contact goons in Ukraine to physically harm Marie Yovanovitch in an effort to eliminate her as a problem for a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who promised Trump dirt on Joe Biden, the Right is more concerned about transgender athletes ruining the Olympics, so, lulz. With that in mind, I thought I would do something of a personal deep dive into the issues associated with the Trump’s Senate trial and its implications, no matter the outcome. Though Maggie “Trump Whisperer” Haberman of The New York Times  thinks I’m just a hayseed rube, I need to get some things off my chest nonetheless.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi keeps mentioning the apocryphal comment by Benjamin Franklin about the nature of our newly established government. Well, Nancy, we couldn’t keep it. Though Trump is nothing more than a vessel for some pretty titanic macro forces in American political life, he’s accomplished his historical purpose — he’s a transitional figure that marks the end of the American Republic. I say this because it’s pretty obvious that a President Pence isn’t going to, like, put the tyrannical genie back in the bottle. President Pence is a Republican — an a homophobic theocrat at that — and as such he may very well keep much, if not all, of Trump’s team going forward. So, in a sense, not only will nothing change, but it will get worse because Pence is not a deranged lunatic but someone who will establish the conditions for someone like President Kooch to put me in an ICE Camp where I become just another victim of the coming American Killing Fields. I say this not as a form of hyperbole or some sort of Infowars level of bonkers conspiracy — all signs point to the existing ICE camp infrastructure being weaponized within 10 years, if not far sooner. They’ll first throw the homeless and mentally ill (to keep them safe and prevent gun violence) into the campus with undocumented immigrants and then, as I’ve mentioned, work their way up. Prove me wrong on this one, folks.

Either Trump is acquitted or he’s not. If he’s acquitted, then he pardons half a dozen high profile people, rants about the need for a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment,” indicts another half dozen political opponents, and potentially is extremely brazen in his efforts to get the actual human beings who make up the Electoral College to vote for him. He could bribe them or dox them, you name it. And the only reason I’m not snatched in the middle of the night by ICE agents by about 2022 because of my anti-MAGA ranting online is Trump’s simply too incompetent to do the necessary governmental shenanigans to make it possible. It will still happen, but it may be the Cuccinelli or Kobach administrations that do it.  

Meanwhile, if Trump is somehow miraculously convicted we will simply punt this same future down the road a few years. We can delay this dystopian future, but we can’t prevent it. I say this because between 2020 and 2040, we’re going to reach peek “Ok, Boomer.” We have to wait until the youngest of the angry old male Baby Boomers shuffle off this mortal plane on a macro level before the browning of America kicks in an AOC becomes a viable presidential candidate. Though, I think a more likely outcome is America in the 2040-2060 will likely be a toxic mixture of modern day Venezuela, Apartheid South Africa and Putin’s Russia. Though, given how rapidly the globe is warming, there’s a chance all we’re going to have some pretty rapid population movements that may change that dynamic in some pretty dramatic ways. Preventing our dystopian future would require a tragedy of such magnitude that if we were given the two options as a choice by God, we probably would be torn. Do we really want 20 million people to die in a limited nuclear exchange with the DPRK that we blame on Trump? Would that be worth it? Though, if you really wanted to be gratuitously sanguine, you might say if Trump goes so fucking bonkers that he collectively scares us so badly that we won’t elect Republicans president for a generation that might do the trick as well. 

No matter what happens with Trump’s coming impeachment trial in the Senate, we’re in a new era. People will mark post-WWII America like this: 1945-1963, 1963-1973, 1973-1989, 1989-2001, 2001-2020. A liberal trope exists that we’re always just a few hours away from this or that otherwise normal event happening that will bring Trump down and everything will go back to normal. This is a result of both desperation and an unwillingness to admit that political tribalism and negative polarization have reached such extremes that Trump is now nothing less than an act of God. 

He is completely immune from any sort of accountability. The only thing stopping him establishing an American Fourth Reich is he’s nothing more than a deranged version of Chauncy Gardner in Being There. As such, Trump is a transitional character in American political history. While I have no doubt he will call for a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment” once he’s acquitted in the Senate, there’s a decent change he may simply turn into a mental puddle before can do it.

But once the idea is out there, it will one of his fascist white ethnostate advocating successors who finish the job. Such a Constitutional Convention will be sold to liberals as an opportunity to pass the ERA, but in reality it will be a Trojan Horse used to codified American Carnage into the Constitutional through a series of Enabling Acts. The ICE camp infrastructure will be weaponized and that will be that. Initially they’ll start with the homeless and the mentally ill and work their way up the political foodchain until the usual suspects of Jews and homosexuals (transgenders!) will be thrown into the camps as well. There will be American Killing Fields and people like me will get nothing more than our name etched on a monument at some point in the distant future — if ever.

Shelt Garner is writing his first novel.