This year, for the third time in a quarter century, most likely a Republican candidate will win the Presidency but will lose the popular vote. In 2000 Bush lost by over 500,000 votes, in 2016 Trump lost by almost 3 million votes and this time he’ll most likely lose by over 6 million. Yep, sucks to be us non-Republican voters because even though we are in the majority we all have to suffer the consequences.
If we didn’t have the Electoral College Gore would have rightly won the 2000 election, oh wait, that reminds me of something, here it is. Fun fact: a consortium of newspapers hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to recount the Florida results and found that Gore did indeed win a majority of votes in that election. So, in the case of the 2000 election, it was both the Electoral College and the Supreme Court that delivered the win to Bush. Ok, back to it. So if Gore had rightly won the election, which he did as I just mentioned, we never would have invaded Iraq, probably wouldn’t have spent 20 years in Afghanistan and without unfunded wars and the reckless tax breaks we’d have much less debt than we currently have today. And with Gore in the Presidency, we would have started tackling climate change 20 years ago. And that’s just the highlight reel.
No one remembers any of this because we don’t talk about the Bush years anymore, but they sucked, they were bad, really really bad. Even Republicans don’t talk about it. In their Glory to America speeches that they deliver in their weird fascist get-togethers they jump right over the Bush family and go straight from Reagan to Trump. Seriously, it’s a thing they do at all of the many MAGA conferences they hold. All these people conveniently forget how much they loved W. Bush back in the day with his white hat and his flight suits and that Texas drawl. They ate that stuff up at the time and then they flushed that guy right down the toilet bowl of history because he was terrible and no one can deny it.
Anyway moving on, I hope everyone remembers 2016. Especially since we’re still having to live through whatever the hell that was. We’re still trying to make sense of it even as it’s replaying right before our eyes. It’s like Alien. Remember how scary Alien was. But then Alien 2 (properly titled Aliens) came along and that was twice as scary, maybe 4 times as scary. Yeah, that’s us right now. But anyway 2016 happened and Trump, who would have lost if we didn’t have the electoral college, got into office, and some people really loved that. Which was nuts, because he was and continues to be, the most unfit, bizarre, dumpster fire of a human being for any position in life, no matter the Presidency. I mean if you wanted to write a complete bozo of a human being that manages to become President and wanted to make him the most freakishly cartoonish distortion of what a terrible person would look like and then you wrote Trump as he currently exists? Well, no one would have believed you. You wouldn’t have been able to suspend anyone’s disbelief. But it did actually happen and it’s completely surreal. Never lose sight of how completely outer limits crazy the situation we are in really is.
So back to the timeline, do I have to recap 2016-20? I’m not doing that but remember this aspect. Basically, orange-cheeto-head bumbled about like an idiot trying to do insanely stupid things and was in turn protected and thwarted by everyone around him. That’s important to understand in order to get a grasp on what’s about to happen when he’s back in the White House.
This time will be different and it’s going to be way worse. kind of like in Alien 2 (really titled Aliens but for clarity we often say Alien 2) how there were hundreds of aliens instead of just one, it’s gonna be like that in a way, but maybe a bit different than a lot of people might think. This is how I think it’s going to play out. Trump will enter office with the entirety of the Republican party united behind the agenda of the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 agenda. If you haven’t heard of this yet well it must be nice to be that blissfully unaware. Good for you. Anyway, the Heritage Foundation has been trying to get to this position for decades and they are ready to try to basically reverse all of the gains of the 20th century. That’s the most concise way to describe what their goals are. So I’m predicting a new kind of chaos this time around. You see the Heritage Crowd are truly cartoonishly crazy, even to people that Trump appeals to. They don’t know how to play the mob, which is Trump’s superpower. Yet they are going to be all over this incoming administration ready to enact all of their crazily fiendish and evil things. So there are going to be times when they are running around doing things that Trump won’t think will play well with the mob (MAGA base if I have to spell it out). Last time you had a bunch of people trying to play whack-a-mole against Trump’s craziness. This time it’s likely that Trump will be trying to keep up with what the people he empowers are doing. He’ll love a lot of it, but he won’t be able to stay on top of their full agenda. They’re way more organized, way more efficient, and they don’t care about Trump. He’s a vehicle, the whole thing is transactional like everything that surrounds Trump. But this time he’s going to be the dog that caught the car and that car is going to drag him through the streets, start on fire, and slam into a fireworks factory next to an oil refinery sitting on top of a nuclear arsenal.
So yeah, if you thought last time was crazy? We’re gonna need a bigger word for crazy.