So 14 months ago, I wrote an essay about what Donald Trump would do to tear apart this country. I’m pleased to say that I was wrong. -ish.
Let’s go down the list and see what my score was:
- ✓ Trump will send servicemen into a city that doesn’t want them to quell the protests. This happened in both Seattle and Washington, DC.
- ✗ A shot will be fired by a serviceman, and somebody will die. Well… not really. January 6 doesn’t count.
- ✗ The protests will switch to “The government is out to get us.” Maybe in some places, but again, not really. Certainly not like the protests of the 1960s.
- ✗ The protests will get bigger. Actually, they didn’t, after the summer of 2020. If anything, they got smaller.
- ✓ COVID-19 will get worse. Well past half a million dead in the US, and counting.
- ✗ Trump will double down on the protests. The protests settled down, so that didn’t happen.
- ✗ People will fight back, and the summer of 2020 will be violent. The summer of 2020 was the calm before the storm, actually.
- ✗ Trump will declare Martial Law. Apparently he considered it, and some of his friends were advocating for it, but he didn’t actually do it.
- ✗ The election of November 2020 will be suspended. Thank God it wasn’t. There was a giant mess following it, but we had the election on-time, and it went surprisingly smoothly.
- ✓✗ Trump will declare himself president “until further notice.” I think we all know that Biden is the President, but some of Trump’s die-hard supporters are convinced he’ll somehow still be reinstated, and I’m not entirely sure even he believes he lost, even though, y’know, those pesky facts say he did. But I’m gonna claim half-credit on this, since, y’know, on January 6, he did try to commit a coup d’état.
- ✗ The year-zero rule will take out Trump. Didn’t happen. And here’s hoping President Biden stays safe.
- ✓ Historians will rank Trump as the worst president ever. Okay, there’s debate on this, but among respectable historians, the only real question is whether he’s at the bottom or just in the bottom five. I’m still claiming it, though.
That’s 3½ out of 12! I officially suck at predicting the future!
Of course, Trump did try to commit a coup d’état, and he is still tearing apart the country, and the hard right is still so far off the crazy deep end that every day I expect those lunatics to march on the Capitol again — but at least as regards the “Trump becomes the American Dictator” timeline, I’ve never been happier to be wrong.
