I Have a Bad Feeling About the 2020 Presidential Election

I’m not sure entirely why, but I used to occasionally be filled with an emotion known as “hope.” If I was not quite an eternal optimist then I was at least optimistic enough to nurse a strong conviction that however dire things might appear, everything would eventually turn out alright in the end. 

I began to lose that faith in humanity and the future when I got laid off for the first time in 2015, some eighteen years into my career as a pop culture writer. Things have only gotten tougher professionally in the ensuing years, to the point where I honestly do not know how much longer I can make a living and feed my family working as a writer, which is unfortunate, as I have no other skills. 

The other thing that has caused me to lose, if not all my faith in humanity, then a great deal, was Donald Trump getting elected president in 2016. Like many other people I assumed that the American people would never elect someone as transparently racist, sexist, narcissistic and egregiously unqualified. 

I assumed that when the tape was leaked of Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” and moving on a married woman “like a bitch” while his own wife was pregnant it would cause Trump to drop out or, at the very least, lose in a record landslide. When he won all the same in defiance of expert predictions, common decency and god’s will I wasn’t just disappointed: I was dispirited. 

Since Trump’s election, I have not allowed myself the cruel delusion of hope where Trump was concerned. When analysts predicted doom with each unforgivable Trump gaffe I refused to let myself feel hopeful or optimistic because those gaffes never seemed to hurt Trump at all, let alone kill his presidency. 

So while it certainly made me smile when Trump was impeached I did not think it would lead to him being punted out of office. Why would it? Nothing else did, and over the course of his time in office Trump has seemingly done everything short of whipping out his dick and masturbating furiously to a Ben Garrison drawing of himself during the State of the Union to illustrate his bottomless contempt for the American people, decency and the checks and balances inherent in our political system. 

Now that he has been acquitted I have a terrible, terrible feeling that Trump will be re-elected by a sizable margin and this fills me with dread. 

I feel like Trump will have a clear advantage no matter who the candidate is. I feel like we’re going to learn something very ugly about ourselves regardless of who gets the nomination, just as we learned just how racist the country was during Obama’s presidency and how viciously misogynistic we are when it was seemingly inevitable that we were going to elect a woman president, if only to avoid making an evil, inept conman with a brain full of rancid pudding the most powerful man in the world. 

If Bernie Sanders is nominated we will learn just how much American voters hate Jews and the malevolent phantom of Socialism and Communism. Republicans have a history of depicting even the most corporate of Democrats as crazed Marxists intent on destroying God’s own Capitalism with his European-style, super-Jewish views on wealth distribution. I can only imagine what gleeful sport Trump, AKA Mr. Greed is Good and I am living proof that God hates Commies, will make of a self-professed Socialist. 

If Warren manages a spectacular comeback we will learn once again just how feverishly sexist our culture remains and if Mayor Pete continues to shock the world by doing way better than anyone expected we will similarly be forced to come to terms with just how many voters are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a clean-cut young man being married to another man. 

One of the ubiquitous mantras of the Resistance has been the need to not normalize Trump’s daily assaults on Democracy, decency and the American Way, how we need to continually point out the wrong, and selfish, and fundamentally criminal nature of the president’s words and actions.

I fear, however, that if Trump gets re-elected, then his egregious misdeeds and transgressions will, by definition, not only be seen as normal, and consequently acceptable; they’ll be seen as the winning tactics of a man who came out of nowhere and defied all the odds to win the very biggest prize in all of western civilization—the United States presidency—twice. 

To these cultists, it won’t matter that Trump was a lunatic who did a terrible job. All that will matter is that Trump did what he said he’d do—keep the stock market up and black people down—and that he won not once but twice. It similarly won’t matter that three years from now Trump’s horrifying mental decline will be far worse than it is now. It won’t matter if the Republicans will need to Weekend at Bernie’s Trump’s ass to make it look like he’s alive and lucid and capable of making decisions when he’s barely alive. All that will matter is that Mr. Winner will have won the big prize as many times as legally possible, and that’s enough to keep folks like myself who have good reason to lack faith in the judgment and wisdom of the American voter, awake at night. 

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