Jeff Tiedrich woke up in the early afternoon on November 4th, 2020. He had gone to bed very late, when birds were chirping and the sun was poking up. He had waited for West Coast ballots to be counted. When Pennsylvania came in solidly for Biden due to several hundred thousand early votes, he got excited. When disgruntled seniors swung Florida and Arizona blue, he knew it was over. Over the course of the night, he fired off 371 celebratory tweets, each more hooting and delirious than the last. The engagement kept his phone vibrating constantly, so he used it as a sex toy on himself. He passed out nude and drunk, like Dionysus at his banquet table.
Jeff slept fitfully. When he awoke, he felt strange. He checked the @RealDonaldTrump account instinctively, prepared to see the President’s characteristic bluster and classlessness. His muscles clenched in advance of the disgust he always experienced looking at Trump’s tweets. But, the President had conceded in the face of embarrassing defeat. Though the wording was perhaps inelegant, it was a far cry from the rank obscenities and threats of coup d’etat Jeff had hoped for. He tapped out a few retorts, calling him “Loser Donny” and saying “Your new name is Donald Turd because Trump got DUMPED!!” None of them got more than a few hundred likes.
Jeff climbed out of bed. He put on his bathrobe and went into the kitchen. He turned on MSNBC and poured a cup of coffee. The smell filled the room and reminded him of his wife. Their marriage had been the most bitter casualty of Jeff’s commitment to the Resistance. The squawking words of the newscasters, chipper and light on the heels of victory, washed over him, but their words registered no meaning within his mind. Jeff turned off the TV. He checked his answering machine. The literary agent needed a call back. She was nervous the publisher would back out of Jeff’s adult children’s book, “Baby Donnie Needs His Diapie Changed.”
Jeff rubbed his hands together. He scrunched his toes. He took a few deep breaths of air. He knew this was Jeff’s body standing in the kitchen. He knew these were Jeff’s hands, Jeff’s toes, Jeff’s lungs. But as for who he was, he had no idea.
For months, my mind has been racing about what happens if Trump wins. Covid is never controlled. The already abysmal quality of life for most Americans plummets even farther. Democracy collapses. Censorship and repression are the norm. The apparati of industry and government are divvied up amongst the kleptocrats like post-Soviet Russia. For this country to survive, Trump absolutely, categorically, unequivocally has to lose. (Happy now, Grandpa?)
But what if he does?
I’m not sure this country is prepared for the sort of mass withdrawal symptoms a Trump loss will bring. After four years of fever, what happens when it breaks? Will we snap awake like from a DMT trip, having just lived an entire lifetime in an alien maze, only to find we’re still in a moldy beanbag chair in some dude’s apartment above a 7-11? Or will it be a postpartum emptiness, a stillness, watching the thing which we dreaded most drift into our pasts like sand out to sea? Or will it be like a fantasy novel, where our hero vanquishes some ogre or cyclops and basks over its hulking corpse, while his next foe, far more gargantuan and powerful, lurks just beyond?
The blue checks and bowties are already on the case. Thomas B. Edsall asked “What Happens To Trumpism?” in today’s NYT Opinion section. He asked a bunch of experts, including Theda Skocpol, Brandice Canes-Wrone, D. Sunshine Hillygus, and Yphtach Lelkes, who are all named after characters from Beowulf. The political scientists don’t agree on much, except that either a win or loss leads to “polarization,” the “bases” and “establishments” fight for power with the “fringes” and “insurgents,” and “resentment,” “commitment,” and “vision” are all important.” Therefore, we know one thing will not change if Trump loses: The political commentary industry will continue to clutch its I Ching coins and divination rods. They will continue to speak to their Gods of Prediction in tongues and mumbo jumbo. The movements of politicians will be evaluated not for the good they do, but according to Euclidian geometries and game theoretical models and Hannibal’s battle tactics and The Art of War. This will continue to benefit absolutely no one.
But the next month will be more than polling and ballots and coalitions and shifts. Though history plays out for us every day, rarely does it enact itself in such mythic plots at epic scale with characters as Biblically flawed as these. Donald Trump is the embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins. Dante and Chaucer and Bosch did not have characters as greedy as a billionaire who pays no taxes, as lustful as a thrice-married pedophile, as gluttonous as a President who only eats McDonald’s, as slothful as a man who believes exercise is lethal, as envious as a head of state who still hashes out petty socialite feuds, as prideful as a willful spreader of disease, and as wrathful as an emperor who rules his dominion on vengeance and rage. Trump is the scorned son of a cruel father who became the cruel father. He sold his soul for glory and power and must carry its weight like Sysiphus. His hometown, the city he sought to conquer, scorns him. He sleeps alone. His was a Pyrrhic factory. And now, having abandoned God, dishonored His book, and laughed in the face of Pestilence, the Lord may strike him down. His kingdom may fall like Sodom and Gomorrah. Melania seems to have already turned to salt.
The Red Death is spreading within Trump’s masquerade ball. People close to him, powerful people, will die. Our country is going to hit 400,000 deaths by the time this is over. There is no way Herman Cain will remain the most prominent casualty. Senators are falling ill, threatening Amy Coney A. Barrett (A.C.A.B.) from reaching the court. His staffers, already disloyal, each one plotting their own second act book deal or Fox show or line of tactical cufflinks for patriots or a firearms training course for girls under 6, will quit in large numbers to avoid getting sick at work. Without them, the campaign will race to the finish line off-message, geriatric, and deranged. The Potemkin Village of coherence that is Trumpworld will fall. He will rage against it. He will not go quietly into that good night.
We deserve to watch him struggle. The night Trump tested positive, a glimmer of hope seemed to ripple through our collective consciousness. It was a giddy feeling at 1 am Friday night. I wished I could go out to a bar and feel that joy with others. The sensation was so delicious because it hinted at something we are always denied in America: closure. Comeuppance. Denouement. People don’t get what’s coming to them here. Our greatest white-collar criminals pay fines or spend a few weeks in the jail wing of ClubMed. Epstein walked free for decades before getting to choose his own punishment. Killer cops go unpunished. There’s never a storybook ending. But for once, just this once, it looks like the bad guy might actually lose.
However, I don’t think Trump will die of Covid-19. Trump is a genuine freak of nature. He’s 6’3” and wide, yet notably unathletic. He’s elderly and lazy and eats like Augustus Gloop, yet shows boundless energy when he must. My crackpot theory is that because he is sober and germaphobic and averse to overexertion, his body has an unusually-low level of inflammation and surprising cellular function for a man of his age. He does seem to follow the Chazzy’s World Diet to a tee: Good Sex. No Stress. One Boo. No Ex. Small Circle. Big Checks. But whatever the reason, Trump is robust. He has old man strength. And now he is loaded up with enough steroids and antibiotics for the breeding steer on a factory beef farm. He is Hulk Trump. He is a Golem let loose. He will fight to the bitter end.
And what happens to Trumpism? That swath of the country, the 40% which will follow the President through thick and thin, will continue to be a grave danger to our country. If he stays alive, he will continue to inspire his base from exile like Aslan the lion. If he dies, he will energize it as a martyr. Lacking the North Star of Trump to guide them, they will briefly latch onto Pence or Cotton or Gaetz, but none have enough drip or swag to be the Don. Trumpism will writhe like a headless serpent. It will mutate rapidly like a tumor.
Tens of millions of people belong to this group. The sheer extent of their psychic pain, their alienation, and their socioeconomic and racial discontent will be unleashed in even more chaotic fashion. Alcoholism, drug abuse, problem gambling, pornography addiction, and sexual sadism, all American epidemics already, will superspread. (For more on this, check out America: The Farewell Tour by Chris Hedges.) Neo-Naziism may or may not grow in numbers, but will almost certainly lash out in frequent lone wolf attacks. A wave of cults, drawing on resurgent interest in conspiracy theories, quack medicine, and astrology will fester on the back of this frustration turned-loose. Some will combine Christianity and Norse mysticism to create racist organizations. A Biden administration crackdown on domestic terrorism would then run into a serious First Amendment problem, as it struggles to define formal White supremacy from upstart religions. Wacos and Cliven Bundys and envelopes full of ricin become more common.
Though Jeff Tiedrich and Eugene Gu and the Krassensteins will face the most critical symptoms, many of us will struggle with Trump Derangement Syndrome withdrawal. We will still desperately reach for our phone each morning, but its notifications will be less terrifying. Instead of infographics on issues and exhortations to help, people will go back to posting their hard bodies and soft-boiled eggs being cut open at brunch. Everything will be less funny. SNL and The Daily Show will still struggle to make us laugh. Jon Stewart-style “calling out bullshit” will never hit the same. We might even miss Trump’s tweets and speeches, surely the most entertaining of any president. We’ll have gone from a ceaseless carnival of freakshows and oddities to the same old artifice as before. Our leaders will put civility back on, like Igbo gods unmasked as mere elders in costume, expecting us to play along with a decayed, degraded ritual. Our ire and terror will pull away from the fore and recede back deep within ourselves, curling up into hard knots. Frogs in a pot on the stove as we are, we will feel the burner turned down from high to medium-low. That’s fine. We’ve gotten used to some heat.
Underneath it all, the steady drumbeats of our epoch grow louder. Seas rise, forests burn, storms rage. Water and food grow scarcer. Millions wage war and board rafts and starve. Robots replace jobs. Algorithms hoard our attention, make us lonely, and steer our lives in directions that corporations choose. Things will get worse, but it will feel less like a raging tire fire and more like a slow gas leak. And all the lessons we should have learned: that politicians are mostly panicky, rash, and colossally self-interested; that individual pain and collective fear are the most dangerous and reactive substances on earth; that power and money are quickly grabbed and rarely shared, might be forgotten far too soon.