Look Back in Nausea, Part III

Tubby loses the election

© 2020 Elvert Barnes, used under a Creative Commons license

[Here’s the third in a series of 2020 lookback pieces — see Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already.]

A year ago today, when nobody (that we knew of) had coronavirus, no fewer than 13 Democrats had dropped out of the presidential race and there were still 15 of them running.

Giddy, carefree days! One would think the defenestration of Tubby — who had just been impeached in the House for a small sliver of his many crimes — was not a matter of vital national importance, but instead an opportunity for the opposition party’s Rising Stars to strut their stuff. We even had to countenance some genuine crackpots like new-age love-wins woo-peddler Marianne Williamson and horseshoe hottie Tulsi Gabbard. (It amuses me that, post-election, Williamson has turned out to be kind of a fun character and Gabbard has turned full-tilt pro-life TERF.)

We also briefly had Michael Bloomberg, and I have to say it was a rare 2020 treat to see every other candidate, even Pete Buttigieg, line up to kick his ass. Solidarity, comrades! I hope the little shit really does try to take over American Samoa.

Don’t blame me, I voted for Sanders. But as it got to be obvious that Biden was going to get the nomination — and I really think it was because the voters panicked at the multi-candidate shitshow and wanted the most electable MOR choice possible — I worried that ol’ Joe was maybe a hair-plug behind the pace and dreamed of him getting some of the drugs Tubby has obviously been guzzling for years.

Turned out Biden didn’t need it, as the pandemic spun out of control and Trump was stuck out there in front of the crowd, as self-confident as always but without compassion or empathy and with increasingly obvious brain-worms. At first the brethren tried to spin him as the Churchill of Coronavirus — “Trump sounding different today Scale of death appears to have changed his tone... this is an absolutely new message and new tone from Trump” — but inevitably his disastrous public appearances, in which he pitched quack cures and the healing power of himself — totally lived up to my many portrayals of him as a drug-fueled psychopath. Soon it seemed every sane person was acknowledging Trump was shit — and conservatives had to desperately think up reasons to support him besides the racism and viciousness that animated his base.

The best they could do was portray Democrats are too radical — even after the absurdly moderate Biden won the nomination. “The radical socialist leftist takeover of Joe Biden is complete,” non-sequitured a Trump spokesman. “He’s a Trojan horse with Bernie, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pelosi, Black Lives Matter and his party’s entire left wing, just waiting to execute their pro-criminal, anti-police socialist policies,” babbled another guy who wasn’t looking so hot anymore — Rudy Guiliani.

When that didn’t work, some of them tried birther shit on Kamala Harris — a revival that, like the Matthew Perry Odd Couple, nobody wanted.

One could see why they were resorting to such desperate tactics when the veep candidates debated and Harris blew off Mike Pence like a masher at a county fair. The Washington Examiner sputtered, “Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris could be seen smirking, smiling, and laughing during Vice President Mike Pence’s answers,” as if that were not a perfectly natural reaction to which viewers could (and apparently did) relate.

Rather than count on such intellectual arguments, Tubby just tried to steal the thing, getting his Postmaster/Ratfucker General DeJoy to tamper with the (for obvious reasons heavily Democratic) mail-in vote, and basically just saying out loud he was going to steer it to SCOTUS and let the Rummy and the Handmaid fix it for him.

Normal people were affrighted, but Republicans went tut tut. “Not a single journalist or politician in hysterics on the social media right now... actually believes Trump won’t leave office peacefully if he loses the election,” claimed David Harsanyi at National Review in September, though he admitted Tubby “gives his opposition endless ammunition to engage in these group fantasies with his reckless answers.” Remember when that kind of yak was supposed to be comforting?

(At the end of November, Harsanyi penned a defense of the Electoral College; “It should also be noted,” he sniffed, “that the system The Washington Post wants to nix has been the most stable in the world.” Harsanyi has been quiet as Trump attempts to steal the electoral vote.)

Nonetheless other conservatives did some traditional politicking — Bret Stephens claimed he knew a lesbian who was voting for Trump, so there! Other blamed the media for Trump’s poor poll numbers, particularly after his belligerent debate performances: Coach Lou Holtz, unaccountably appearing on op-ed pages, said evil reporters had engaged in a “smear operation... designed to make the president seem like an aggressive bully...” Imagine — Donald Trump, an aggressive bully! Also, Holtz said, “When I played golf with [Trump], he counted every stroke, never moved the ball… he was the most honest golfer that I have ever played with…”

Amazingly Trump did not get a perceptible boost from this, nor from Maggie Haberman’s claim that “President Trump heeded the pleas of his advisers to tone it down,” nor from Peggy Noonan swooning over Tubby’s “unfathomable magic,” nor from the endorsement of Trump by National Review’s Rich Lowry as “The Only Middle Finger Available” to raise against “the cultural Left.”

Toward the end Trump’s goons were claiming Biden’s mail- and early-voters had regretted and were trying to rescind their votes, presumably because Trump wiggling his butt at his late superspreader rallies had turned them on. Alas for the cause of American fascism, voters endorsed Biden by such a wide margin that Republicans couldn’t manage to steal it; and so the election proper ended — leading to Tubby's current bugfuck crazy post-election coup attempts.

But that’s a subject for another day. Suffice to say that this election not only got us out from under Tubby’s disastrous reign in what we all hope is the nick of time; it may also, thanks to his apparent escalating insanity, convince enough voters never to vote for Republicans again that we may survive the next decade or so. But it is something to consider that had some stars aligned, Tubby might have scraped by, and be turning the mad wrath he currently devotes to trying to overturn his defeat to further and probably fatal assaults on our democracy. Maybe the Lord does take care of fools, babies, and the United States after all.