Doug's Darkworld

I dreamt I was at a big public celebration/event in Paris. Then it was announced that the USA was bequeathing Trump to France. That was the word in the dream, bequeathing, dream language can be quite odd. And the French promptly shut down the ceremony, they were not interested in taking Trump off our hands. I don’t normally dream about the world at large, but these are not normal times. And it’s a safe bet a lot of people are dreaming of ways to get rid of Trump. Nearly a hundred thousand dead of Covid-19 in the USA now, many Americans find that appalling, I know I do.

Yes, I know, this has turned into the Trump/Covid-19 blog. And if it was September of 1939, it would have turned into the Hitler/War blog. I say War instead of World War Two because few people we’re calling it World War Two until America entered the war in 1941. Semantics aside, the gentle reader presumably understands. It’s the times, Trump and Covid-19 dominate the news, so I’m rolling with it. This is a more speculative blog than usual, don’t worry, tons of bad news about the new polio in my next post.

First, Trump’s re-election. I see him pivoting now into an election winning schtick, and while he may be the worst president ever, he’s still a brilliant self-promoter. Let me explain how this is going to work. He got elected back in 2016 largely by promising to bring back an ‘America that never was’ to the majority of white people who think whites are a discriminated against minority in the US now. That’s a Trump supporter in a nutshell, someone who knew there were terrible problems in America, the good old days were gone, and here came a candidate who promised to bring it all back. They aren’t the majority of Americans by any chance, but there were enough of them to carry Trump’s MAGA parade over Clinton’s uninspired “I don’t need the flyover states” campaign.

Well, MAGA’s probably not going to work again, although Trump will sure emphasize the “truth” that before Covid-19 he had created the greatest economy the world had ever seen. And then along came Covid-19 because of the Chinese and WHO. So now what is Trump promising? If he gets re-elected, why, he will finish off the fight against Covid-19 and restore the economy! All his supporters have to do is get out and vote for him! Only Trump can save America from Covid-19!

Bear me out, yes, I’m saying that Trump is going to use Covid-19 to get re-elected. More accurately, he is going to use it to whip up his base even more fervently than in 2016.  This time he’s promising a return to a time people actually remember, not just some lost golden age. And there’s more, Covid-19 was caused by foreigners, and weaponized by the Democrats to make Trump look bad! And blue State governors! Yes, Covid-19 was part of the leftist plot to bring socialism to America, and destroy everything great about it in the process! Trump is going to save America from the very enemies the right wing outrage machine has been warning about for decades.

Gotta remember people, Trump’s supporters watch Fox News and other pro-Trump media, so they will back this all up. My point here, and I think I’ve made a strong case for it, is that Trump’s base may be even more driven to vote in 2020 than in 2016. So if anyone is going to beat Trump in 2020, they need to run a better campaign than Clinton did in 2016. Is this written in stone? Of course not. Anything can happen between now and November. The world we knew is gone. Or put in another way, it doesn’t matter how bad Covid-19 gets, Trump is going to spin it his way, and whoever beats him is going to have to do an even better job of motivating their base. Food for thought I hope.

We’ll see. Outside of the US, I am wondering if the world will split into two worlds. The Covid-19 world, and the non-Covid-19 world. There are countries that are getting Covid-19 under control and slowly re-opening their economies. It’s not rocket science, it’s just effective government working with epidemic science. And then there are countries run by people who distrust science and government, starting with the US. And in these countries Covid-19 will continue to circulate as they are fighting it with prayer and common sense. Reason and science trump those, but a lot of people are hostile to that idea. And the former countries are going to want to have as little to do as possible with the latter countries. So we could see an enormous sea change in global alignments over the next year, unprecedented since World War Two or the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I dunno. Whatever happens, I plan to keep blogging on it. To cope with it all I have started working two days, then taking a day off. Off Social Media too. Just a day to rest and recharge my batteries. And so far, working like a charm. I got a tremendous amount done in the past two days, and today is the first day in months I had the concentration and motivation to sit down and write a blog post in one sitting.

Hoping that’s a good thing, and not like a candle brightening just before it dies. Comments and shares encouraged. Stay safe and stay sane everyone.

Copyright © 2020 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.

(Image: Anonymous Facebook post, apparently stuff shared freely on social media is public domain. Made me LOL. Will remove or attribute as required if the copyright holder requests. A discerning reader provided the source for the image: New Study.)