Disclaimer: By a substantial margin, the American people voted the events in this account to be completely fabricated. They never happened. Obviously, the Left-wing extremist who put his fantasies in writing is a very sick person; however, recent court decisions preserving hate campaigns and other misinformation as free speech prohibit social media platforms from silencing anyone, no matter how deranged. We did screw around with the photos originally accompanying this piece when it was posted in 2020, because several of them substantiated claims in the article, however false they are. These fake news photos have been replaced with interesting scientic materials prepared by the very smart students over at PS 106 and designs for some truly marvelous machines conceived entirely with Artificial Intelligence.

About 2020─ This Never Happened

2020 has been routinely called the worst year in living memory. As if every aspect of it--the pandemic, the absurd anti-democratic antics of Trump, the blind denial of both systemic racism and the validity of science by half the populace--weren't ugly enough, the Fates decreed 2020 was a leap year with one extra, freakin' day. Burdened with an unjust destiny, I'm more likely to work out my pain by making stuff than crying about it. This was the year I saved my tears for moments containing common decency and grace; alternately, here's some stuff I wrote about and posted.

For the Lower Merion Township "New Year's at Noon" event, I built a two-stage prop, loaded with twenty pounds of chocolate, that was supposed to represent a pair of spectacles with a 20/20 view of the coming months. Instead it hinted at the calamities to come: a beaming fireman dropped one lens, and as the little kiddies leapt for the splattering goodies, he let the other lens fly. Wholesale murder was averted by mere inches. Soothsayer Cato's political prediction proved a total bust; however, the little fellow who steps into frame behind the marionette in this video became a local hero come July when he led our neighborhood Black Lives Matter demonstration.

As Covid-19 spread from China to the Mid-East and Europe, I was still fuming over the dereliction of Mitch McConnell and Conservatives during Trump's mockery of a Senate impeachment trial. Republicans admitted their chief gangster had withheld funds designated by Congress to assist Ukraine in defending the Crimean Peninsula from Russian invaders, but they refused to allow that trading government favors for dirt on a political opponent rose to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors." The senate majority leadership would not even allow the many dedicated, civil servant witnesses to Trump's blatant corruption a hearing on the Senate floor.

Meanwhile, anyone who attended NPR's description of the viral epidemic that shut down China's Wuhan Province knew by January that sucker was going to travel the globe and America should be ready for it. Trump had already tried to shut down the straight-as-an-arrow national public broadcasting service because of its political reporting. His "plan" for dealing with the coming pandemic was to dismiss the validity of science-based reporting as "fake news" and to groundlessly and incompatibly accuse China of somehow fabricating Covid-19 to attack the U.S. and more importantly himself.

Along with the excruciating train wreck of Trump's autocracy came the rank indecency and incompetence of his advisors and appointees. After selling himself to the preposterously gullible American rube as some kind of businessman genius who would surround himself with "only the best people," Trump appointed lackeys without resumés or conscience to his magician's cabinet. In January, we had Mike Pompeo swearing out the side of his mouth that the administration never received crucial intelligence Putin had put a bounty on the heads of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Always willing to abet his boss's unholy subordination to the will of the Kremlin, Attorney General William Barr had delivered a totally misleading Sparks Notes version of the Mueller report the previous summer, dismissing concrete evidence of conspiracy and about a dozen counts of obstruction as nothing-to-see-here-people inconsequence. By early 2020, the AG appointed an independent counsel to investigate the origins of the Mueller investigation, fueling the perception of those same dupable Americans that Trump was the poor victim of persecution by a vast, deep-state, Liberal conspiracy.

Because of the power of his office and his willingness to wield it to punish Trump's political enemies and protect his crooked friends, Attorney General Barr was a particularly galling facet of the most corrupt presidential administration in U.S. history. My reaction was to characterize him as Simon Bar Sinister, arch-enemy of Underdog, the 60s cartoon defender of truth and justice. Later, I put his doughy mug on a mock billboard with the slogan "Better Call Barr," advertising a corrupt legal defense lawyer and emulating a gag used in the Breaking Bad spin-off, starring Bob Odenkirk.

A continuing frustration with the horrible year was the utter disregard for facts among Trumpasites in MAGAland. They were willing to dismiss evidence in Trump's strongarming of Ukraine. They believed unsubstantiated drivel about Covid-19 blared at them on Fox television, the completely fanciful Qanon website, and Twitter feed, a modern Cloudcuckooland. They believed in corrupt dirty dealing by Hunter and Joe Biden that even Barr refused to prosecute, while the nepotism and graft benefitting Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner was out in the open and in your face.

The worst effects of the American public's utter inability to discern factual reporting from propaganda were to come much later in 2020, after Biden won the presidency by 74 electoral votes and seven million popular votes. Three-quarters of Republicans, it would be reported, believed the election was stolen, a conspiracy of mind-boggling vastness, involving Republican election officials in key swing states who had managed to dump millions of fraudulent ballots into the system for the Democratic presidential candidate while simultaneously delivering the actual tally for incoming Republican congresspersons and re-vesting Republican Senators down-ticket. The poison of Trump's habitual, conman's flimflam, the line of bull that had kept his hospitality businesses afloat despite six bankruptcies, not only destroyed the democratic norms of 230 years, it eroded standards of logical argument and rudimentary scholarship that had been in Western practice for millennia.

Eventually, Trump initiated a Coronavirus task force and began daily televised briefings,scattershot affairs where social distancing and masks were neither recommended to every American or employed by the team on the dais. Trump frequently contradicted or stifled his own medical experts, and the American people--desperate for guidance--were subjected to alternative facts from illegitimate "experts" like the My Pillow guy, a major Trump donor.

In contrast to these daily debacles, New York Governor Cuomo was becoming a kind of cult figure with his regular reassurances to the public, which were steeped in science and statistics and cold, hard truth, designed to talk the people of the Empire State through a weeks-long crisis of out-of-control infections, overburdened medical facilities, and grief. New York City was in a lockdown mode, struggling to get ventilators and PPE equipment. In the absence of any co-ordinated federal response to the now-raging pandemic, hard-hit states were on their own, bidding against each other for scarce supplies, subject to price-gouging by vendors, and belittled by Trump who responded to criticism by calling the disaster a "blue state" problem, "not my table."

Because the ramifications of the mishandling of the pandemic were obvious to responsible journalists, the dangers to life and the national economy were obvious to me. One of the first things I realized was that, after Adam Schiff, scores of patriotic and serious-minded witnesses, and a Mitch McConnell-rigged impeachment process had failed to rid the country of the enemy of the state, DeeJay Death Trumpet, the likelihood was a lowly virus would unravel his presidency and put an end to the dismantling of our democracy. I thought of the climax of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and the George Pal movie that was one of my childhood favorites.

I also considered how the anti-science/alternative facts strain driving at least a third of popular opinion was reminiscent of another dark period in American history, when the "Know-Nothing" party held offices after the Civil War. Them guys also believed in conspiracy theories over fact: one of their favorites was the belief in a conspiracy orchestrated by the Catholic Church to subvert U.S. democracy. They were xenophobic, populist, and prone to demagoguery, since bullying is an alternative to changing people's minds with concrete argument. A permanent stain on the middle of the otherwise pristine white marble exterior of the Washington Monument corresponds to the Know-Nothing period, when the folks who morphed into the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War controlled much of political activity. I envisioned there would be some gruesome, permanent records, too, of the Trump years--when America lost its ever-loving mind, and had more deaths than any country on Earth MAGAland says America is greater than.

Trump's daily briefings continued into April and were often tragicomic displays of dysfunction, prevarication, and pathetic self-congratulation. He repeated over and over again how great his response to the virus had been, and how the U.S. had more testing than any other country. He ignored the fact that our rate of infection and percentage of cases worldwide was huge considering our percentage of the world's population. The United States had more sickness due to Covid-19 than any country on the planet. Brazil, Russia, and India were the next nations vying with us for worst-in-show pandemic response, and those three countries were also run by autocratic demagogues. All the while, Trump complained that we had too many cases because we did too many tests (...), and one day the whole thing would be over "like magic." Soon after he suggested people might get cured by injection with bleach or suffusion with ultraviolet rays, Trump's advisors convinced him the daily briefings weren't boosting his public image, and like magic THEY disappeared.

At the end of March, the two-trillion-dollar CARES Act was voted into law, a massive infusion of much-needed capital for businesses and relief to families disrupted by the pandemic. The package made perfect sense but it was rife with administrative problems, and the rhetoric from Republicans who flatly refused to support the working class was reason to despair. McConnell and others complained that extending subsistence-level unemployment benefits to poor families would destroy their incentive to work, and he wanted lawsuit protections for businesses that insisted their employees report to work under life-threatening conditions. People waited months for their relief checks to arrive, and Trump insisted every one of them had his signature on it. After trying to maintain personal oversight of the aid package, Trump fired the Inspector General who was actually charged with the job. According to the Brookings Institute, over 10 billion dollars was handed over to lobbyists and fundraisers connected to Trump and businesses owned or connected to Jared Kushner. Betsy Devos managed to divert public tax dollars to Christian private schools, and even the Catholic Church took a 1.4 billion dollar slice of the pie. Who knew they were so close to collapse?

The great failure of the U.S. pandemic response was not having a federally mandated lockdown every place with significant Covid cases and keeping restrictions in effect until the rising curve of infections was flattened, state by state. What we got was a gutless leader who refused to wear a mask, held superspreader rallies where he mocked caution, and continuously wailed that the cure for the pandemic shouldn't be worse than the disease. All Trump cared about was preserving his weak-ass economy to win himself a second term; the Texas lieutenant-governor and others chimed in that elderly people should be happy to sacrifice themselves to the virus to preserve our business health.

Taking their cue from the science-denier-in-chief, protesters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan assembled, heavily armed, in state capitals, demanding that all health restrictions be lifted, refusing to be masked, claiming the better good was a violation of their rights and freedoms. The Wisconsin supreme court repealed sensible measures to preserve public safety, likening precautions that protected lives to totalitarianism. Pennsylvania's Republican legislature voted away Governor Wolf's quarantine provisions and restrictions on businesses. I posted a graphic showing a coronavirus assaulting a nostril. "Are you trying to infect me?"
"Don't worry. It's only political."

The unprecedented horror of the Trump Virus was that our national dialogue about safety and recovery was warped by our leader's inability to heed indifferent facts and data without rejecting them as some kind of personal attack. News sources were full of anecdotes about perfectly reasonable persons assaulted and ridiculed for wearing masks to protect themselves and the community. Covid-19 has a measurable pathology; unfortunately, our leader in the struggle against it was also pathological.

As 2020 crawled near to the end of summer, the presidential election became increasingly relevant, and with polls consistently showing Biden carrying an eight- or nine-point lead, my wife and I began to hope we wouldn't need to sell our home and move to whatever foreign nation might still accept Americans in 2021. As the nation burned, President Nero fiddled around at superspreader rallies in Oklahoma, Colorado, and at Mt. Rushmore, salving his colossal ego. A mystery is what compelled his followers to sit masklessly without social distancing, in the middle of a pandemic, and listen to that weak-minded fogey prattle inarticulately that only he could save America--from the crisis his own incompetence had caused. One explanation was that Trump's "What, me worry?" governance appealed to Whites who were in denial about the other disease threatening our democracy: systemic racism.

Say what you will about the destructiveness of the internet and social media, the lies, misinformation and hate speech they proliferate, I believe the appalling injustices fomented by America's blatant and latent racism were finally acknowledged as a result of so many self-satisfied white citizens witnessing George Floyd's murder in broad daylight on the pavement in Minneapolis. In my tiny suburb of Philadelphia, an eight-year-old kid, who refused to accept his black friend might be shot down at some point due solely to race, organized our local Black Lives Matter demonstration.

Hundreds of protests broke out in cities across the nation and where other instances of police brutality occurred. Despicably, Trump incited violent clashes by refusing to acknowledge the racial travesties that have scarred our land since Columbus landed. Instead, he played to the racism of his white base by blowing his "law and order" dog whistle, claiming leftist agitators were the source of sporadic violence that marred many peaceful protests, and declaring he'd send government troops into urban areas to keep the peace if Democratic mayors didn't have the guts to crack down on freedom of speech and the right to assemble.

Trump's worst impulses were on display when he used rubber bullets and pepper spray to disperse a peaceful protest next to the White House so that he, Barr, and Kaleigh McEninny could stand in front of a boarded up Episcopal church and hold a Bible upside down for a photograph. Other than that, Trump had stayed holed up in a bunker and ordered an ugly, supplemental wall to be built around "his" house, the only effective physical barrier he had actually erected for the whole of his term in office despite his election promise to keep foreigners from swarming our southern border.

I never found the belief that Trump was an intelligent schemer ("Some people like to say I'm a 'stable genius'") even remotely plausible. I admit he was the best con artist since Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man. Tax records show that his only profitable endeavor against decades of business losses was his long-running reality TV show, where he masqueraded as a shrewd businessman. The real wizard-like masters of finance and investment don't market themselves as a brand on coarse TV shows; they shun the limelight and protect their privacy. What Trump has always been is a crude, bullying, inveterate liar, more like a genus that should be kept in a stable. Mostly he has his way with people because his knack for tossing blatant horse hockey takes them off guard. Who would ever expect the most powerful man on the planet to be so nakedly full of shit? Watching him in interviews touting his performance on a simple Alzheimer's screening and claiming the doctors never saw anything like it, one couldn't but notice his desperation to be thought intelligent.

Times of great stress reveal the true nature of people. 2020 betrayed Trump's character to enough who had been blind to his indecency up until then that he lost re-election. He claimed he'd aced the pandemic response, that he regretted nothing. When members of the White House staff and inner circle began to contract Covid following reckless behavior and a party for newly appointed justice Amy Coney "Mony Mony" Barrett, people who had believed the misinformation diminishing it on Fox News began to suspect that the disease was a very real threat to everyone and the shameless bluster of the Trump Troupe was juvenile. The moment we'd all been waiting for happened just after the first presidential debate, when Trump himself grew short of breath, weak, and even more unfit for office than on a typical day. He was flown to Walter Reed hospital in a helicopter.

Unsurprisingly, Trump spokespeople refused to say when he had been last tested or knew he was infectious. He may have exposed Joe Biden to the virus during the debate, days before he became symptomatic. Trump's children had themselves appeared maskless at the event, casually flaunting Cleveland Clinic guidelines. Chris Christie, who "prepped" Trump for the big debate match-up, also fell ill and was in an ICU bed for more than a week.

Seeing Trump in the hospital for four days was a surreal spectacle, indeed. Here he was, getting experimental treatment available only to a very few, but his personal doctor, Sean Conley, D.O., refused to level with the American people about the severity of the patient's condition or how much oxygen he had been given. One certainty was that Trump was pumped up on steroids. His behavior for days was manic even for him: in the middle of intensive treatment and while still infectious he rode in the presidential limousine past supporters who were camped outside Walter Reed Medical Center (maskless, of course) to give them a thrill and to burnish his Man Tan orange on the sunbed of their adoration. The adventure needlessly exposed Secret Service agents to Covid, but it was worth it to demonstrate with a disdainful wave that like a god he was immune to the consequences of his worshipers' own miserable and bleakly untelevised lives.

After having a photo op in the hospital showing himself pretending to sign a stack of blank pages, Trump was discharged. Immediately upon touching down on the White House lawn, he huffed and puffed up a flight of stairs, took off his mask with bravado, and saluted the cameras like Il Duce on a bunting-draped balcony. We wondered how many public servants inside the residence were endangered by his behavior. The Washington Post reported that 130 Secret Service agents were ultimately infected or quarantined in service to Trump's ego.

Just as America may have finally realized through Trump’s richly deserved illness that Covid-19 was serious and his approach to it unconscionable, the first Biden/Trump debate likely put an end to anyone’s notion that Donald’s personality was “direct and honest” instead of simply vulgar and mean. Spewing lies and poison--perhaps literally disease--he interrupted every response by the former Vice President and strutted like a schoolyard bully. Jake Tapper denounced the performance as a “train wreck,” and historian Jon Meacham declared it the debasement of a seventy-year tradition of presidential discourse. Not only were history wonks and press elites sick to death of Trumpism, but also regular folks like you and me had had enough of Trump's crass vulgarity.

The difference between the elections of 2016 and 2020 is well-represented by what happened in my home state of Pennsylvania: more black voters turned out in urban Philadelphia to support Biden, and white suburban women, like the ones who marched in my neighborhood racial justice protest, abandoned Trump who had supported him four years before. Even so, five days passed between election night and when the Associated Press declared Joe Biden the victor, not so much because the vote was close--it wasn't that close--but because so many people voted by mail.

Tasteless and destructive to the bitter end, Trump refused to accept the results, amplifying far-fetched conspiracy theories tweeted in Cloudcuckooland and heedless of the perhaps permanent damage he was doing to the credibility and sanctity of our election process. A President knowingly subverting the Constitution he swore to defend is a traitor on the face of it. In a rare spasm of honesty, he had been telling the American people for months he would refuse to accept the outcome should he lose, a violation of ancient playground codes predating the Republic. One wonders: what would the bastard have to do to convince people he is criminally unfit to lead the nation, call on his supporters to attack the Capitol?

As he had always managed to avoid financial consequences by outlasting the average creditor in courts of law, he pursued 60 different legal challenges to results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona; almost all were lost and many were dismissed with the judges heaping derision on Trump's legal mooks. None of them changed the outcome of individual state elections. Even the Supreme Court he had hastily packed with one final appointee, less than a month after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, refused to listen to his baseless arguments, construed to overturn the will of the American people without a shred of credible evidence of widespread fraud.

As I write these words, just hours before the end of the most stressful and heartbreaking year for my country through which I have ever lived, Trump is still disputing facts, fuming against his myriad enemies and betrayers, and still trying desperately to avert the inevitable transition of power twenty days hence. Credible news sources and specialists in Constitutional law assure me my anxiety is unfounded and Trump will leave the White House at noon on the appointed day, kicking and screaming if need be. My country is in chaos. Cases of Covid-19 are nearing 20,000,000 and deaths are at 344,000 (Editor's note: This figure was eventually revised downward to 1,200,000.) with a 70% more contagious mutation of the virus gaining a foothold in the country, even as hospitals are crammed to near capacity with the sick and doomed. Yet, whatever we face in the coming year, we will not have to do it with Donald J. Trump in the lead role, and for that reason alone, I feel truly blessed.

Drew Zimmerman, ©2020, 2024