Here’s What Will Happen, Trump-wise

It’s only countable days now until the Nov. 8 election, when, as appears likely, if the most recent ABC-Washington Post poll is remotely connected to the current political reality and zeitgeist, Donald Trump will go down in defeat to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton even as Wikileaks continue to leak like the Titanic before it split in two.

Here are a few things that could happen, Trump-wise.

A. A wan and tired Donald Trump concedes after both NBC News and Fox News call the election five minutes after the first polls close in Delaware and two hours before anyone in California has even gotten a chance to vote. “It’s been fun, Crooked Hillary,” he says. “No hard feelings. Let’s do lunch when you get to Washington. Don’t forget to tip.” Melania says, “Congratulations and wouldn’t want to be you.” Two hours later, Gary Johnson also concedes, saying that he had hoped the result would be different, at least in Florida.

B. An angry and red-faced Donald Trump, after a long and bitter campaign and an even longer night in which he lost the election by a comfortable electoral margin, nevertheless says the whole thing was rigged, jigged, bamboozled, hugely and undeniably, and vows to go to the Supreme Court. “I’ve never been there before,” he says. “I thought this was a good time to go.”

C. In a remarkable turnaround, at the end of a long and bitter night, a Wikileak that reveals that Hillary Clinton is not a citizen combined with late votes in Hawaii and an obscure corner of the Everglades and a 100-percent plurality in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Mar-a-Lago, Trump wins a improbable victory, whereupon there is a surge of immigrants into Canada.

D. There is a tie. At this point, George Clooney officially became an Italian citizen.

E. In the aftermath of the election, which Hillary Clinton won thanks to the voters of the District of Columbia, a strange calm settled over the land because someone hacked into all of the available social media, including Snapchat, and all the major and minor networks and cable channels. Somewhere people were screaming out loud or on Twitter, but no one could hear them. There was a blackout all over the United States and it remained dark at daybreak. The Zombie Wars had begun.

When considering the rise and rise and perhaps the fall of Donald Trump, it’s important to remember that great sage who said, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” or the other sage, who said “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” (and was promptly charged with body shaming).

Lots of people have blamed lots of people for unleashing Trump on America’s political landscape, with such a devastating and destructive result.

I could say, as some people are prone to do, that I blame myself, except, in truth, I already have enough to blame myself for. Blame it on Mame, a choice that merely reveals my age.

The roots — not Jimmy Fallon’s band, but roots, like hair roots and things sent into the ground by trees, like the roots of Trump’s hair that Fallon stroked — go way back, to the first time a congressman stood up during the State of the Union speech and called President Barack Obama a liar and became a congressional GOP folk hero. They go back to Rush and a host of other lords-of-radio trash talk. They go back to the Tea Party — probably the one in Boston, too — and all sorts of hateful but defiant nonsense that got people like Ted Cruz to think he could be president.

Once upon a time — after the birthers, after the bankruptcies, once he turned 70 — Trump managed to do quite a bit of damage.

Almost effortlessly, and certainly without much thought, Donald Trump managed to bring out the worst in everybody and everything he came in contact with.

Consider the Grand Old Party — not so grand, very old and not much of a party animal anymore. Trump faced a field of too many presidential aspirants to count and pretty much waltzed through them like a Target commercial, diggity, diggity. His rivals — such as they were — folded like the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Anything written about Trump will have references to the Titanic and zombies in it.

Trump said Jeb Bush didn’t have energy, and Jeb said, I do too have energy, but not so you could hear him. Marco Rubio, while young and impetuous, surely did not expect to talk about stained pants, but there he was, after digging out the knife in his back planted there by Chris Christie. Ted Cruz, after losing the nomination, could have looked brave when he refused to endorse Trump at the convention, except that he looked merely like Ted Cruz.

Consider the media. They lambasted, complained, whined, called him names, took him or not, took his telephone calls and printed or repeated or aired every dumb, outrageous, unpresidential and unprecedented outrageous thing he said, and then counted their ridiculously high ratings and did it some more. They were stuck between greed and a hard place, where actual journalism resided. Occasionally, they went there, but more often than not they went to the Trump Tower for unrevealing but exclusive interviews.

Hillary Clinton, when not crazed by the drip drip of emails and hearing “Lock her up!” as if it were muzak on the Trump Tower elevator, managed to come up with her own moment of going, not high, but low, with her imponderable bucket of deplorables. There were words, phrases and slogans that I thought I would never hear in my lifetime, given that I’m living during the time of the End of Days, including the P-word rampant on the airwaves without being part of a cat commercial.

Mostly, Trump brought out the worst in his base, which the media discovered late in the game to be angry white men. They were and are much more than that. Only Bill Maher would make fun of people like that and blanket them as God-obsessed rednecks. Trump’s base is not base, even if he is; they are not the bad breath of Beathard; they are not “my uneducated”; they are people who were made to believe they were trapped in a world where they no longer mattered.

Trump, confronted with their cheering, reveled in it, but confronted with them in person, looked discomfited by so much misery. He went to a flood-ravaged area in Louisiana and thought the best thing to do was sign autographs.

But here we are. It’s almost over. Can you hear the people sing?

Picked up the Post today. It read, “Trumpism isn’t going away.”

Say it isn’t so.