In his recent Stanford commencement address, Ken Burns said about Donald Trump, “As a student of history, I recognize this type.” Curiously, I’ve always felt that I recognized Trump from alternate history, because every time I wonder how he could have ended up as the presidential nominee of a major American political party, I conclude that someone must have gone back in time and screwed up the past just enough to create a Trump trajectory.
In the classic 1952 story, “A Sound of Thunder,” by Ray Bradbury, one of the characters discusses the state of the country before commencing a safari back to the Mesozoic:
"Makes you think, If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith won. He'll make a fine President of the United States."
"Yes," said the man behind the desk. "We're lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492.”
Inevitably, the trip to the Cretaceous goes wrong, and a passenger leaves the sanctioned walking path long enough to step on and kill a humble butterfly. (Butterflies don’t appear in the fossil record until the next geologic period, the Paleocene, but we’ll forgive Bradbury for that.) The world to which the time travelers return seems to have been subtly corrupted, with misspellings everywhere and a faintly acrid scent in the air.
Horrified, the man with the butterfly plastered to his boot faces the new reality:
His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: "Who - who won the presidential election yesterday?"
The man behind the desk laughed. "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" The official stopped. "What's wrong?"
Surely, in a teleological sense, Donald Trump was not “meant to happen.” For him to have gotten even this close to power, someone must have fouled the time stream somewhere along the way. Even Ted Cruz warned that Trump would be “the Biff Tannen president,” so all we have to do is prep Doc Brown and Marty for one last rescue mission into the past ….