I’m a retired therapist and for many years worked with a schizophrenic client who believed we were in a simulation (and I was the conduit to programmers who could get him a girlfriend, but that’s another story).
Today, politics feels like a simulation. Who could have predicted what’s happened over the last few weeks?
Trump is convicted in civil court of rape and then business fraud, and finally just a few weeks ago of election-fraud felonies. We had been saying for months (indeed, years) that everything Trump accuses Biden of (election fraud, inappropriate sexual behavior, profiteering off foreign governments, using stimulants, etc.) is projection. When Trump became a felon, we won that battle. Pretty much everyone knows that Trump is a criminal and a liar, and Republicans have been forced to accept him that way.
But, there was another game going on: The competition as to who is more senile, Trump or Biden. It ended with a victory for Trump. Biden screwed up the debate big time and it played into all the negative shit that the Republicans have been foisting on the American people for months. Now, everyone knows that Biden has some cognitive decline, and the Democrats are debating whether to accept him that way.
Then the Supreme Court declares that Trump is largely immune from prosecution after his presidency as long as he can show he was acting officially (like Putin did when he imprisoned Navalny). He’s immune from having to confront the facts and defend himself, and we are denied the truth in a ruling that seems to be about as unAmerican as a monarchy.
Now, we have the almost-assassination of Trump. What drunk programmer in this simulation decided on having the crime committed by a white male conservative gun nut whose father is a “strong Republican” and a rabid (one of the top 20 gun enthusiasts in his town of 20,000) gun rights supporter? This is the sort of Hollywood stuff that the right wing regularly complains about, making conservatives out to be assholes. They are!
Then Aileen Cannon takes Clarence Thomas’ hint and dismisses the entire Jack Smith classified documents’ case two days before the Republican Convention. This inexperienced Federal judge flouts decades of established law to throw the whole thing out. Yet we saw it on tv, boxes in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago marked classified, after Trump lied and denied he had them! Trump got off (for now) on a technicality.
Meanwhile, amid all this turmoil, Democrats are trying hard to push Biden out, and he’s just as adamant to stay as they are to get rid of him. Complicating this is that he’s done really good job and has his defenders, but the youth are just not interested in him and many of us find it unbelievable that he’s not kicking Trump’s ass. This story, which is likely to get sorted out in the next week or so, could be the next big event.
One thing’s for sure: this story is so far from over. This race is insane, with lots of unexpected twists and turns, and there’s no reason to think that it’s going to be all normal from here on in. This is the new normal. Chaos. Unpredictability. Headlines. We’ve had half a dozen October surprises and it’s not even August.
Years ago, Bill Clinton hosted periodic gatherings of great intellectuals at the White House that were broadcast on PBS. One of these events featured Stephen Hawking. He was asked what he thought the future would be like, and said something like, “I’ll tell you this: Change will happen faster and faster because of technology.”
He’s absolutely right. Though we’re probably not in a simulation, everything is happening at high speed with a level of unpredictability that I doubt has been matched in any previous campaign. The political landscape is in constant upheaval. Whatever we believe about the state of the race this week, may be completely different next week.
While I would like Biden to step down because it is clear the millennials have truly run out of patience with an old guard that has clung to power too long, I am confident that whether he stays or goes has no bearing on who will win in November. There will be another half dozen or more October surprises. Some will be manufactured by the campaigns, others will be highlighted by the media, and still others will just come out left field, and we’ll be united in thinking WTF!