You Should've Voted for Trump

You may have noticed that the image above is not AI-generated. Well, that’s because I’m done with AI. It’s crap, and I can’t countenance using it anymore. Instead, you’re getting a dung beetle found throughout central and Eastern Africa, named—appropriately enough—Sisyphus spinipes.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been having a hard time lately. Each day a new horror story coming out of Washington, D.C., as the craven nitwits and incompetent toadies of a would-be dictator tear to shreds the fundamentals of a system it took two centuries to build. It’s awful, and it’s absurd, and I can’t look away. And because I can’t look away, and don’t want to look away, the seething ball of rage at my core grows ever hotter, distracting me from the rest of my life. I don’t like it!

Not writing this newsletter has not helped. For those of you just joining: I started Trying! by writing an essay every single goddamn day (including weekends) until, last Saturday, I hit no. 100 and decided to give myself a break from the grind. Which, man, I needed that! Daily production had really altered my life: While I discovered that I was capable of producing a reasonably high-quality email after dark, after dinner—I’d always thought I’d be too tired and foggy—it also meant that I couldn’t go out at night, or if I did happen to go out, I had to write first thing in the morning, which meant I might not have time to go running, and so running itself has fallen by the wayside these past months—which also doesn’t help me cope with the Situation.

In the past few days, I’ve gone out to dinner at our friends’ house (thanks, J. and P.!), cooked for another visiting friend (good to see you, J.P.!), and just watched TV and read without worrying that I was squandering precious writing hours. In total, I have skipped three whole days of writing Trying!, but that’s been enough to accentuate the misery of existence in 2025. “Writing is not therapy” is a lesson they drilled into us in my creative-writing workshops in college and grad school, and it’s true: Writing should not be therapy. You should not write primarily to tame your inner demons or, you know, work on your shit. That often makes for what we call “bad writing.” Still, writing can certainly be therapeutic, especially when it has become an exercise as vital and cleansing as a good long run. Whatever I write here, whatever it’s about—it helps. A little.

And so today I want to put on my hat as America's Worst Political Analyst™ and ask you to consider a mistake that 81,282,916 of us made back in 2020: We voted for Joe Biden—the most votes ever cast for a single candidate. It was not a mistake in the snide, present-day sense. Biden was, in my view, a good president: He inherited a godawful mess of a nation that was suffering not only from Covid but from right-wing terrorism, and he mostly handled those well, and although his policies eventually tamed the resulting inflation—driven by corporate profiteering, people!—he could not escape the popular perception that he had failed us all.

Donald Trump, however, would not have handled the ongoing pandemic or the ensuing inflation well—and that’s why we should have voted for him. Consider this alternative timeline: It’s November 2020, and Trump has been declared the outright winner of the election. And as in 2016, he really has won. There’s nothing for the Democrats to dispute that would make a difference, and so we all grudgingly accept our fate. Meanwhile, Trump does not need to make threatening calls to Georgia’s governor in search of extra votes, he does not send a mob to the Capitol on January 6, and he does not flee the White House with boxes full of classified documents that he leaves lying around a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. Instead, he remains in office—and fucks it all up. He fucks up the vaccine roll-out, resulting in far more than the 1.1 million American deaths that happened anyway. He fucks up Ukraine, and we watch Russia steamroll into Kyiv (and then observe a street-level insurgency take hold). And he fucks up inflation, messing with the Federal Reserve’s measured attempts to rein it in through higher interest rates. (Sorry, Jay Powell!) He fucks it all up because he’s a fuck-up at heart, an ignorant narcissist blind to reality but willing to use his billions and his minions to buy and threaten his way to power.

Until, in this alternate timeline, we reach early 2024, and we’ve all had enough, on both the left and the right. Trump is term limited, and finally unpopular enough that he won’t try to violate the Constitution by running again. Mike Pence is the new Republican candidate, not because the GOP likes him but because they know he’ll lose to whoever runs against him, maybe Pete Buttigieg or Gavin Newsom or even Kamala Harris. (Alas, no real progressive will earn the nomination.) And so we would now be entering 2025 with a Democratic president whose job, as it so often is for Democratic presidents, is to clean up the mess left by Republicans. And this Democrat would do it. Certainly not perfectly, since the remaining Republicans and many callow Democrats would stymie their efforts, but we’d be looking at real improvements to our world, and not worrying about a president who’s about to defy all the courts in the land and set himself up as a true dictator, effectively abolishing the Constitution.

Which he’s doing now, in our real timeline, purely out of retribution¹. After being called on his actual crimes, he now wants revenge on the upstanding citizens and federal employees who did their jobs in attempting to bring him to justice—that’s his motivation for tearing down our institutions. (Well, that and money, as always.) But the catalyst for it all was the 2020 election: Had he won, he’d have no one to get vengeful on. We would have suffered badly under another four years of his administration, but at least we’d now see an end to it.

When I started writing this piece, I figured I’d end on a note like “And that’s why I’m going to vote Republican from now on.” But it’s just too easy to be snarky in retrospect. To imagine, as I have, that this country should have re-elected Trump back in 2020 is really quite cynical. We all knew back then—all 81,282,916 of us—that the guy was not up to the job of getting us through and out of the pandemic (which is still going on), so we voted for the one who could and who did. Should we have played four-dimensional chess with our decision instead, and George Costanza’d our way into a better timeline? Should we do that the next time we have a chance to choose (if there ever is a next time)?

I can’t endorse that. A certain amount of cynicism is necessary to think about and participate in politics, sure, but we cannot let it overwhelm us, as it has the party in power right now. To run a city, a state, a country requires a level of earnestness that is as exhausting as it is annoying, and yet it’s still necessary. We need people in government who believe that what they are doing matters, not just to themselves but to everyone else out there. Red tape, human error, frequent incompetence, and inescapable pettiness may get in their way, but they all—elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats alike—need to an almost naive faith in the value of their roles. Without that, we get, well, we get what we’ve got right now, a cabal of rapists, both literal and figurative, and their enablers, all hoping to pillage their way to stomach-churning wealth.

Don’t be like them.

Open your eyes, face reality, accept the widespread existence of the crooks and the cheats and the hypocrites, and resist the temptation to play their game. Be honest, be direct, and choose what you believe. And trust that the rest of us, whatever remains of the 81,282,916, and maybe even more, will do the same.

I feel better now, don’t you? 🪨🪨🪨

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1  He’s always been a revenge guy: Go back to 2011, and we can see it was Obama’s razzing of Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner that prodded the schmuck to amp up his attacks—and eventually run for president.