The RNC has become GOP meta, political fantasies laid upon an unintended sequence of failed actions in reality. What if Trump could ignore history, science, and rationality and yet remain IMPOTUS.
Tonight’s event consisted of stunts: a pardon, a naturalization ceremony, and a Secretary of State who wants not only the Rapture, but to be POTUS in 2024.
The RNC contains all those things that exist in fantasy and cosplay, the Dear Leader’s wife is hot, former slaves know their place, as do women, and there is but one true national religion. It only took 16 years, but there could be a Black Bachelor. There’s no place like home, Auntie Em, and Paul Waldman at WaPo found it.
...But watching the first night’s proceedings, something else came into focus: an entirely different President Trump from the one we all know, one whose actions and character are completely at odds with what we’ve watched over the past four years.
To put it simply: This is Trump fan fiction.
For the unfamiliar, fan fiction allows fans to take well-known entertainment properties and write their own scenarios into them, creating everything from brief stories to entire novels. What if Kirk and Spock were lovers? What if you threw Harry and Hermione into the “Star Wars” universe? What if the a cappella singers from “Pitch Perfect” had to fight zombies?
Or what if Trump were a caring, compassionate, totally non-racist person who saved America from the coronavirus pandemic? Wouldn’t that be an interesting twist?
So Republicans decided that the way to handle the crisis affecting all our lives was to present an alternate timeline, a bizarro-universe story in which rather than spending months denying the coronavirus would affect the United States and claiming it was about to disappear, Trump was in fact the only one who realized how serious it was.
“One leader took decisive action to save lives: President Donald Trump,” said the narrator of a video laying out a fantasy in which Trump personally wrestled the pandemic into submission.
[...]
So now they ask: What if we imagined that none of that actually happened? If we imagined a Trump who is kind, gentle, and compassionate, and the worst disaster of his presidency, the one that has destroyed so many families and left the economy devastated, never occurred? What if that spectacular failure was actually a tremendous success? Wouldn’t that be great?
www.washingtonpost.com/...
