Seeking Credible Stories about the Future of Donald Trump

A challenge for storymakers

By Moristotle & Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Moristotle to both budding and fully flowered storytellers in search of an idea: I challenge you to write a credible story for Moristotle & Co. about the future of Donald Trump – if he has a future – or about his end, if you imagine he does not. I even offer you a scenario to get started:

The psychiatrists gain access to Trump when it becomes apparent to his defense team during legal negotiations in one of his criminal indictments that the chances of his being convicted are overwhelming, and Trump’s only hope for avoiding prison is to submit to psychiatric evaluation. (His lawyers have decided among themselves to withhold from Trump that he might not like prolonged detention in a hospital for the criminally insane much better than prison detention. But by this point they have become so annoyed and disgusted with the man, their attitude is “Who gives a fuck?”)
    Trump, of course, after being found not-guilty on the ground that he’s insane and not competent, finds the hospital for the criminally insane to which he is sent much to his liking. The other inmates there are fully as believing of his lunatic ravings as his most devoted denizens among American voters were.
    He does suffer the disappointment, though, that he can’t always get a Big Mac and fries exactly when he wants them.

    The authors of the ten best stories submitted will be toasted fittingly on Morisco!

I would take a
dark, darker,
darkest approach

Paul Clark: If I were going to tackle such a way-over-my-pay-grade project, I would probably go dark, darker, darkest in my approach.

Premise being: Trump and the Republicans allowed Covid to spread because they learned early on it would kill a much higher percentage of blacks and Latinos and “elitist” rich liberals in retirement homes and care facilities, and would therefore decrease the number of people in groups most likely to vote against them: much as Nixon created the DEA because even he knew he couldn’t couldn’t get away with creating an agency to criminalize blacks and leftist liberals, but he knew that declaring a “war on drugs” would basically accomplish the same purpose.
    And then the Covid plan of course got out of hand – much like McCarthyism, the DEA, the 9/11 response, the carefully planned 2008 recession, etc. – and when someone had to take the fall, the Republican leadership of course turned on Trump and blamed him.
    So what you end up with is a man sounding and acting insane, but only because he is saying and doing in an unfiltered fashion exactly what his puppeteers forced him to do, while they (as always) sound normal and morally superior (think Mitt Romney) because they talk and act in the carefully scripted and choreographed manner expected by the public.

Crazy
uncle?

Moristotle: I like your darker approach. You would be one of my contest winners just by virtue of countering with a more credible scenario.
    By the way, our colleague Ed Rogers would like it too. He has told me that “Trump is only the crazy uncle they brought down from the attic. They’re finished with him, but I don’t know if they’ll be able to put him and his followers back in the attic.”

Trump is
no Nixon

Paul Clark: What gets me with this con that the faux conservative Republicans have been running for 40 years is, they keep billing it as repairing what Kennedy or Carter or Clinton or Obama did, when what they are actually doing is the undoing of what Nixon did and/or tried to do: EPA, NPR, single-payer government health care, family care, higher minimum wage, etc.
    I’m afraid that my scenario is all I plan to submit. I actually don’t want to write a story. I am so sick of hearing Trump, of hearing about Trump, of hearing people still ignorant enough to believe anything Trump says, I worry it might take me several bottles of the cheapest tequila I could find (I would not use a decent scotch for such a purpose) just to write a 750-word ultra-short short story about the man.

    It is just surreal how this mess has played out, from what I truly believe started as a joke: I don’t think Trump ever had any serious idea he would win the nomination, much less the election, and I think his reign of terror shows that. Think of the good that could have been done with the $12-$14 BILLION (or whatever absurd number it finally turns out to be after the Georgia senate runoff circus) that has been pissed away on this year’s nominating campaigns and elections....

Rosy
scenarios
are also
welcome

Moristotle: You know, maybe the contest should be for scenarios first, rather than fleshed-out stories. I mean, I’ve already said you’d be a winner by virtue of your darker scenario alone.
    And, of course, some writers might suggest a rosy scenario – rosy for Trump, with him continuing to take people in and command the unwavering loyalty of millions, further enriching himself and his family, giving lost souls a fantasy to assuage their dissatisfaction with reality. Of course, these scenarios will be accepted too, and weighed on their merits. All are welcome.
    [This post was written and put on the schedule prior to James Knudsen’s column, “Acting Citizen: Trump Island” on Saturday. I believe that I’ll accept “Trump Island” as a contest entry, and I hereby toast James fittingly!]

I am not
just another
adult who
never outgrew
a liberal
indoctrination
as a child

Paul Clark: Sure, why not?

    By the way, like most teens who grew up watching the Vietnam War on the evening news and who were in college during the Watergate Scandal, it is fairly easy to guess my opinion of Richard Nixon at that time. Looking back nearly five decades, it seems almost impossible that today I have to accept him as the greatest Republican president in modern history and arguably one of the two most effective presidents of my adult lifetime.
    So that no one will dismiss my perspective as just another adult who never outgrew a liberal indoctrination as a child, let me note that I was raised Republican. When my family moved from Upstate NY to Virginia, they discovered that the Southern Democrats – led by George Wallace of Alabama and Lester Maddox of Georgia and many others of their ilk – were predominantly racists, so Republican politicians were the civic-minded heroes I was raised to look up to and admire. To think what being a Republican politician means now, compared to then, is still mind boggling – even though I’ve had 40 years to get used to it.

Copyright © 2020 by Moristotle & Paul Clark