Trump and O.J.: The Ticket That Could Have Been
The ultimate counterintuitive, psychopathic, sociopathic, chaotic, clickbait presidential ticket for all times.
by Rich Herschlag
They were the perfect pair. One was an idol to the masses. He transcended race. He was a once-in-a-generation athlete. And O.J. was no slouch, either.
While some people—and by that I mean only hundreds of millions—are happy to see O.J. Simpson dead and gone, I have been in mourning for days. Even though the end of our democracy and our very way of life is hurtling toward us like a hypersonic missile, I had always held out hope for a silver lining— for the ultimate counterintuitive, psychopathic, sociopathic, chaotic, clickbait presidential ticket for all times.
The announcement would probably have come sometime in mid-July during a meaningless Republican National Convention with no platform and serving only as a media opportunity for Marjorie Taylor Greene to genuflect to Vladimir Putin. Donald J. Trump and Orenthal James Simpson would have considered gliding down the escalator together at Trump Tower for the big coming out, but in the end the slow drive down the 405 in a 1993 white Ford Bronco would have tested better.
For anyone who thinks the addition of O.J. Simpson would have in some way hurt Donald Trump’s chances of being reelected . . . No. First of all, nothing can hurt those chances, and Trump’s already tried just about everything—incompetence, fascism, stealing and auctioning off state secrets, rape, demented middle-of-the-night rants, falling asleep in court, international extortion, money laundering, perjury, sedition. None of it seems to work. Hitching his political fate to a disgraced murderous misogynist wouldn’t have left a scratch.
The truth is, the 2024 Trump-O.J. bedfellow juggernaut would have made profound emotional sense, put Trump over the top, and taken the entire national circus to the next level.
O.J. is what Trump was looking for but never quite found in a Herschel Walker—racial obsequiousness combined with nuclear bottled rage. Walker physically abused women but he never quite let it all hang out. Walker knew little to nothing about policy but occasionally bothered to try. Walker spewed gibberish but never successfully monetized it by being a recognizable pitchman for major corporate brands. With O.J., Trump—and by proxy our exceptional nation—would have gotten the ultimate shameless media titan not named Donald Trump. Together, they would have killed it.
Nothing has ever stuck to Donald Trump, and other than armed robbery and kidnapping changes, not much had ever stuck to O.J. Together the two could have wreaked a bloodbath on America with utter and eternal impunity, and that very promise would have endeared the wacky, remorseless duo all the more to a hapless base that historically couldn’t argue itself out of a parking ticket. For angry white America, already thoroughly housebroken to rage vicariously through celebrities who loathe them, the act of voting for a Black man not named Obama would have been cathartic and liberating in the most toxic manner conceivable. That same Black man’s destruction of a couple of overprivileged West Coast lives would have made O.J. an honorary Caucasian almost as much as his glib commercials for Hertz Car Rental did in the 70s. The outrageous two-pronged defiance of a famously fallible legal system would have resonated profoundly with millions of MAGA haters of the Deep State.
As for Black Americans—especially the ever growing contingent of Black males now telling pollsters they’re leaning toward Trump—O.J. on the ticket would have solidified the protest vote of a lifetime. What more incendiary statement, what better Hail Mary pass than pulling the lever for an interracial pair of goons who strictly never cared a whit for anyone or anything other than themselves? O.J. was what Omarosa could never bring herself to be—a soulless sellout hawk picking ravenously at the cadaver of American civic life.
Of course, pessimists like us should never entirely overlook the real world accomplishments of a persona like O.J. Simpson. Because in his unbridled lust for fame, fortune, and the blood of anyone who stood between him and his invincible male specimen self-image, O.J. did in fact accomplish the only marginally concrete thing the severely stunted American political brain can pretend to earnestly grasp in an election year—he created jobs. While hovering over the freeway in a TV helicopter following Simpson’s Ford Bronco and continuing to cover the gruesome story 24/7 for interminable months, cable and network news outfits unwittingly launched a new age of media—the very one we still live unredeemed in today.
By ignoring literally thousands of worthy stories regarding water shortages, child abductions, and airborne cancer-causing agents in favor of obsessively gluing itself to a single sensational macabre drama, American media relearned that underestimating the public’s intelligence was literally impossible—a lesson a relatively youthful Donald Trump back in the 90s swallowed, digested, and puked out in the 2010s in the form of shockingly moronic political appeal. Stupid sells, as long as you can link that stupidity to some timeless human urge that was once rooted in legitimacy. The original connection is disposable so long as what remains is a fuming, out-of-control id that feels justified to the beholder.
The job creation came organically. With all those eyeballs stuck to the boob tube they simply had to be transferred to other prurient, hate-inducing, hormone-triggering content. That’s how we saw the rise of Dateline, Cheaters, COPS, Court TV, and “reality TV” itself. The internet couldn’t have come along at a better time, amplifying the hollow sound of stultified minds like a megaphone on the navel of an upset stomach. You want job creation? OJ gave us the Kardashians. OJ gave us The Apprentice. Take that, Joe Biden.
But the final vindication of O.J. Simpson’s tragically misbegotten life of seething while at the same time enjoying every physical and financial privilege known to humankind would have come not from stirring up still more frenzy and dissension in a country just about at its breaking point, and not from creating still more destructive employment opportunities in our self-loathing economy, but rather from serving a master who was the closest thing ever to his pale doppelganger.
Like a running back ignoring CTE as he breaks headfirst through a human border wall at the goal line, a political pawn must sacrifice himself cynically for a cause that really isn’t even his but which he signed on for as part of his final Faustian bargain. When Trump ultimately lost an election—whether the upcoming one or the one in, say, 2036—O.J. Simpson as Vice President of the United Stated of America had a rendezvous with destiny in the Capitol building on the day of certification. And unlike Mike Pence, you can be sure O.J. would have done the right thing.
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Believe it or not, the writer of this piece was in my high school graduating class. We were pals. That is Stuyvesant High School, 1980.
He was a satirist then, too.
The apple rarely falls far.
We also had, supposedly, Beastie boy Adam Horowitz.
We DID have two of the world’s leading scientists, Michael Greene and Lisa Randall. I asked out the latter. Like all the other girls, she turned me down.
Did you ask AI to make the picture? That's not O.J.