Weekend at Donnie’s: Would Trump’s Death Hurt His Reelection Chances?
As far as the long term fate of Trump’s cadaver is concerned, there is much historical precedence.
(image: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)
by Rich Herschlag
In the 2020 version of the iconic 80s movie Weekend at Bernie’s, Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon arrive at Mar-a-Lago to warn President Donald Trump about an apparent bookkeeping error with regard to Russian money laundering but discover the president is dead. Little do they know Vladimir Putin had one of his oligarchs inject Trump with Novichock earlier in the weekend because the sitting U.S. president was likely to lose the upcoming election and ultimately, in an attempt to reduce his sentence, cooperate with the new attorney general.
Of course, it is quite an entertaining few minutes of cinematic reprise as the comedic duo of Bannon and Kushner initially fail to realize the president is no more. He is non-responsive to reports Melania was spotted with the pool boy and that Trump-Pence is trailing in Pennsylvania by 11 points. Mentions of wildfires consuming millions of acres on the West Coast and thousands of Americans dying every week from a deadly virus elicit no response whatsoever, but there is no sign in the president of anything unusual.
Trump seems sluggish, so Steve and Jared move him over to the couch, where the president’s big orange head flops onto Bannon’s flowery Hawaiian party shirt and he gingerly rolls it aside. Steve and Jared banter a bit about shutting down the post office, starting a couple of race riots, and how their boss probably had a few too many Big Macs the previous night. But then, when Kushner mentions the new Trump Hotel in Moscow and there is not even a nod from the president, our two heroes realize there is something wrong.
The remainder of Weekend at Donnie’s is amusing if somewhat predictable. With less than a month to go before the election, Steve and Jared have to convince the nation and the world that the president is alive and well and living in South Florida. As the two drag the president’s limp body between them down the fairway, the ever-clueless press fires questions about the Woodward book, the Cohen book, the Mary Trump book, and the newly surfaced videotape of Trump receiving a golden shower from a Saudi prince.
Steve and Jared’s slapstick yet artful handling of the president’s corpse on the green results in a credible hand wave, fist pump, and shoulder shrug at key moments. Furthermore, Trump’s score of three under par on the back nine convinces all but the most skeptical in attendance the president is fit for 12 more years and a sex tour of Thailand.
And this is where our cynical satire of a classic comedy ends. It’s not because your faithful correspondent couldn’t go a couple more holes. I had all sorts of notes scrawled on an envelope about water-skiing, phase 3 vaccine trials, and Jeffrey Epstein, but the joke itself has died and the audience knows it. Because Trump’s actual death— let’s say sometime in early October— probably wouldn’t hurt his chances on November 3.
Clearly, any third-rate late-night TV comedy writer could be kidnapped and brought in at gunpoint to generate countless authentic sounding infantile, vindictive tweets on the president’s account. Short of that, any intern could be given the three-to-five AM shift to recycle old tweets about Crazy Bernie, Sleepy Joe, and Trump’s being the healthiest president in history. Deepfake videos of Trump holding rallies in an undisclosed location to avoid Black Lives Matter protests would be produced by a capable team of Ukrainian hackers and quickly consumed by the hapless base.
Facebook posting of file footage from the 2016 Republican primary debates and interviews with Larry King in the 90s might be called out by discerning eyes in the media but would be accepted by loyal supporters as incontrovertible evidence of a presidential pulse. A cold-blooded, shrill tongue-lashing of Chris Cuomo by Kayleigh McEnany in the White House press room would underscore the administration’s determination to spin the story of Trump’s demise their way and “own the libs.”
Moreover, even the unlikely admission by the Trump administration that the emperor had neither clothes nor heartbeat would fail to move the needle an inch. Trump has been dead in the water for quite some time now, and his FiveThirtyEight approval rating remains steady at 43.1 percent. The purpose of every new book, revelation, tape, gaffe and leak seems to be to swing three independent-minded ICU patients in Wisconsin who have just emerged from a coma they first entered in January 2017. While funeral homes and crime labs can’t make their bones without a body, production of Donald Trump’s body—even lying in state at a Dallas-Fort Worth area rodeo—would bring little more than QAnon claims of a massive radical left hoax funded by George Soros and millions of freshly minted bumper stickers reading: “A Dead Trump is Better Than a Live Biden.” It’s all bets off when a dead Donald Trump and a dead Kim Jong-un are spotted together on a park bench playing rock paper scissors.
In the end, a deceased Trump with some timely Russian assistance and the usual adoring low-information brain dead American masses might narrowly win or lose a tight electoral race, much like the marginally alive Trump will. That same deceased Trump may claim victory prematurely, throw out millions of late-arriving mailed-in ballots, and refuse to have newly elected Democrat senators sworn in. The ensuing constitutional crisis will proceed as scheduled entirely without regard for whether Donald John Trump’s Krebs cycle is up and running.
As far as the long term fate of Trump’s cadaver is concerned, there is much historical precedence. Horrific, demonic, culturally suicidal ideas tend to way outlive their corporeal hosts. Trump the Stiff will live for decades if not centuries in that nebulous netherworld still inhabited by Nazi perpetrators playing backgammon in Argentina and by Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who many months after his earthly demise was brought to life every Saturday night by Chevy Chase declaring that the general was still dead.
Leaders and tyrants come and go. Over the long haul, the real difference between life and death is the legacy left to one’s country and planet. As in the case of the Roman Empire, Germany, Spain, Japan, Russia, and now inevitably the United States of America, the only relevant question of morbidity is in relation to democracy.
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