The fun thing about Donald Trum—

Whoa, whoa, time out. We need to establish some ground rules here. There’s a giant meteor hurtling toward Earth, on course to destroy us all at, like, midnight. All attempts to dislodge it from its path — lasers, nuclear-powered space farts, distracting it with a seductive meteor circling Venus — have failed. Humanity is doomed.

What do we do on the final day of our collective existence?

We fuck like bunnies, of course. No way we’re not enjoying the last moment left us.

So let us grant that a year from now we could all be eating cockroaches while hiding from the zombies that were unleashed when President Trump demanded that The Wall be painted with that cool new virus in the CDC vaults. This would be, we can all agree, a Bad Thing.

Meanwhile, let’s all enjoy Life As We’ve Known It while we can, by entertaining amusing hypotheticals that soon enough will be as meaningless as human attempts at civilization.

Cool? Cool.

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Okay, no, not Socks. For one, Socks is, uh — are the children upstairs? — dead. Carrying around the desiccated husk of the former First Cat is probably bad optics.

And even a Reanimated Socks wouldn’t test well in focus groups. Cat Lady vibes, for one. And, more broadly (oops! sorry), feminine vibes. Dogs are Manly. The American public approves of Manly Presidential Critters, which is why Bubba got Buddy, whom nobody remembers, because Buddy was a Usurper of Socks’ rightful throne.

No offense, Buddy, but you were just a dog. Socks owned the joint, as cats do.

Anyway: Hillary could use a cat, because being around a cat would bring out some humanity in her, which she sorely lacks. Unless it was one of those Bond Villain white cats, which it probably would be, so never mind, sorry to bring it up.

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Everything we know about American politics we learned thirty-five years ago.

It was the night of the Reagan-Carter debate, the only one before the 1980 election. Like all good liberals living in good liberal college towns, we had spent the previous months incredulous that Reagan was even in the race. We had heartily agreed with George (pre-HW) Bush, who, in the last honest statement he ever made in public life, called Reagan’s proposals “voodoo economics”.

Every criticism that everyone had about Ronald Reagan was true. And, as we were to learn that night, none of it mattered.

You had to be there, watching how Jimmy Carter was powerless against a confident fusillade of ignorance and lies, how “substance” was irrelevant against a supremely self-possessed delivery. Americans wanted to hear what Reagan was saying, see how Reagan was saying it, wanted it so badly they didn’t care about anything else.

That night, we knew Reagan would win the election. And we knew why: Americans love being lied to.

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