Hahahah, yes.
W h e n I t A l l F a l l s D o w n
2017-2021:
Hillary Clinton (Democratic)
2016 (with Tim Kaine) def. Donald J. Trump (Republican)
When all is said and done, Hillary Clinton has been remembered by history by the ironic plaudits bestowed upon her: the most qualified Presidential candidate in history and the woman who broke the highest and hardest glass ceiling, left office as perhaps the most hated President in American history. Yet hated as she was from the beginning, it was not obvious in 2017 that this would be the fate of the Clinton legacy. Certainly there were already stirrings when, reneging on earlier promises, Clinton approved of an only moderately watered-down version of the TPP in early 2017, or when she intensified the diplomatic standoff between the United States and Russia, but with a Democratic house, and a nominal majority in the Senate with Vice President Kaine's intervention, the first 100 days of the Clinton Presidency shaped out as expected: boring, technocratic, but essentially effective. In October any chance of that stability being parlayed into a second term and a place in the history books as one of history's trailblazers was torpedoed by Ronan Farrow's revelation of the crimes of Harvey Weinstein. With the 'MeToo' movement picking up steam over the following months, President Clinton's popularity initially soared: even the resignation of Clinton cheerleader Al Franken, with Clinton's tacit encouragement, only served to make the case for a woman in the White House stronger. That was, until difficult questions began to be asked about her husband, his relationship with Monica Lewinski, and his friendship with a certain controversial New York financier, as well as the Clintons' previously well-publicised connection to Harvey Weinstein. Such rumours would churn along throughout 2018, and with Clinton's popularity steadily falling from its highpoint in October-December 2017, with widespread discontent with Clinton's neoliberal policies from both the left and the right and a fair degree of voter suppression, the Republicans would win back both the House and the Senate in a landslide in 2018.
Then the damn burst. In 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was rearrested on charges relating to sex trafficking, and the entire Clinton house of cards began to collapse. With calls for Bill Clinton to be arrested, a surge in support for the mysterious and cult-like 'QAnon' movement, and more and more of the Democratic donor class under fire by the MeToo and Progressive movements, President Clinton was boxed in. So unpopular that, by October 2019, she was seriously considering not running for a second term, Hillary would find herself faced with the greatest crisis of her life as the Coronavirus Pandemic ravaged America. With all the petty demagogues of the right screaming tirade after tirade on television, Talk radio, and "Epstein truther" podcasts (as well as televised primary debates), and with her pandemic mitigation measures criticised at once as insufficient and as overly authoritarian, Clinton seemed surprisingly weak against a quixotic primary challenge from the left - by the convention, it was clear that she had already lost. Facing the spectacle of both Howie Hawkins (at one point polling at 10%) and Kanye West joining her puckish Republican rival in taunting her during the Presidential debates, Clinton sat them out, only adding to the appearance that she was aloof, out of touch, and unprepared to face the voters. And by November, it was over. A humiliating landslide defeat, the loss of the 'Blue Wall' (a near miss as early as 2016), and the utter tarnishing of her reputation all saw America's first female President leave office less under a cloud than a raging storm.
Today, most historians chart the Clinton Presidency as the beginning of the end. The bright liberal hope of the early 21st-century had seemingly been exposed, to many, as a liar, a crook, and potentially an accessory to a vast conspiracy of pedophiles operating at the highest levels of American society (the QAnon cult, initially based largely around the interpretation of "esoteric" meaning in Clinton's fumbling responses would grow to be the fourth largest sect in America by the 2040s). As Steve Bannon, a former Trump surrogate then entering the White House as an advisor to Trump's more boisterously charismatic heir, proclaimed on FOX on the morning of innauguration day, "The era of American carnage ha[d] begun!"
2021-2029:
Tucker Carlson (Republican)
2020 (with Joni Ernst) def. Hillary Clinton (Democratic), Howie Hawkins (Green-Left 2020), Kanye West (Independent)
2024 (with Joni Ernst) def. Kamala Harris (Democratic), Mark Rufallo (Greens '24: the party of the Left)
By the time he strutted into the White House, escorted by an unofficial honour guard of Oathkeepers and Proud Boys, the bow-tied bard of American populism had come along way from Crossfire. But then, so had the American body politic. Even four years previously, with Hillary Clinton's resounding defeat of Donald Trump, it had seemed that the American people had proven their democratic maturity, rejecting inexperienced demagoguery in favour of expertise and enlightenment - or at least that was the consensus amongst the country's coastal elites. In reality, even before Clinton's election, the total deterioration of American society had already begun. By 2020, with the nation drenched in wildfires, ravaged by plague, and gripped by violence between the far-right supporters of Carlson and left-wing counter-protestors, it was clear that American democracy was close to its breaking point. Indeed, rioting which had begun towards the middle of 2020 after an eruption of new BLM protests, had metamorphosed into a general wave of discontent about Clinton's forever wars, border detention centres, and her deleterious neoliberal policies - by November, these riots had grown close to a quiet civil war. Promising a return to law and order, and running on the Trump policy playbook with none of the declassé mannerisms, Carlson won back the terrified white suburban 'moderate' vote for the GOP, and ushered in a grinning preppy populism.
The Carson years were not easy, and the economy never recovered from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, which dragged on into the early months of 2022, before a mixture of growing herd immunity, and the gradual roll-out of a vaccine stemmed the tide. President Carson's new Industrial Strategy, his trade war with China, and a moderate increase in welfare spending won support from the GOP's new blue collar base, and from some begrudging Democrats, but alienated the donor class and much of his own party, barely sated by new socially conservative strategies; a ramped up war on drugs, more stringent domestic anti-terrorism measures, a strict clamp-down on illegal immigration and, with a huge GOP majority in congress, a border wall. But despite the lean years of the early 2020s, by 2024, as Kamala Harris dragged her way to the top of the bloody pile of Democratic candidates over a defeated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, Tim Kaine, and Gavin Newsom, it seemed unquestionable that Carlson would win a second term. The previous 12 years of Democratic rule had brought America to the breaking point - and if that wasn't enough, renewed political violence (stoked by the President's supporters but framed as Antifa led domestic terrorism by the administration) and blatant GOP gerrymandering would do the trick. Four years after entering the Oval Office, with Mark Ruffalo winning a stunning 5% of the vote for a combined Green-Socialist ticket and splitting the left vote, Tucker was re-elected.
2025-2029 would be even harder than the four years which had come before. In Carlson's America, for all the populist rhetoric, a certain kind of elite was still very much on top: clashes with Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter saw monopolies broken, but their successor companies only enriched shareholders in the long-term, whilst for the ruthless, the return of the American manufacturing industry - and a loosening of domestic labour laws - created a new industrial Wild West where fortunes were won. Racial animus was at an all time high as black, hispanic, Jewish, and any other minority Americans were all blamed for the continuing stagnation of Americans' standard of living. Violence, at least, did not rule the streets, but the "civil peace" won by the Carlson administration was the peace of a defeated people. Yet still the Democrats flailed. Still associated with the unsavoury collapse of the Clinton administration, with hundreds of thousands of Coronavirus deaths, a near war with Russia, a collapsed economy, demonised as the "party of the pedos" by the great prophet Q and the right-wing media, and divided by a militant left and flaming establishment, the Democratic Party was near universally despised.
But out of electoral chaos emerged a man with a calling - a calling from God. At first he was a joke: a rapper, running for President? But like Trump riding down the golden escalator, he picked up momentum, drawing in elements of the left, the religious right, and millions of Americans just desperate for redemption. Even still, as he climbed in the polls to five, then ten, then fifteen, then twenty percent, no one thought he could do it. And then came the Carson emails: chains of correspondence between the President and his allies in which he derided ordinary Americans as a "mob" and "barely deserving of sterilisation" and at times openly flirted with white nationalism and bringing in the far-right paramilitaries as an organ of the state. This alone still couldn't kill Vice President Ernst's run for the White House, but with the country slouching into a new recession by July, it was clear the GOP was on the way out. Proclaimed the nominee of his new party to almost godlike acclamation, the ultimate outsider declared a "new dawn" for America. As brother killed brother in the streets, the economy reached new lows, the EU drifted out of the American orbit, China surpassed the country by all GDP metrics, and Russia began its inexorable slide into collapse, the American people decided that
anything was better than this - even a guy who picked his own reality TV star wife as his running mate. And so on one misty day in November, narrowly, barely feasibly, and largely thanks to the people of California's rejection of the Governor known only for the horrors of the wildfires, Kanye West won a plurality of the vote, and with it the White House.
2029-2033:
Kanye West (Dawn)
2028 (with Kim Kardashian West) def. Joni Ernst (Republican), Gavin Newsom (Democratic)
As it turned out, electing a mentally ill rapper to the Presidency, was not a recipe for political success. It was not simply that both the President and Vice President were totally unsuited for the office, or that they had almost no support in Congress, or that their policy platform was almost totally denuded of actual policies which hindered the West administration - the greatest of all of its issues was that the President simply did not care about executing the office to which he had been elected. The great issue was not, as the American elite grumbled, the President wouldn't wear a suit even to the inauguration, but that idiosyncrasies aside, it was clear to all that the President had little interest in governing whatsoever. Almost no policies came out of the Oval Office, and as the economy imploded, it was unclear that the President would even sign a desperate bipartisan stimulus package. A barely filled cabinet, and almost empty administrative agencies saw the gradual crumbling of the American administrative state, already gutted for decades by underfunding, causing countless man-made and avoidable natural disasters. But in the end, the President rose to the occasion... in his own way. If erratic, President West did some good work: his criminal justice reforms were lauded, and if his plans to tackle the opioid epidemic were often not exactly coherent, greater spending on drug rehabilitation, and a serious effort to take on the Sacklers (alongside corporate power more generally) won real plaudits.
But it was an uphill battle nevertheless, and attempts to ban abortion and the death penalty, and reinstate school prayer alienated as many voters as they won. Education reform was similarly hampered by Congress, whilst condemnation of vaccines as "the mark of the beast" were met with disdain by a people barely saved by the Covid-19 vaccine. But for many, the final straw was the pardoning of Chicago gang leader Larry Hoover. By the end of 2031, the polls had resolutely turned against the President. President West's last great policy attempt, slashing what remained of the American welfare state as a "Democratic plantation", found near total condemnation, and as new populist insurgencies in the Democratic and Republican primaries captured the nation's heart, the first family made the decision that, although the President would run to save some face, he would not campaign actively. President West's legacy remains complex and divisive, attracting a mixture of pity, scorn, and loathing. What has soured his legacy most of all, however, was what came next. The farce that came before a great tragedy, the clusterfuck of the West administration was a brief lapse in the cold civil war that had reigned since 2016 (if only out of exhaustion and confusion about the terms of battle) - election season '28 saw the resurgence of mass political violence, and the beginning of American Caesarism.
2033-
0000: Madison Cawthorn (Republican)
2032 (with Marco Rubio) def. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democratic), Kanye West (Dawn) [did not actively campaign]
2036 (with Marco Rubio) def. Conor Lamb (Democratic), Julia Salazar (Left Opposition), Liz Cheney (Independent)
2040 (with Marjorie Green) def. Keisha Lance Bottoms (Democratic), Lee Carter (Left Opposition), George P. Bush (Conservative)
Madison Cawthorn's America is not the America of the Founders anymore. The handsome populist President rules effectively as a dictator, his opponents cowed through violence, and the private sector tamed through corporatism not seen since FDR. A divided opposition has only nominally contested Presidential elections since the blatantly rigged election of 2036 (though Cawthorn remains genuinely popular with ordinary Americans), and even internal critics like former Vice President Rubio have faced consequences for their dissent over the violation of basic democratic norms, and the President's refusal to step aside. With the left divided between moderates and the supporters of the jailed Senator Ocasio-Cortez, and former Republicans alienated by Cawthorn's increasingly naked authoritarianism, and willingness to play brinkmanship with the EU in the Arctic Circle refusing to work with the left, any cohesive political opposition seems impossible. Indeed, it seems that the only threat to the President's authority may come from within: despite his efforts to tame the QAnon movement (including appointing Vice President Green), its followers are increasingly power-hungry. Whilst the military, the elite, and the big corporations back the President for now, his American Putinism is precarious: the reprieve from political chaos and the all-but civil war which engulfed the nation in his first year in office could shatter at any moment. If it does, what remains of the American experiment may finally come to an end...
(This was an attempt at a sort of Summer 2020-punk by way of a Hillary victory world, and to show that far from being funny and zany, a Kanye Presidency would probably just be really sad, really shitty, a bit pathetic, and ultimately tragic for anyone living through it).