As the outcome of the US election hangs in the balance, it’s time to ask an important question. And I’m not talking about the one we’re all asking, about whether the pollsters arrived at their projections by throwing darts at red and blue balloons or whether they just used a Ouija board and massive amounts of weed.
No, I’m talking about the big one, that one that might get answered in the next few days: if things go against Trump, and he really is about to leave the White House, will he leave in a limo, an ambulance, or a laundry basket in the back of a van?
Of course, it’s very possible that he’s staying on. At the time of writing, the race was still twisting in the breeze, dangling off a few hundred thousand mail-in votes from key states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If he comes out ahead, then very little will change at the White House, including, I imagine, the new wall that has been hastily erected around the property to keep protesters out and to make sure Trump doesn’t have to see anyone who dislikes him.
If, however, the American people have decided to send him back to private life and his empire of debt-fuelled kitsch, then we may be about to see sights that are very new indeed.
Over the past four years, Trump has lowered every bar he’s bumped into, but early on Wednesday morning he boldly went where not even he on his grubbiest day had gone before, proclaiming to the world that he had “frankly” won the election, long before the finally tally was even close.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that Trump will strap Ivanka to himself as a human shield and go out in a blaze of gunfire and orange blusher.
It was the sort of thing you might expect from the Glorious Leaders of flyblown backwaters, the kind who wear aviator shades indoors and who address their nation every evening at 6pm, just after the daily witchcraft report, from atop an ivory throne flanked by models holding gold-plated AK-47s.
But there it was, explicit misinformation designed to cast doubt on a legitimate outcome, coming from the leader of the free world.
Vladimir must be so proud.
Again, I must stress than all of this might be moot. But if Trump is about to lose, then it’s possible that we’re about to witness not so much a political handover as the sort of thing that happens when a cult leader called The Sacred Banana is asked by police negotiators to come out of his bunker.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that Trump will strap Ivanka to himself as a human shield and go out in a blaze of gunfire and orange blusher. Trump barely wanted to be president, and he certainly won’t take up arms to stay president.
But if he loses, I suspect we’re about to see the Republican party plumb such depths of political and judicial skulduggery that they will make Machiavelli look like Honest Abe Lincoln. There might not be guns involved, but, to paraphrase Charlton Heston and the NRA, the Democrats will have to drag the presidency out of Trump’s cold, tiny hands.
So which will it be? A limo, allowing him one last, sombre wave to the 6% of Washingtonians who voted for him? An ambulance, as the strain gets too much and paramedics frantically try to pump him full of Big Macs? Or will it be where it should be: hiding amid America’s dirty laundry, hoping to get to safety as fast as possible so he can start laundering himself, his empire and his legacy, and telling us that no president in history has hidden in laundry better than him?
Time will tell.
