Dateline Jacksonville
A report from the future, when Trump just won't leave
There was some news a little bit ago that Donald Trump said he wouldn’t not go to Joe Biden’s inauguration. That’s not surprising or even the whole story. The truth, as Elie Jacobs reports from the future, is that he is going to counter program the inauguration by holding his own rally in Jacksonville, Florida, and announce that he’s running in 2024. On his first day as a private citizen again, Trump’s going full Florida Man.
by Elie Jacobs
JACKSONVILLE, FL January 20, 2021
Former President Donald J. Trump, whose term in office came to a close at noon today, held a rally at TIAA Bank Field to announce his plans to seek his former office in the 2024 election. Trump’s plans to “counter program the inauguration,” as one aide put it, took place while Joseph R. Biden III was sworn in as president. This was, like many things that transpired under the Trump presidency, unprecedented.
Mr. Trump’s intention to run for another term had been telegraphed since before his loss in the general election to Biden. After first mouthing public utterances of support for Trump’s right to free expression, Republicans, led unexpectedly by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), began publicly pleaded with Trump and his advisors to delay his announcement until at least the Spring as the inauguration drew closer.
With Trump in the race, the Republican Party is essentially frozen for the next four years. Former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former United Nations Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, all of whom were expected to seek the presidency will be all but locked out as their former boss continues to dominate the party. Some half dozen other potential candidates will likewise be in limbo. “There’s some level of irony that these people sucked up their pride and ignored their morals for the last four years in the hope of being able to run in 2024 and now they’re all stuck in a giant orange shadow,” said Tim Archibald, a Republican consultant.
Other possible contenders include several governors such as Maryland’s Larry Hogan, South Dakota’s Kristi Noem and Florida’s Ron DeSantis.
“This election was stolen from me – from us,” shouted Trump, wearing one of his new “Make America Great Again Again” hats. Without factual basis or legal support, Trump charged that not just the dead but the undead were wrong to vote for Biden.
“They say dead people voted. Dead people! Can you believe it? Why wouldn’t dead people vote for me? Zombies love me. You know who’s a zombie? Joe Biden. Zombie Joe has been dead for 10 years. I know so. If you look closely, you can see him right after Rick shoots Shane in Walking Dead. Great show. I never miss it. You know what I don’t miss? That Barbara Streisand. Ugly and untalented as they come. She must have gotten famous the old-fashioned way. I guess I’m not supposed to say that anymore. The politically correct leftist don’t want you saying things like that anymore. You know who’s a socialist? Erika Eleniak. Saw her once at Studio 54, we had a nice chat and she was, you know, you could tell, she was very interested. But I was with my beautiful daughter, so ya know, I couldn’t. I couldn’t get there,” said the now-former president.
Trump raised, for the first time, that artificial intelligence was behind the electoral theft, which at least had the virtues of originality, if not truth.
“I hear they were trying to deliver ballots by drones, but the drones were piloted by immigrants and built in Venezulu (sic) or Brazil, maybe China. We just don’t know,” said Trump.
Raucous boos greeted every mention of Trump’s enemies. Trump concluded with an extended conspiracy theory about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, Hunter Biden’s association with Burisma (which Trump repeatedly referred to as ‘Birsuma’), and some sort of cabal made up by French President Emanuel Macron, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomanei and Jeff Ament, the bassist for the Seattle-based rock band, Pearl Jam, prompting the band’s singer, Eddie Vedder, to tweet, “It’s true. All of it,” itself apparently a reference to a scene in a recent movie in the Star Wars franchise.
The crowd, estimated at 20,000 and almost entirely unmasked, lined up in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Many attendees refused to speak to media or identify themselves “for fear of being targeted by AOC and the Antifa death squads Loomer warned us about,” as one attendee put it. Several signs proclaimed “Three Time Trump.”
“Of course, we’re here. We would do anything for President Trump. He loves us and we love him until death do us part. Our death, obviously, he’ll never die. America has never had a better president,” said a 42-year-old woman named Karen who refused to provide her last name. Her husband - who refused to provide either name, quickly cut in to declare, “Trump won this election. Ballots were lost and stolen and miscounted. Sleepy Joe is not the legal president and we’ll know how evil he is because of the laptop.”
Trump leaves office $1 billion in debt, with some $400 million of that guaranteed personally, and faces at least 30 investigations of which a third are federal criminal investigations. With nearly 73% of the country disapproving of him personally, Trump has spoken privately that he expects to find himself under additional investigations, indictments and financial trouble. Deutsche Bank, which became his primary lender after most of Wall Street ceased doing business with him decades ago, has reportedly been looking to unload the debt. It is unknown to whom Trump owes the money that he has personally guaranteed. “You have to assume he owes significant amounts of money to Russians, Chinese and non-state unsavory actors,” one financial analyst suggested.
Leaving office with well over 90% approval ratings within the Republican Party, Trump is a likely frontrunner for the nomination four years hence. Trump will be 78 years old on election day 2024, and the White House physician continues to claim Trump is in good health and at 6’3” a reasonable 240 pounds.
This view is not widely shared in the medical community. Said Dr. Kristin Albertson, head of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai, said she has never examined the former president, “But given what I can see with my own eyes, every day really is a blessing for him.” Albertson noted Trump’s medieval belief that humans are born with a finite amount of energy and that people die when they run out of energy, a view now only in popular circulation on certain subreddits and Joe Rogan’s podcast.
There had been fears that Trump was a flightrisk. Now that he is staying for the foreseeable future, the intelligence community fears of Trump posing a counter intelligence threat could come to fruition.
“One of the first things you learn in tradecraft is to identify sources who are susceptible to MICE,” Joe Kilman, a longtime member of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Clandestine Services said, referring to the acronym for Money, Ideology, Compromise and Ego. “Trump is maybe the most blatant example of a high-level target who could be coaxed into spilling the beans.”
Others in the intelligence community suggested Trump may pose less of a problem.
“We’ve never been certain that he’s literate and if he is, what level of comprehension he possesses. Plus, it’s not like he paid attention to anything over the last four years, so he may not know anything to divulge,” said Michelle Groten, a former intelligence officer.
Trump was introduced by Rep. Matt Gaetz (FL-1), Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his eldest son, Don Jr., who is still trying to get that hug.
Trump has not announced his campaign team, but many of the people who helped him win in 2016 and run in 2020 were not in attendance. Most noticeably, his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, who flew to Israel earlier this morning. Former First Lady, Melania Trump has not been seen in public in several weeks. It is believed she may have flown to her family home in Novo Mesto, Slovenia.
Brad Parscale faces money laundering and fraud charges. Cory Lewandowski faces charges of lying in court. Campaign manager Bill Stepien has not been seen since the end of November. Sean Spicer is recovering after a devastating knee injury during what he called “intense training for a reboot of a game show about musical chairs called Oh Sit!” Trump favorite Hope Hicks has signed on as president of TRUMP TV, the former president’s online news network, launched to compete with FOX News. The streaming network has signed Sean Hannity and Trish Regan. It is expected Tucker Carlson, once he returns from in rehab, will also join the nascent service.
Former Acting FBI Director Rudy Giuliani, who also served as Trump’s personal attorney and led the Trump campaign’s meritless legal challenge, was unreachable for comment and his whereabouts remain unknown. According to eyewitnesses, Giuliani left the country last night, after learning he was to be indicted for multiple as-yet-unannounced crimes. Surprising most observers, Trump had not issued Giuliani the same blanket immunity he gave to Stephen Miller and to Kushner. Giuliani’s weeks-long role as acting FBI Director, following Trump’s firing of Christopher Wray has been described by senior Justice Officials as “rocky and primarily focused on the arrest or deportation of Sacha Baron Cohen.” According to White House aides, Trump’s refusal to grant immunity to the former Mayor had to do with a recent dinner he and Trump shared. The aide, who asked to remain anonymous, remarked, “He knows what he did.” The aide declined comment on rumors that Trump was enraged by Giuliani receiving two scoops of ice cream at the end of their meal.
Trump’s enduring popularity with at least a fifth of the American population is not easy to understand. William Swann, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, suggests it has to do with identity fusion. A process he describes as when followers become so fused to a leader they seem “tied to them in such a way that things are true because the leader said them.”
The psychologist Caitlin Van Moore put it more simply. “There is a segment of the population who are never disappointed in the products they buy however large the failure of a pill to make a penis larger or beverage to immediately cure arthritis. Snake oil salesmen have been around a longtime, it’s likely the world’s third oldest profession. It’s the promise of all upside with no sacrifice and that is the world Donald Trump has promised people for the last half decade.”
Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, diagnosed the core of Trump’s “political project” as “the reassertion of dominance over the historically dominated by the historically dominant.”
As Donald John Trump begins his third run for the White House, one member of The Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump fundraising program formed by several high-level “never Trumpers,” said “It’s sort of remarkable, that with the regulatory rollbacks, tax cuts, and recreation of the entire judiciary, he should be have supplanted Ronald Reagan in the pantheon of the Republican Party. Yet, he only has 90% approval, which we know we can cut to 87% if we can raise another $50-$60 million dollars.”
Reporting was contributed by Frank Spring in Albuquerque and Michael Connelly in Philadelphia. Elie Jacobs is a communications consultant who recently moved to New Jersey. He wrote last May about being quarantined with his wife and toilet-training daughter in a New York apartment in “Elie’s Day.” Follow him on Twitter at @ejstrategies.
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