Already, Always Campaigning

It is now July of 2019 and so only sixteen months remain until the 2020 presidential election. To give an idea of just how far that is into the future, 16 months in the past puts us in March of 2018, which was incidentally when I moved across our great country, from Kings County to Alameda County. Things have changed.

Since today is the 1st of July, sixteen months ago this day was the 8th of March, 2018, according to the helpful folks at Research Maniacs, and per my journals the previous week I’d woken up in an airstream trailer in San Antonio, en route. (For the record, I have been keeping a daily journal since 2014, if anyone cares.) Whew!

So it seems to me that a lot can happen between now and the day when whomever is the Democratic nominee faces off against the most odious incumbent president my country has ever had. Yes, he is my president: My racist, sexist, disgusting asshole president. At this point my null hypothesis is he will be re-elected, 60/40 odds.

I have never hoped to be more wrong about anything, but that is how it looks at this point. Again, there remains quite a long time until the Day of Judgment, but it is worth recalling how what was assumed by all responsible pundits to be unthinkable became real. Nothing is inevitable, which suggests he could go down in defeat.

At the risk of cliché, anything could happen, but it does not look very good when you have no sense of consensus about who that nominee should be and it sometimes seems that only another major economic collapse would threaten the president’s chances. Well, Happy Fourth, my fellow citizens. It is still a republic, if we keep it.