Dispatches from the Mirror Universe

Democrat Donald Trump and Republican Dick Cheney each remain the only two presidential candidates that could possibly lose to the other

MIRROR UNIVERSE, D.C. — With just a few days before the election, this historically contentious presidential contest continues to heat up.

In some ways, this could almost have been predicted. The country has not in living memory been forced to choose between such intensely disliked candidates: a bombastic political neophyte who takes pleasure in energizing his base with outlandish behavior and wild promises, facing off against a career politician, a Washington insider seen as corrupt — even, to some, as literally the personification of evil.

It’s worth considering how we got to this point.

After eight years of watching an ineffectual George W. Bush struggle to accomplish anything of significance against the stonewall of a fully Democratic Congress, the prospect of four more years of the same under a President Cheney — a careerist Washington crony, from the current president’s own cabinet even — is out of the question for the leftmost half of the electorate, especially since they haven’t agreed with much of the president’s policy agenda since Day 1 (to say nothing, they hasten to add, of his constant ranch vacations in Texas, or his predilection for issuing controversial executive orders).

President Bush hasn’t had it easy, trying to navigate the country through two terms of economic upheaval and growing threats of jihadist terrorism. His job was made tougher still by congressional gridlock. Immense pushback from Senate Majority Leader Patrick Leahy (D-VT), House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Speaker of the House John Lewis (D-GA) sandbagged even Bush’s signature legislative efforts. With public confidence in Congress reaching historic lows and the government often at an impasse, the Democratic party leadership in the House and Senate has earned criticism even from members of their own Democratic base.

Into this mire of mistrust waded a record seventeen (!) Democratic presidential candidates, running the gamut from unlikely (known philanderer and butt-of-jokes Anthony Weiner), to improbable (widely-hated Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel), to unknown (mild-mannered Virginia senator Timothy Kaine), to inspiring (former presidential candidate Howard Dean, back at it again for another attempt), to perplexing (junior Illinois senator Barack Obama, who seemed to think that after only serving about a year in the Senate, he was qualified for the highest office in the land).

And, of course, to the left of them all, businessman and global brand unto himself Donald J. Trump.

The first man to somehow be both 100% capitalist and 100% socialist

On the face of it, Trump doesn’t seem that unlikely of a choice. He’s floated the idea of a presidential run before, including in 2000 with H. Ross Perot’s Reform Party. As a member of the New York society class he’s been a longtime friend and supporter of both Bill and Hillary Clinton; he’s a fixture on television with many connections in (big-dollar-Democratic-fundraising) Hollywood; and most peculiarly, he’s a Howard Stern regular who clearly isn’t afraid of being frank about sex (unusual in politicians, but weirdly, somehow refreshing). And Trump, unlike fringe candidates of the past, is a billionaire with quippy soundbites to burn and who doesn’t give a cold wet damn about being polite.

He was so outlandish at first that nobody took him seriously. (Maryland governor Martin O’Malley tried to correct him on a factual matter during the first primary debate, and earned himself the nickname “Martin O’Nerdy” for his troubles.) In a field crowded with policy wonks and career politicians, he calmly walked all the way to the left, staked out a policy fief far more extreme than his rivals, and somehow managed to bluster about it enough that he convinced voters he might actually be serious.

Free college for all? Just for starters.

Legally recognized polyamorous marriage? Don’t mind if we do.

A universal amnesty for undocumented immigrants? Naturally.

Income caps for the wealthiest 1%? Sure, why not, the advice of egghead economists be damned.

And of course, just listen to the crowds chanting at his rallies — “build them all, build them all” — to know what’s getting people really excited: his proposal to build a thousand state-of-the-art state-run hospitals all across the country, paid for by a new federal sales tax. The media keeps explaining how it makes zero sense as actual policy, but the crowds eat it up.

And why wouldn’t they? Largely young and educated, middle- and lower-class, they’re a generation afraid — afraid of being broke, of mounting debt, of getting sick without a job or health coverage, of being driven bankrupt by an unexpected illness and having their life fall apart because of it. Trump’s Federal Hospital Initiative would, in theory at least, completely eliminate one of the population’s greatest worries. (Never mind that it’s completely impossible to implement.)

Trump’s critics like to call him a con man, full of promises he not just can’t keep, but can’t understand that he can’t keep because he lacks anything resembling a coherent understanding of governance. Based on his statements in interviews and on the stump, it’s true that Trump may not quite be clear on the role of president in the American system, or what the separation of powers are, or how a bill becomes a law.

But none of that stopped him from rocketing to the lead in the Democratic primaries, driven by what Republicans might term desperate wish-fulfillment votes completely unmoored from something so pedestrian as logic. Even as his primary opponents struggled to keep up with him in taunts, mean-spirited tweets, and perhaps-not-quite-factual claims, they all (except for Rahm Emanuel) seemed weighed down by an inability to completely abandon reason. Actually knowing something about government, they found it too difficult to make up nonsense to make the crowd cheer louder. Trump, to the credit of his vast imagination, had no such limiter.

And so he won the primary, handily, and a man with no experience in the public sector whatsoever became the Democratic nominee for president.

The GOP’s struggle between pragmatism and vision

Unfortunately, the Republicans, seeing Donald Trump coming, couldn’t get behind a coherent opposition strategy. They wanted to hang onto the White House, of course, and the easiest way to do that seemed to be to nominate the current president’s VP, Dick Cheney, a party insider, man-sized safe full of skeletons and all, despite knowing he was widely hated and distrusted by literally half the country.

Probably more than half, since as it turned out, much of the Republican base didn’t trust an establishment candidate. They wanted someone they felt had integrity, someone who would take whatever George W. Bush was unable to get done and push it through by sheer force of persuasion. They found what they wanted in Texas senator Ted Cruz.

And when Cheney, the “electable” candidate, ultimately did go on to win the primary — squeaking out victories (in the most secular states) by the narrowest of margins — huge swaths of the GOP base felt betrayed. They had fought for who they saw as a principled candidate. They could clearly see the growing quasi-maniacal enthusiasm growing on the left for Donald Trump. They despaired for the chances of another Bush crony against a populist candidate who seemed to understand the frustrations of young people, women, and minorities. And they argued among themselves about whether or not they could hold their nose and vote for Cheney simply to keep Trump away from the White House.

There was no easy answer. Because when Dick Cheney accepted the Republican nomination, he became that rarest of political animals: a candidate so loathed that there was a real risk he might even lose to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, was a candidate so loathed that he might even lose to Dick Cheney.

Trump as the candidate of renewal

If you listen back to Trump’s stump speeches, starting from the early days of the primaries up through the present, after you clean all the blood from your ears you might notice that his message has evolved. His political instincts are like those of a dog following a scent trail: he sniffs around until he senses something promising— in his case, a cheer from the crowd — and then bounces around some more in that direction, searching out more positive feedback.

In this way he’s been able to hone a policy package that’s less a sensible theory of governance than it is a market-researched collection of cheer lines for the left. And luckily for the Democrats, most of them already believe that Republicans are illiterate morons, so no amount of fact-checking from the right seems to get any traction.

Republicans, especially Dick Cheney, like to point out that Trump is at heart probably a moderate, and they mean it as a pejorative. You’ve probably seen the famous picture of Trump pheasant hunting with Cheney on the Koch brothers’ private island; and, of course, he has long been friends with Rudy Giuliani, since the days he when was greasing the mayor’s palms to get building permits in Manhattan. Cheney stumps about Trump’s lack of integrity (without any shred of self-awareness, we might add), only to watch the accusations roll off Trump’s back as he either denies them, or explains how they prove he’s a genius — sometimes in the same breath. When Cheney charged in the first debate that Trump racially discriminated against blacks in his early apartment developments, Trump pointed the accusation back at Cheney in inimitable fashion: “I don’t discriminate against anyone except people who look like a hungry turtle about to steal some lettuce. I just don’t think they should be president, and I think everyone here knows exactly what I’m talking about.”

Trump will readily admit that over his long career as a businessman, he made friends with anyone he thought could help his properties or his brand succeed, and along the way he donated to any candidate he thought would help. He supported both Hillary Clinton in her run for Senate and George Pataki, a Republican, in his run for New York governor. In both cases he seems to have placed bets on horses that won.

It’s that sort of intuition that has many Democrats convinced that he’s the one to clean house in D.C. after the disastrous George W. Bush years. “Politics is super broken,” said one 21-year-old Wellesley student wearing Trump’s signature blue Make America Even Greater ball cap, “and we need some fresh perspectives from people who haven’t been career politicians and who don’t feel beholden to special interests.” Cheney, she thinks, is the candidate of “more of the same, and we don’t want more of the same. We want to counter the oppressive system with one of justice and, like Trump said in his acceptance speech, make America a safe space for everyone. We want to make America even greater.”

Trump’s coalition of the unwilling

If Trump’s inexperience is paradoxically his best qualification, according to at least that one first-time voter from Wellesley, the same inverse logic may not quite apply to his personal life.

More traditional Democrats, who initially supported Howard Dean, say, or Timothy Kaine, have only slowly warmed up to Donald Trump. “He’s a challenging personality,” said Barney Frank (D-MA), after declining to answer whether he’d endorse Trump in the primary. “Let me just say that I have no interest in voting for Dick Cheney.” Asked if this meant he would definitely vote for Trump on Election Day, Frank only said “I’m keeping careful watch for any way that he might earn my trust and my vote.”

FOX News and other conservative outlets have accused Trump of inappropriate behavior around women, of misusing funds from his charitable foundation for personal gain, of neglecting to pay contractors who worked on his buildings, and no end of other malfeasance stretching back decades. They compare Trump’s sordid (and on record in the tabloids) sexual past to that of another popular right-wing punching bag, Bill Clinton. Even Newt Gingrich, Clinton’s old nemesis from the nineties, popped back up on CNN to lambast Trump for being “a man of zero character, manifestly unfit to be elected dogcatcher,” to which Trump replied with a tweet: “Newt — got bored just listening to another very lame accusation from another washed-up politician. I understand if you’re jealous of my wife, many are!”

Asked to answer for Trump’s sins on the October day he finally offered up his endorsement, former candidate Anthony Weiner said “Democrats forgave Bill Clinton.” Then he corrected himself: “Really, they never got mad at him in the first place.”

And so, as the race has tightened, and a Cheney presidency looms ever more likely as a dispiriting possibility, at least a few Democrats are falling in line. Weiner, Emanuel, O’Malley, and Al Sharpton are among the primary candidates who lost to Trump and then eventually went on to endorse him. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) praised Trump for his willingness to treat progressive moon-shots as a stated campaign goals. “Anything you think is too far left, he’ll say it,” laughed Kucinich, in a hidden video released by the online group Gotcha!Media. “He’s being fed very questionable facts from out-there websites like Alternet and Democratic Underground, and he gets up there and says it like he’s coming down Mount Sinai and reading from stone tablets. And so of course college kids, poor people, they go for it. He’s up there saying things they all thought the grown-ups were too dumb to realize.” (Kucinich later clarified that he was speaking admirably of Trump.)

But after the release of the famous Access Hollywood hot mic tape, the discomfort of the Democratic party establishment became palpable. John Lewis, current Speaker of the House and universally regarded as a man of principle, rebuked Trump in a blistering speech from the House floor, calling him “not a Christian, not a statesman, not an honest man, and not a good man.” Bernard Sanders (I-VT), a self-proclaimed democratic socialist and the Senate’s lone independent, called Trump “a snake oil salesman telling Democrats anything they want to hear, just so he can get elected. He has no idea what these policies are and what they mean. He has not learned about the history of progressive politics and the reasons we believe these things are good things for the country. And I’m saying that as a person who would like to see many of those policies enacted — but I will not fool myself into thinking that Donald Trump will be able to execute his promises if he actually makes it, G-d forbid, to the Oval Office. I have my doubts if he can even operate the Oval Office doorknob.”

It comes down, unfortunately, to a binary choice

Dick Cheney has legions of haters — and even his supporters often admit there are things about him, and the governing body he represents, that they find unpalatable. The Bush White House still hasn’t offered up a convincing story explaining its “loss” of 22 million official emails between 2003 and 2009. There are persistent accusations that Cheney himself directly profited, through Halliburton, on arms sales generated by the prosecution of the Iraq War. Social media is filled with memes of him as Darth Vader.

And, of course, he once shot a man in the face on a hunting trip. (“If only that had been Donald Trump,” reads one popular meme image.)

Many Democrats and independents who came out in force for Howard Dean during the primaries aren’t happy with the prospect of “having to” cast a vote for Trump simply to forestall a possible Cheney presidency — or voting for Cheney for the opposite reason. Still others believe that even though it’d be unpleasant, a Cheney presidency, unlike a Trump presidency, would at least be survivable.

But to millennials, Cheney represents an unfathomable, unspeakable evil working actively against the interests of the United States, and Trump represents a wrecking ball crashing through the edifices that erected and enabled that evil. His rough edges, to them, are the entire point.

“He’s not running for pope. You don’t send a good person to raise hell,” said a student at a UC Berkeley rally for Trump, who wore a T-shirt portraying Trump in the famous Che Guevara pose. “You send The Hound. You send a person who says ‘Give me the gun and avert your eyes.’ You got to fight the powers of Mount Doom, you send Saruman, you know?”

When it was pointed out that it was in fact young Frodo, pure of heart, who took the One Ring to Mount Doom, the student shook his head. “I don’t think that’s right,” he said. “That’s not the way Trump explained the story.”