Election 2020

Trump’s October Surprise

What if Donald Trump believes he’s going to lose in the fall? He might just play the wildest card in all of human history.

Bryce Zabel
Point of Contact

--

The “October Surprise” is a deliberately created or timed news event that is intended to influence the outcome of a presidential election. October gets the naming rights because the date for national elections is in early November. The idea is to disrupt the flow of the campaign significantly enough and close enough to the election to shatter the existing electoral dynamics.

Article updated lightly on October 12, 2020.

He has his seats filled again. Now what?

Donald Trump, knowing he’d lose if the election was held today, wants one of those October Surprises so he can beat Biden over the head with it.

He’s looking for the latest bright, shiny object to get his attention in a growing wave of bright, shiny objects that everyone from the U.S. Navy to his own son seem to be talking about.

He knows both of the Clintons were into this issue and wanted to break the news to the world. In President Trump’s mind, it’s probably worth doing just for the sheer joy he’d get thinking about Bill and Hillary not getting any credit at all when it happens on his watch.

Besides, every time he has said a word about this subject, it’s generated headlines. Writers and journalists spend days and weeks analyzing what he meant. He doesn’t have to Tweet to amplify this message, it spreads more efficiently than Covid.

He likes the attention. His pal, Tucker Carlson, says this is a good issue and that he should consider using it if he needs to.

We all know that Donald Trump is just disruptive enough to do it.

And by “do it,” we mean throw the entire UFO issue into the upcoming presidential election at the last minute in a wild attempt to deflect, distract and scare enough people to win the election.

That’s right. Unidentified flying objects dumped smack into the middle of a presidential election by a sitting president who actually loves the idea of how disruptive it could be.

It sounds crazy. It’s not going to happen. Right? I mean, right?

What has he got to lose?

It’s the Ultimate Violation of a Norm

While it’s a long-shot, the facts on-the-ground say that it’s not impossible. Two key concepts drive this —

  • UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, have become a legit issue in the last three years. First, the New York Times covered a government UFO program on the front page and this summer wrote about the possibility of crash wreckage being real. Three Navy videos of UAP encounters were just confirmed as authentic by the DoD. The Senate Intelligence Committee just sent a bill to the full Senate that includes giving the U.S. intelligence community 180 days to come back with a report on what all of the various agencies have to say on the subject.

So, yes, the UFO/UAP thing has become a real deal.

  • Trump can’t help but notice that whenever he has spoken about UFO topics, he generates waves of headlines and coverage that makes him look like a guy in the know. That dynamic has given us Trump talking to George Stephanopoulus in the Oval Office about UFOs and Navy pilots, discussing the same with Tucker Carlson at the end of a lengthy interview, and even recently doing a Father’s Day interview with Don Jr. where the Commander-in-Chief of all of the United States Armed Forces said what he knew about Roswell was “very interesting.”

What Has He Got to Lose?

Most people assume that Trump knows very little about the UAP subject. Either he hasn’t asked for the big briefing or it hasn’t been offered, plausible deniability and all, and because the people who run deep programs like that see the president as a transient employee of the government who can’t necessarily be trusted.

Trump’s Falling Star | Image: Edel Rodriguez

But Trump knows just enough to be unpredictable. Even if all he does is hang out with his Fox friends Hannity and Carlson, he knows that people are talking about UFOs and taking them seriously and they think he knows more than he’s saying.

He’s seen the videos. They’re short so he could stay focused. He’s been told that they took place in Navy airspace.

He’s got the military angle talking point solid — these mystery objects are a threat to our national security.

Trump Becomes the Ultimate Anarchist

Now Trump, who rarely gives a written speech anyway, sure isn’t going to have one written up on this topic. That would be, in his mind, an open invitation to the committee of losers that surround him to screw it all up because they don’t understand media combat the way he does.

Trump probably wouldn’t weigh this decision more than five minutes, but the argument for action is simple enough. If there is a threat to us from ET or whoever, then other countries will rally around the U.S. because we have the best weapons, and the American people will keep him in office because they know he’ll be tougher than Biden.

If the election is going against Trump by the waning days of his campaign then, as the President so famously asks different interest groups, “What have you got to lose?”

New York Times | Image: Sam Hodgson

The Great Debates Could Get Strange

Even if Trump wants to play this card, there are obviously multiple ways it could happen in the endgame of a chaotic and polarizing campaign.

Here’s just one example: It’s Thursday, October 22 at Belmont University in Nashville. Just two weeks before the election.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden step on the debate stage for the first time since that disastrous (for Trump) first debate. That one was memorable for plain old strange zeitgeist weirdness, first with Trump’s constant yelling and interruptions, then his coronavirus diagnosis from his White House super-spreader event.

Remember, this last debate is a live event. No one can shut Trump up even if they want to.

Future History

Trump knows he’s going to say something, doesn’t want to over-rehearse, wants to play it by ear. At some point, he’s going to just come out and say it: aliens are real, UFOs are real, it could be bad, but he’s got it handled. This requires somebody with guts, you can’t let a wuss like Biden deal with these creatures.

Biden, hit with this broadside, may literally have no response. The subject will not have come up in debate prep. Yet there it will be. Just him and a crazy President on stage together, and the crazy President just said that he thinks we have an alien problem, and doesn’t think Biden is tough enough to handle it. What in the world will Joe do with that one?

Biden Considers | Image: Julie Winegard

It won’t be good, that’s for sure. And whatever he says will be played over and over and over again, just like Trump’s dramatic bombshell revelation.

Joe Biden, thinking on his feet about aliens. Just imagine that.

And They’re Off!

After the debate, while Biden virtual huddles with his advisors, Trump will give Tucker Carlson a sweetheart one-hour exclusive. By the end of it, we have the messiest Disclosure scenario imagined by anyone unfolding before us.

The only thing standing between this really happening and it all being a piece of fiction cooked up in my overactive imagination is the whim of Donald J. Trump, a man who has trained himself through Twitter to say whatever he wants whenever he thinks of it. I’m just saying…

Trump will paint himself as tough on aliens. He will paint Biden as a dangerous pacifist. The commercials that both campaigns had prepared long in advance to roll out against each other are worthless.

The Final Days of the 2020 Campaign

With a public battered by coronavirus, racial justice protests, and a sputtering economy, cable news blows up with scientists, celebrity abductees, whistleblowers, witnesses, pilots, and God knows who else, all trying to verify what exactly Trump has disclosed and to pitch their expertise to talk about whether it is true and what is being done about it.

Trump Makes It a National Security Election

In the end, in the shadow of Disclosure, the Trump campaign will be asking whose finger do you want on the button if there are ETs buzzing our aircraft carriers and missile silos. He’ll remind us how he can be very, very strong, the strongest president in all of history, he’s been told. The Biden campaign will be talking about keeping an open mind until we have more facts, and if there was ever a topic made for a history-altering gaffe, it would have to be this one. At some point, Joe will go philosophical and say something memorable for the history books.

Someone on the Biden team now should spend five minutes on a potential policy because you never know.

The Disclosure of UFO reality is such a disruptive act with the bonus that Trump loves, he’ll get to be front-stage center through it all. Better still, even if he loses, he gets to turn the hard part of the UAP reality-issue over to a successor to sort out the messy details.

After a simple blurb in a national debate, anything could happen. Anything.

Admittedly, this is not likely to be anyone’s first choice for how the world should handle such an important issue as learning that we are not alone but we are, after all, only human.

You heard it here first.

--

--

Bryce Zabel
Point of Contact

Writer/producer in features & TV. Creator, five primetime series. Ex: TV Academy CEO; CNN reporter; USC professor. Author of books about the Beatles, JFK, UFOs.