100 Days
100 days. 14 weeks and 2 days. 2,400 hours.
That’s all the time we have left, as of this article’s publishing, until we decide what we want America’s future to look like.
In 100 days, it’ll be November 3rd. Election Day. Donald Trump will be trying to get re-elected; Joe Biden will be trying to stop him. Presumably. A lot can happen in 100 days.
The coronavirus has stolen so many things from us, and a sense of time is one of them. I can’t tell if these 100 days will feel like an eternity, or if they’ll pass in the blink of an eye.
In most respects, every day that Donald Trump is in charge during this volatile period in our history is a day wasted. A day we aren’t recovering. A day of more deaths from the coronavirus as it rages silently and uncontrollably. A day that Bill Barr’s unmarked troops can whisk protesters off the streets in the dead of night. This erratic, often authoritarian, behavior will make these last 100 days feel like a lifetime.
At the same time, and largely as a result of that behavior, nearly every day of the Trump presidency has been a rollercoaster filled with as many twists as an M. Night Shyamalan film. It feels like just yesterday that my state was going into lockdown, but, in reality, that was nearly 4 months ago. It’s been about 3 months since Bernie Sanders was an actual candidate for president. In this respect, these last 100 days will be over before we know it.
I should feel good about where the race for president stands. This has been arguably the worst stretch of polling for Trump in his political career, with Quinnipiac showing him down 15 points, 52–37, nationally. Monmouth’s latest poll shows him down 13 points in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. An NBC/WSJ poll had Biden taking the lead on the question of who voters think will handle the economy best. If you add in Trump’s recent meltdowns in the Rose Garden and South Lawn, I should feel on top of the world and confident.
But I don’t.
I don’t think anyone who lived through 2016 can feel those emotions anymore in regard to political campaigns. Sure, the national polling was correct, and state-by-state polling was not invested in as much as it is now, but I still can’t help but doubt.
The stars aligned perfectly for Trump last time. He was facing a historically unpopular candidate. We were coming off 8 years of a Democratic administration. He was considered an outsider. Pent-up racism was boiling over. Russia gave their support. And on and on and on…
Realistically, there is no way that can series of events can happen again, but that overwhelming sickness I felt on the morning after the 2016 election is seared into my mind so vividly that I can feel it now, as I write this. That feeling of disbelief, of not realizing the country I was living in, is why my brain will not let me feel any relief when there’s good polling for Joe Biden or when Trump’s mental deficiencies appear more and more frequently. That feeling taught me that we never truly know what our world will look like tomorrow, because it could all change in an instant.
100 days is enough time for Trump’s full-time fixer, part-time Attorney General, Bill Barr, to come up with some half-baked scheme to invalidate mail-in votes, or worse: the entire election. 100 days is enough time for the coronavirus, which has been spreading through the ranks in the White House, to reach Trump, who is in several high-risk groups. 100 days is enough time for Joe Biden to get dehydrated, causing him to stumble and fall, and allowing Trump to go on the offensive about Biden’s health. 100 days is enough for the dense and feeble-minded Ron Johnson, one of the senators from my home state, to announce that his committee discovered some “bombshell” evidence (that’s clearly fabricated) about Hunter Biden.
Conventional wisdom says being down this much in the polls, with this amount of time left, is practically a death sentence, but our collective “2016 PTSD” says otherwise. 100 days before the United States reported its first coronavirus case to the WHO on January 20th, 2020 (coincidentally, 3 years to the day since Donald Trump was sworn in as president), the date was October 12th, 2019. At that time, this coronavirus still only existed in bats, my Green Bay Packers were 4–1 after beating the Cowboys in Dallas, and public impeachment hearings against Trump were still more than a month away. Last time, everything broke in Trump’s favor, and we’ve recently been reminded just how much can happen in a short period of time. There’s still good reason to believe something dramatic will shift momentum back to Trump.
In short, the election is still a lifetime away, but it will still manage to sneak up on us. To steal from John Green, it’ll approach slowly at first, then all at once. There’s plenty of time for Trump to find ways to cheat, for Biden to make a mistake, or for the media to push a certain narrative because the drama of a close race gets more clicks.
But, this time, we know better. We are not passive observers. There are 100 days for the Lincoln Project to bombard Trump with ads that provoke his narcissism. 100 days for the members of “43 Alumni for Biden” to show that there is a bipartisan coalition backing Joe Biden. 100 days for us “regular people” to volunteer, register voters, contribute to campaigns financially, or do any of the other infinite small, yet meaningful, actions that can help ensure that on January 20th, 2021, Joe Biden is placing his hand on the Bible while Donald Trump watches on, helpless, as he becomes the newest “former president”.
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