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Okay, I admit it, I’ve been worried -- and no surprise there. In this world from hell, it’s not hard to worry about untold numbers of things going wrong. Let me, however, lay out my own large-scale version of worry about this America of ours. What if Joe Biden does win? The world -- at least the world I know and read and watch and talk to -- has one giant anxiety then: that Donald Trump will declare the election a “fake,” refuse to leave office, send the lawyers into the courts, the troops or the dreaded feds into the streets, and call out all those armed Trumpsters for support. You more or less know the scenario(s) yourself, I’m sure, and whether the U.S. military then would or would not decide to literally remove the president from office, it would indeed be a nightmare.

Still, something else has long been on my mind: not what Donald Trump could try to stop from happening, but what he could actually do between November 3rd and January 20, 2021. This is, after all, the head of an administration that has tried to roll back nearly 100 environmental regulations, turning this country into a potential hell on earth. His people, now undoubtedly fearing defeat, are already moving fast to make sure that the U.S. will, in the worst sense imaginable, remain Donald Trump’s land until that hell freezes over.

My worry: what, in those months, could The Donald do to ensure that, when Joe Biden sits at that desk in the Oval Office for the first time, he finds himself waist deep in you-know-what (including potentially a future Great Depression) that he and his crew might never be able to shovel themselves out of? With that in mind, I asked TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon to consider just what shape we might find ourselves in economically in the Biden moment (if it ever arrives). So get your shovel ready and dig in. Tom

So Trump Loses
What Happens Then?
By Rajan Menon

Donald Trump isn’t just inside the heads of his Trumpster base; he’s long been a consuming obsession among those yearning for his defeat in November. With barely more than a week to go before the election of our lifetime, those given to nail biting as a response to anxiety have by now gnawed ourselves down to the quick. And many have found other ways to manage (or mismanage) their apprehensions through compulsive rituals, which only ratchet up the angst of the moment, among them nonstop poll tracking, endless “what if” doomsday-scenario conversations with friends, and repeated refrigerator raids.

As one of those doomsday types, let me briefly suggest a few of the commonplace dystopian possibilities for November. Trump gets the majority of the votes cast in person on November 3rd. A Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of those supporting the president intend to vote that way on Election Day compared to 23% of Biden supporters; and a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll likewise revealed a sizable difference between Republicans and Democrats, though not as large. He does, however, lose handily after all mail-in and absentee ballots are counted. Once every ballot is finally tabulated, Biden prevails in the popular vote and ekes out a win in the Electoral College. The president, however, having convinced his faithful that voting by mail will result in industrial-scale fraud (unless he wins, of course), proclaims that he -- and “the American people” -- have been robbed by the establishment. On cue, outraged Trumpsters, some of them armed, take to the streets. Chaos, even violence, ensues. The president’s army of lawyers frenetically file court briefs contesting the election results and feverishly await a future Supreme Court decision, Mitch McConnell having helpfully rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to produce a 6-3 conservative majority (including three Trump-appointed Supremes) that will likely favor him in any disputed election case.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, they wear masks in hell. I didn’t know that myself until this year. On the best evidence around, however, like most Americans, I’m now in a circle of hell. I feel it particularly when I’m out on streets that are starting to chill down, not heat up, as winter arrives (however slowly) and a pandemic spike in Covid-19 cases heads our way, as hospitals fill, panic grows, and the president from... well, hell... assures us that, by hook or crook (crook being perhaps the operative word here), in 2021 he plans to oversee the greatest economic comeback in history. And mind you, I’m thinking about this nightmare while out walking New York City’s streets half-blind as my glasses, just above that mask of mine, fog up with my own breath. I have no doubt that it’s the fog of hell as, at my advanced age, my friends are increasingly isolated and alone in a city, a country, a world under siege.

And bad as it might have been, it didn’t truly have to be this way, not if we had a president who cared for any of us even faintly, even microcosmically like the way he cares for himself. That’s why it gives me special pleasure today to post a piece by that wonderful Chilean writer, whose work I first began editing and publishing in book form back in the 1980s, my old friend (and TomDispatch regular) Ariel Dorfman. I read my first Dorfman piece in 1969 in another life entirely when I was still a printer at the New England Free Press. It was a critique of Walt Disney he had co-authored, years ahead of its time, called How to Read Donald Duck and I’ve never forgotten it. Today, he does what so many of us, myself included, would love to do. He ushers “our” president, Donald Trump, through the gates of Hell. Join him for a moment, even if your glasses fog over. Tom

Sending Trump to Hell
Dante Alighieri Has Words for Donald J. Trump From the Other Side of Death
By Ariel Dorfman

For some time now, I’ve wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once caused grievous harm to their fellow humans.

The more Trump has abused his power and position in this world and the more he’s escaped any retribution for his crimes, the more obsessed I’ve become with visualizing ways for him to pay in some version of the afterlife.

As I mulled over the treatment he deserved for the havoc he continues to wreak on the lives of countless others here in the United States and across the globe, I turned almost automatically to the work of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose Divina Commedia minutely recreated in a verse called terza rima what awaited the readers of his time once they died. Dante (1265-1321) laid out his otherworldly landscape in three volumes -- Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso -- that have rightly been considered among the towering and influential literary achievements of humanity.

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Since I came of age (long ago in another century), I’ve never missed voting in a presidential election. And I guarantee you one thing -- barring a health disaster -- I won’t miss this one either. I’m not in need of one of the movingly committed people TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon writes about today who are going door to door in Nevada to get out the vote in an election that could quite literally be the difference between life and death, between a White House (mis)managed in such an authoritarian fashion, so corruptly, so blindly, so grotesquely that it guarantees a future hell on Earth and one that at least gives us a chance to begin to imagine and press for another, better world. In fact, I expect to vote in person, masked, well distanced, and early in a city (New York) and state that isn’t even in question this grim election year. No wonder Donald Trump said a bitter goodbye to my hometown and moved to Florida (with, unfortunately, an ever more dismal stop at the White House on his way down there).

But everywhere in this country, let’s hope that the urge to vote, to act as if this were still a genuine democracy (and not simply a democracy of the billionaires) worth saving, is as powerful as it is in the world Gordon has been inhabiting these last weeks. It matters beyond words. Tom

Guns, Germs, and Smoke
UNITE-HERE! Canvassers Take on Trump in Nevada
By Rebecca Gordon

“Look, folks, the air quality is in the red zone today. The EPA says that means people with lung or heart issues should avoid prolonged activity outdoors.”

That was J.R. de Vera, one of two directors of UNITE-HERE!’s independent expenditure campaign to elect Biden and Harris in Reno, Nevada. UNITE-HERE! is a union representing 300,000 workers in the hospitality industry -- that world of hotels and bars, restaurants and caterers. Ninety percent of its members are now laid off because of Trump’s bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic and many are glad for the chance to help get him out of the White House.

“So some of you will want to stay in your hotel rooms and make phone calls today,” JR continues. Fifty faces fall in the 50 little Zoom boxes on my laptop screen. Canvassers would much rather be talking to voters at their doors than calling them on a phone bank. Still, here in the burning, smoking West, the union is as committed to its own people’s health and safety as it is to dragging Donald Trump out of office. So, for many of them, phone calls it will be.

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I was never in the military myself, but I did spend time at a U.S. military base and I have to admit that it remains a treasured experience among my memories. Sometime in the 1950s, my father ran a gas station on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Now largely a public park, it was then an Army base with two forts on it, both built by the early nineteenth century. To tell you the truth, though, what I remember was a really large swimming pool and a movie theater where, for maybe a dime, I could see Buck Rogers serials and cowboy or war films to my heart’s content. Troops drilled on the island. Jeeps drove by. There was even a golf course (known as the “world’s crookedest”). Growing up on Manhattan Island, my Saturday ferry trips there with my dad were my thrilling introduction to the suburbs, military-style.

Here’s the thing, though. I never could have imagined then that such American bases -- approximately 800 significant ones (and many smaller outposts of various sorts) -- would by the twenty-first century be scattered in at least 80 countries and on every continent but Antarctica. As scholar Chalmers Johnson dubbed it back in 2004, this is America’s “empire of bases,” its “Baseworld.” Though not all of those bases have the amenities of Governors Island in the early 1950s and some, from Afghanistan to Kenya, are now embattled parts of America’s forever wars, here’s the strange thing: except at places like TomDispatch, they are normally neither acknowledged nor discussed here in any significant way. Over the years, millions of American troops and contractors have passed through them. Wars have been launched from them. And yet they are not debated in Congress or investigated by the media. They are simply a given, the no-need-to-notice bedrock of a highly militarized imperial power now visibly in trouble in a pandemicized world that, in my childhood, no one could have imagined.

TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich is one of the rare and memorable figures who, in his military life, spent time on embattled versions of just such bases in American war zones and came home to tell the tale. In his books, from The New American Militarism to The Age of Illusions, How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, he has repeatedly focused on the curious militarization of this country and its global policies and what that meant. Today, in the midst of an America that would have been inconceivable in the 1950s, while recommending a new book by a colleague, he wonders again why not just those bases but so many aspects of American policy abroad remain ill-considered and undiscussed even in the midst of the most embattled presidential campaign of our lifetimes. Tom

Reframing America’s Role in the World
The Specter of Isolationism
By Andrew Bacevich

The so-called Age of Trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books, especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within Donald Trump’s haphazard and continuously shifting orbit. With metronomic regularity, such gossipy volumes appear, make a splash, and almost as quickly vanish, leaving a mark no more lasting than a trout breaking the surface in a pond.

Remember when Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was all the rage? It’s now available in hardcover for $0.99 from online used booksellers. James Comey’s Higher Loyalty also sells for a penny less than a buck.

An additional forty-six cents will get you Omarosa Manigault Newman’s “insider’s account” of her short-lived tenure in that very White House. For the same price, you can acquire Sean Spicer’s memoir as Trump’s press secretary, Anthony Scaramucci’s rendering of his tumultuous 11-day stint as White House communications director, and Corey Lewandowski’s “inside story” of the 2016 presidential campaign.

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It might be deplorable of me to say so, but conspiracy theorizing at the highest level of government gave me one of the greatest gifts of my childhood, a TV set. I once wanted to write an essay called "Thank God for Senator McCarthy!" about that time. In April 1954, my mother, a theatrical and political caricaturist, was asked by the then-liberal New York Post to draw the Army-McCarthy Hearings, about to be shown on ABC. I was almost 10 years old and televisions were just beginning to enter significant numbers of American homes, but not mine. I had to go to a friend’s apartment to catch the Adventures of Superman and other must-sees of that moment, while begging my parents (then essentially broke) for a set of our own.

The Post must have purchased that black-and-white TV for her so she could cover those dramatic hearings. Their focus: charges lodged against the U.S. Army by that anti-communist conspiracy monger Senator Joseph McCarthy for being “soft” on the Reds. He was a monster, but not quite of Trumpian proportions (not being the president of the United States). Still, I can remember walking in the front door of our apartment after school one day and seeing my mother sitting in front of that new TV, drawing the senator's iconic face. His was, in fact, the first image I ever saw on a TV screen in my own house and, to me, he looked boringly normal -- that is, belligerent and pugnacious like so many of the 1950s fathers I knew, including my own.

So I was both unfazed by and thankful to him. After all, though he brought misery to so many with his red-scare tactics and fantastically wild charges about commies in the government, he brought me Disney and Lucy and Ed Sullivan. As a result, I’ve been less surprised than some by the connection between our present conspiracy monger par excellence and the many screens and entertainments of our present lives -- a blur of (mis)communication that puts that ancient black-and-white TV of ours to shame.

As TomDispatch regular Steve Fraser suggests today, while reviewing the history of the conspiratorial thinking of this country’s leaders since the Salem witch hunts, we now have the ultimate conspiracist-in-chief and TV personality in the White House. He’s far more belligerent and pugnacious than any 1950s dad I ever knew and, by the way, only recently labeled Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris a “communist.” I wonder how my mother might have drawn him as he continues to pump out manic tweets and videos in a haze of Covid-19 and a potentially steroidal euphoria. Tom

The United States of Paranoia
From the Salem Witch Hunt to Conspirator-in-Chief Donald Trump
By Steve Fraser

News is “faked”; elections are “rigged”; a “deep state” plots a “coup”; Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suspiciously in bed with a pillow over his face; aides of ex-president Barack Obama conspire to undermine foreign policy from a “war room”; Obama himself was a Muslim mole; the National Park Service lied about the size of the crowd at the president’s inauguration; conspiracies are afoot in nearly every department and agency of the executive branch, including the State Department, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI (“What are they hiding?”). Thus saith, and maybe even believeth, the president of the United States.

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