Storm Clouds Are Gathering . . .

. . . and I’m increasingly uneasy.  This Presidential Campaign has been changing from funny, to ridiculous, to worrisome, to frightening, to hunker-down-in-your-bunker.  I’m not just talking about Donald Trump, either.

No matter who wins the upcoming election, the White House will be under siege.  Our best hope is that the entire country, and for that matter the rest of the world, will not be subject to the slings and arrows directed at (or generated by) our new President, no matter whom he or she turns out to be. 

Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive (always to be read as presumptuous, or preposterous, or preputial) Republican candidate, one can predict three things.  One, the general election campaign will be venomous and puerile enough to make many voters seriously embrace those pledges to move to Canada (investment hint:  Maritime Provinces real estate).  Two, as there’s an almost fifty-fifty chance that Trump will become the next United States President, this prospect is sufficiently terrifying to make many voters consider changing their cocktail libation of choice from beer, wine, or bourbon to Drano, rat poison, or elixir of shroom.  Third, the rest of the world will become more and more nervous, seeking gathering-storm shelters (economic, militaristic) potentially inimical to United States interests.

What might fall from the oppo sky during the General Election campaign?  More about Trump’s significant mob ties in New York and New Jersey.  More concerning Trump’s lying (imagine that!) about his wealth and success (this might be the most damaging to the Trumpernaut).  Certainly more about Trump’s misogyny, racism, xenophobia, serial contradictions, willful ignorance, yadda yadda, But as RNC chairman Reince Preibus recently dribbled:  “People just don’t care.”  Well, some people don’t – the Trump fans (one shouldn’t confuse fans with political supporters) – but some actually might. As might our allies abroad.  In fact, as they already do.

It’s harder to predict in what specific ways a Trump Presidency would be horrible. Lightning strikes without fear or favor. Would Trump start a nuclear war (let’s begin at the top of the disaster food chain)?  Would he wreck our, and the world’s, economy?  Would he declare martial law to enforce deportations of Mexicans and Muslims and Mujeres (of whatever ethnic background, who try to avail themselves of health care options or equal pay claims or who are less-than-perfect-tens)?  Would middle-of-the-night twitter storms replace news conferences or measured diplomatic negotiations?  Who knows?  Except that a shitstorm of biblical proportions would be in the offing.

Or take Bernie Sanders (take him back to Vermont, please, or to the ineffective Senate backbench that he’s occupied for decades).  With every cockamamie caucus win or the-numbers-still-don’t-add-up delegate fight or the-game-is-rigged rant, he has morphed incrementally from geriatric rebel with a solid reformist cause to fame-addled, nihilistic crankypuss.  Add his apparent encouragement of his followers’ self-righteous incivility and intractability . . . and his scorched-earth policy vis-à-vis the Democratic Party, to which he has absolutely no allegiance . . . and you have a stormy scenario that will either help elect Donald Trump, god forbid, or will be background bombast for the inevitable attempts to undermine a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Let’s suppose that Sanders’ super-delegate hypocrisy succeeds, and he becomes the Democratic candidate.  His current (relative) popularity will plummet as Republicans drop the other Socialist shoes.  I mean, he honeymooned in the Soviet Union and supported the Sandinistas, amirite?  Not to mention that his primo advisor (and wife) bankrupted a nice small Vermont college after tuition was raised precipitously.  Tell me again how we’re going to afford free higher education for all? 

Then let’s suppose that, somehow, Sanders wins in November.  What would his presidency look like?  Total chaos larded with total ineffectiveness.  His election would also involve a balance-of-power shift in Congress, particularly in the Senate – which means that professional Democratic politicians (who might be tools of this or that but who tend to be pragmatists) would try to rein in Sanders’ unicorn-drawn down-with-class-inequities chariot.  Most Senators, of both parties, are fairly rich and have even richer donor friends. Thus most of Sanders’ proposals would go nowhere, and his most ardent followers would be outraged.  Protests would occupy the news, Sanders would wave his arms, and nothing would get accomplished, setting the stage for tsunami-sized Republican victories in 2018 and 2020.

Now to the crapstorm gathering around Hillary Clinton.  It will be a dark and stormy night, or if one is theologically inclined, a dark night of the soul.  We’re all aware of the usual Hillzentric targets:  emails and Benghazi being the most recent, Whitewater and Vince Foster being revivable blasts from the past . . . oh, what’s the point: the woman has been a politician in the public eye for decades, so there’s a lot of material blowing in the wind.

But what Donald Trump is amorally equipped to do is to focus his blasts on Bill Clinton – not on his Presidential record but on his can’t-keep-it-zipped record.  It’s already happening:  Bill as rapist, Bill as the ‘worst’ abuser of women in history, and Hillary as evil dungeon-mistress enabler.  Like worms that appear on sidewalks after a summer rainstorm, reputed Bill Clinton victims are magically resurfacing to reiterate and embroider their unadjudicated claims (see the Bill with the cigar ad released today).

The worst is yet to come.  It’s the Jeffrey Epstein connection.  Epstein was a very wealthy ‘friend of Bill’ with a convenient private plane on which the former President hitched rides – maybe 10 times, maybe 27 times, but enough to be noteworthy.  Noteworthy because Epstein is a convicted child molester who ‘employed’ underage girls to ‘service’ himself and his pals onboard his jet (dubbed ‘The Lolita Express’) and on his private Caribbean island (dubbed “Orgy Island”).  And because a source of Epstein’s mysterious wealth is reputed, in some circles, to be attributable to hidden cameras that provided the shadowy financier with blackmail material. 

So far, there’s no evidence that Bill Clinton enjoyed Epstein’s nymphets, nor that Hillary Clinton booked her husband’s passage on the Lolita Express.  But as guilt-by-association-and-innuendo is a preferred Trumpian tactic, simply raining down ‘information’ about Bill’s association with Epstein might be sufficient to drown Hillary.  What category of sleazebags is more reviled than pedophiles (Epstein technically is an ephebophilac, an adult whose sexual interest is in mid-to-late adolescent minors)? 

The only thing that might protect Hillary Clinton from this looming tempest is that Donald Trump is also connected with Jeffrey Epstein – they were social friends, Epstein was a member of Mar-a-Lago (from whence his first teenaged ‘sex slave,’ Virginia Roberts, was recruited), Trump was subpoenaed in a child-sex case against Epstein, and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, formerly a Lolita Express frequent flyer and now a Trump supporter, was named as a molester by Virginia Roberts herself.

If Hillary Clinton survives the mudslide coming her way, her Presidency will be under constant assault.  There’s nothing to suggest that the same partisan mean-spiritedness that motivated Republican obstructionism vis-à-vis Barack Obama will not rein (or rain) supreme vis-à-vis a President Hillary Clinton.  The primal sin of Being President While Black will be replaced by the primal sin of Being President While Female (and a Clinton).

No matter who wins in November, it’s going to be a rough ride.  Batten down the hatches.