A win for Vladimir Putin’s favourite citrus piglet

Did the Melbourne Cup get shitcanned this year? Even el Goog doesn’t know. The happy horse torturers at the VRC say it’s on. But Lexus, the maximum sponsor is sucking its teeth and consulting its lawyers about any potential liability exposure from hosting a super spreader event in the ruins of the fallen city the ancients knew as ‘Melbourne’.

Still, you should totes get your drink on for the first Tuesday in November, because that’s the day America masks up, or not, goes to the polls, or not, and wakes up from its four year long national nightmare. Or, you know, more likely not.

Professional journalists don’t care to make predictions, because they end up looking like even bigger fools than normal, but I’m neither professional nor much of a journalist these days. I write massively splodey end of the world novels where all of your favourites die and nothing good ever happens.

This makes me uniquely qualified to tell you exactly what is going to happen on November 3.

Donald Trump will win… for a little while; and then he won’t and everyone will lose.

Miss Rona’s global pandemic party means that on current projections somewhere between sixty to eighty million Americans will vote by mail, and somewhere between fifty to seventy million of those guys will vote the Democrat slate.

Because the US is, in many ways, one big failed state composed of fifty semi-autonomous omni-shambular mini-states, most of those postal votes won’t be counted.

No. Not a typo. I’m going big on catastrophising.

Tens of millions of votes for Biden simply won’t be counted. Maybe a coupla million cast for the honking orange cumtrumpet will go missing, too. But mostly it’ll be Biden taking the hit.

Or at least, that is Trump’s plan, insofar as he is capable of planning anything beyond grabbing the genitals of the next woman who walks past him after he’s snorted a face-full of Clorox and Adderall from the blotter on the Resolute desk.

Because the angry little mango man has turned postal voting into a weirdly partisan loyalty test, and simultaneously convinced a solid wedge of his own voters that the virus is both a Chinese plot and a fake news hoax, the US electorate has pre-sorted itself into contending camps marked not just by party affiliation, but by a crucial instrumental difference.

Most Democrats will vote by mail.

Most Republicans will vote in person.

Assuming the GRU doesn’t just hack the voting machines to spit out a win for Vladimir Putin’s favourite citrus piglet —



—the election night results will skew massively towards Trump. The votes cast on the day will be counted first, and most of those votes will be cast by Trump Stans. Apart from a couple of states like Florida, Biden’s oversized haul of mail-in ballots will still be sitting in boxes at various collecting points, unopened, uncounted, and all but invisible to the world.

Trump is of course already shrieking like a cursed-herpes howler monkey about mail-in voter fraud.

He will declare himself the winner on the night. He has to. The only thing saving him from a US $100M tax bill and the US $300M he personally owes to a bunch of Russian mafia bosses is owning the keys to the White House.

Rupert Murdoch’s obedient toad-eaters at Fox News (and their tiny tadpole wannabes at Sky) will amplify the lie. The hapless gumbies in the mainstream media will apply their usual ‘fair and balanced formula’, which means reporting what Trump says as though it isn’t a steaming, mound of undead demon faeces, writhing with tentacles and hungry whipworms. And millions of heavily armed Trump superfans, living in the Fox News/Breitbart/QAnon alternate reality dimension will lose their shit if anybody suggests delaying the emperor’s coronation for anything as wildly out of left field as counting the rest of the votes.

Side note. Never Trumper Jonathan V Last had the best take on the media’s #epicfail both-sides coverage after this weeks presidential debate:

Looking around the media landscape this morning, just about everyone is decrying how awful both Donald Trump and Joe Biden were. How boorish. How uncouth. How impolite. How unpresidential….

Imagine a newspaper reporting on the Soviet invasion of Poland in September of 1939 with a headline saying:

“Russians, Poles, trade fire in latest outbreak of violence.”

Apply that broken template to what will totally look like another stunning win for Trump, at least on the evening of the vote, and you can write the morning after headlines yourself.

Or you could, if you weren’t busy setting your hair on fire because Trump’s Interior Minister Bill Barr had despatched ‘federal forces’ to seize evidence of ‘ballot fraud’ at hundreds of locations around the country.

With millions of votes for Biden removed from the count, even if temporarily, the bizarro machine of the US Electoral Count Act fires up and the whole circus rolls off to the Supreme Court with its freshly baked 6-3 conservative majority, or even more tendentiously to the House of Representatives.

But don’t the Democrats control the House?

Why yes they do, Padawan, but the Count Act doesn’t care. It gives one vote to each state delegation, and when you do the freakish restaurant bill math involved in calculating who gets to cast that vote, it turns out the Republicans have the upper hand.

Think of all those tiny rural states with mostly Republican members. Now imagine how many Democrats come from a handful of humungously big monster ass states like California.

In case of shenanigans the Electoral Count Act mandates one vote per state.

Maybe Pelosi could refuse to seat them, but by then you’ve got ammosexual Proud Boys and fat SS cosplay buffs out in the streets exchanging fire with…

Er…

This guy…

So even if your Melbourne Cup drinking plans are on hold this year, I would still lay in an elegant sufficiency of adult beverages, if I was you.