The Don is dead. Long live — NO! He’s alive, he’s alive!

by David Benjamin

“MAR-A-LAGO (25 January 2022) — The sudden, apparent demise of ex-president Donald J. Trump on Monday, when he choked to death spectacularly trying to swallow whole a Burger King Triple Whopper that could not be dislodged from his fat-narrowed windpipe despite the efforts of his daughter Ivanka and four muscular bodyguards simultaneously applying the Heimlich maneuver, has left America in a state of unprecedented confusion, grief and ironic exultation…”

MADISON, Wis. — Okay, that paragraph, just above, is fake news. You can tell by the date. But the beauty of this imaginary scenario is, of course, that it could happen any minute, any hamburger. 

The mere thought of this tragedy gets me thinking about what’s going to happen when the Donald really does buy the farm (with an unsecured loan from Deutsche Bank). There’s a plethora of possibilities, all of which will turn the Republican Party into a fire drill at the county asylum. 

The biggest faction within the fractured party will almost certainly be a veritable army of Trump believers — let’s call them MAGATruthers — who embrace, discuss, compare, contrast, post and broadcast a torrent of lurid conspiracy theories about Trump’s assassination, with Tucker Carlson of Fox News as their anchor paranoid. 

Or, to paraphrase Carl Denham (King Kong, 1933), “Oh, no, it wasn’t the hamburger. ’Twas Politics killed the beast!

My favorite fever dream, until I think of one even weirder, features a secret evil cabal of Clintonites, Never-Trumpers, Venezuelans and MSNBC hosts. The first evidence of their diabolical plot to kidnap and murder Trump is a grainy video that arrives suddenly on the loading dock at Fox News. It shows a Satanic ritual conducted by the high priest of a transgender nudist vampire cult, in the basement of the New York Times building. The video spreads almost instantly among millions of social-media addicts. Trump trolls gaze in horrified fascination as a woman looking eerily like Nancy Pelosi serves a grisly feast to a cabal of liberal cannibals who seem — to the naked eye — to be Chuck Schumer, Jill Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Liz Cheney and dozens more of their ilk. Their dinner: raw slices of Trump’s liver, kidneys and private parts, garnished with parsley and fava beans, served on bone china with silverware, linen napkins — with a nice Chianti. 

A subsequent flood of similar videos would overwhelm the internet. Each would be voice-overed by Carlson or Sean Hannity with a warning that ”some scenes” might not be “suitable for children.” Crazed by the conviction that Trump was murdered as surely as were Abe Lincoln and Jack Kennedy, MAGATruthers would fill stadiums, where leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz would send them into the streets to “hunt down” their messiah’s killers. Random people would, of course, be hunted down. In the spirit of Trump, the official leaders of the Republican Party would deplore the violence. They would mention “hopes and prayers.” However, to appease the roving bands of armed Trump zealots, GOP chiefs would also blandly claim that the dead and crippled victims were part of a left-wing “false flag” conspiracy designed to provoke peaceful “Rittenhousers” into unshouldering their AR-15s and blasting away in self-defense.

Second scenario: He’s not dead. 

Trump, actually, is alive and well, living in luxury in… Cyprus (which has no extradition treaty with the United States). He’s hiding out only long enough for his posse of nasty Negro persecutors, including Fulton County D.A, Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and January 6 Select Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, to leave office, or better yet, be driven out — “with extreme prejudice” — by chanting swarms of MAGATruth cultists.  

Clandestinely filmed YouTube clips will reveal a hale and hearty Trump socializing at an opulent secret compound. Among the rumored dead who can be seen on film laughing and joshing with Trump seem to be John F. Kennedy, Jr. (his plane never crashed), Jimmy Hoffa (nope, not buried under MetLife Stadium), Elvis Presley (trim, fit and still crooning mellifluously at age 87), Marilyn Monroe (she just couldn’t stand the Hollywood rat race any longer) and the twenty little kids who never died at Sandy Hook Elementary. 

The Never-Dead Trump movement will coalesce around the belief that he’s coming back any day now. The Republican Party will see no choice but to honor the Never-Dead delusion, precluding all aspirants to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination from trying to raise money or announce their candidacy. Loyalty to the zombie Trump will be even more fanatic that when he was alive and filing lawsuits against ungrateful women. Any Republican even suggesting that Trump might be mouldering in his grave would be vilified, ostracized, boycotted and, if he or she gets careless, hung from a lamppost by a mob of MAGATruthers.

Finally, after five or ten years of delusion and denial, there would evolve among the Trump faithful a faith — the Church and Casino of Latter-Day Trump. Its holy site, a sort of Mecca for Trump’s millions of believers, would have to be the biggest cathedral ever built, a hundred stories tall, coated in (faux) gold leaf, funded by Vladimir Putin, erected atop Mount Rushmore, throwing Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt into permanent shadow, with LED displays of the word “TRUMP” so large and brilliant that the name (or even better, Trump’s face) would be visible from space.

There would be a Book of Trump, of course, written somehow by Trump himself, posthumously, in which the first lines of “The Sermon on the Tower” will read, “Blessed are the brazen, for they shall develop the Earth, and then stiff the contractors…”

The Church’s holy days of obligation, which would draw millions of pilgrims to South Dakota nine times a year — dwarfing the annual biker bash in Sturgis — would be Trump’s birthday, the birthdays of the three kids he likes (but not Tiffany), the feast day of his dad Fred (but not his mom), the day Trump graduated “with the highest honors anyone has ever seen” from the Wharton School, the two days he was elected president by a landslide, 8 Nov. 2016 and 3 Nov, 2020, and, above all, the most sacred day on the religious calendar (for any religion anywhere, you got that?), January 6 — when true American patriots rose up and fought heroically (but peacefully) against the Big Lie of Sleepy Joe’s Communist coup d’etat. 

The good news about the creation of the Church of Trump is that it would represent an admission by his flock that he’s actually dead and gone to his reward at the right hand of God (well, above God, actually, according to the Book of Trump). Technically, it would allow politics to proceed toward a Trump-free democracy (if we still have one).

The bad news, of course, would be that you can’t have two Saviors in the same white Christian nation. Someone — either Jesus Christ or Donald Trump — would have to hit the bricks. This would not be a fair fight. After a few thousand MAGATruth church burnings and a wave of colorful martyrdoms, there would be only one God before us. And, just to spare you any suspense, he would not be a Jewish carpenter who never had two nickels to rub together, much less a gleaming 6000-foot tower on Fifth Avenue.