Kid Rock, who was once arrested for assault at a Waffle House while out on bond, has won the 2018 election for United States Senate in the state of Michigan.  Of course it’s still September 2017, but thanks to pattern analysis and deductive reasoning, we can skip ahead in the story.  Kid Rock gave this speech on Tuesday, September 12th, 2017.  He offered the statement in rhyming verse as an evocation to the powers that would elect him to the most powerful deliberative body in the world. 

Not like the copper giant of American fame,
With welcoming eyes cast from from land to land;
Here at our walled-off, twilight gates may stand
A broken woman with guttered torch, whose crown
Tarnished in hatred, with fell renown

Up is down, good is bad, it is raining outside and it is not, and the color of the sky is blue, but also plaid with polka dots. This is an example of alternative facts presented by fake news, potentially accepted as truth in place of provable, confirmable reality. The recent decade has seen the explosive proliferation of misleading information, outright patent falsehoods, and outrage-as-entertainment being consumed by people at ever-increasing speeds. Individuals from all parts of the ideological and political spectrum are now subject to a barrage of erroneous click-baiting headlines and propagandist fabrications meant to sow distrust, foment unrest, or simply monetize the impulsive emotional response of the viewer and listener. Social media and the rapid development of internet news and delivery mechanisms have accelerated and essentially weaponized the ability of fly-by-night organizations hoping to construct their own version of reality out of whole cloth and disseminating it to hordes of news media consumers intent on finding news that confirms their cognitive bias.

Trump has been in office for 115 days, and from his track record already we can draw several conclusions that allow us to extrapolate likely eventualities – events that exist with a high probability of occurrence. We base these on patterns of his behavior as well as the logical conclusion of his involvement in random and expected events.

“Why do you say that I have to apologize? I’m just quoting the newspaper, just like I quoted the judge the other day.” Trump is not the liar telling lies any more than the inside of a great bell is the clamor ringing forth from it. He is, in his perspective, simply the medium by which the truth is distributed from those who have it, to those who need it. It isn’t up to him to parse fact from fiction – that task has been accomplished by those with time for such trivial nonsense.

Trump is not like other politicians in America. Things he says that would normally destroy candidates and elected officials flow from his mouth without pause. Recently, one of his surrogates tried to explain that Trump was not lying per se, but rather was speaking an “Americanese” that certain people understood to be true, regardless of the facts of the matter. As of the latest polls, 37% of Americans still approve of Trump’s actions. This, in spite of provably false lies he spews, roving contradictions, and a never-ending sequence of embarrassing policy mistakes. How is he does this? Let’s look at his techniques to keep 37% of the people still in his corner, and how we might bring them back to sensibility.

What follows is an exercise in the very old practice of planning for the worst and hoping for the best. There are several possible outcomes to what may be an inevitable terrorist attack on American soil under the Trump administration. We know that Trump does not handle things well. We know that he commits unforced errors even in light of economic growth and the idleness of peace. How the scenario unfolds may go several different ways. Here’s one possible progression of events, based on a rough amalgamation of policy positions Trump has taken and what he has verbally said he would do.

In an effort to gain some kind of rough accounting for the costs associated with Trump’s staggering frequency of vacation in his “Winter Palace” at Mar-a-Lago and his keeping his wife held in a golden tower, we were asked to arrive at a daily count of just how many of our tax dollars he is frittering away.