oh yeah and we have SCOTUS too. I mean Mitch can't hold the seats open FOREVER. ...probably. I suppose if she's POTUS when Covid lands we probably get Trump next anyway. I know! Let's go back to 2000 and NOT vote for fucking Nader! or let Brooks Brothers Rioters steal the fucking thing!
I remain convinced that if Hillary is POTUS 2016-2020, covid never becomes pandemic. Trump fired the whole pandemic response team that Obama set up, whose job was to identify and help contain possible pandemic viruses, in 2018. If Hillary’s prez, odds are, covid stays in the box.
Agreed, she’d have controlled it. Since she actually has a brain.
Yep. If covid DID break containment with Hillary as prez, despite the pandemic response team still being in place in China, she definitely wouldn’t have suppressed awareness until it was too late to get it BACK in the box. With early enough response, brief area-based lockdowns would’ve been enough.
And we’d have been able to get fucking tests instead of it circulating widely in the US in December/January while everyone pretended it was only a few isolated cases and nooo that awful cold you have is really just a cold! Nvm you’ve literally never been that sick in your life before!
What really gets me is Trump’s initial pretense of not knowing how it spread!! Having us focus on hand-washing, rather than respiration. Yeah, keep going to church & singing!! Never mind those masks - save them for first responders!! Just wash those hands. He admitted to Bob Woodward he lied.
And probably nothing particularly atrocious happens, so trump has a harder time propagandizing all the terrible things she’d supposedly cause. She probably wins a second term in 2020.
She also hasn’t stacked the courts with conservatives, so Roe stays. She’s probably less good on trans rights than Biden but not actively making shit worse for trans folks either. Presidential powers remain limited, because again, courts not stacked with conservative judges.
Israel probably still attacks Palestine, and she’s probably not better than Biden on that, BUT when Harris runs in 2024 she’s not weighed down by being part of the administration folks are mad about that for, and she’s not hamstrung by being unable to criticize it too hard.
*maybe* we still get trump in 2024, but without the stacked courts that are letting him get away with everything.
(In this scenario, Harris running in 2024 also wouldn’t be the FIRST woman prez. More people have had a chance to get used to the idea of both a black person and a woman being prez. So she’d be running with a lot less baggage.)
Anyway, coming back to this later, I think if trump still won 2024 for his *first* term, which I’m not convinced is likely (tbh I think if he lost his first run he wouldn’t have won the GOP nom again), we’d be looking at a situation like his actual first term, which sucked but was mostly reined in.
And there’s about a 0% chance he survives another four years without becoming so completely senile that there’s no way to prop him up as a figurehead anymore, plus after one disastrous trump term the American public would also still elect another Dem.
And that puts us far enough out that the dinosaur bigots are starting to die off from age in enough numbers to actually reinforce a lot of the more recent civil rights progress as younger generations who grew up taking same-sex marriage for granted start to outnumber the jerks who fought against it.