Starting in the 1950s, a Looney Tunes cartoon television series featured an absurdly stylized, speedy, reedy, blue-and-purple-hued bird known as “the Road Runner.” Racing at accelerated clips along deserted highways of the Southwest from standing stops, each one punctuated by its sounding a snappy double chirp (“Meep-Meep!”), the avian’s distinctive forte was its premonitory ability in every instance in each episode to quickly act to evade the relentless and ingenious efforts of a coyote (named “Wile E. Coyote)” to catch him.
As related in Britannica.com, “In each episode, the coyote sets an elaborate trap for the bird, usually with the aid of some product—such as a giant rubber band or a ‘portable outboard steamroller’ — ordered from the fictitious Acme company. The scheme always backfires as a result of either the products’ chronic unreliability or Coyote’s own ineptitude.” The Road Runner, not once caught or even injured, responds with his characteristic double chirp and then streaks away from the foiled or fouled attempt at entrapment. One lucky bird!
The presidential reign of Donald Trump may well be a case of “life imitates art.” Mocked, harried, hectored, undermined, and even veritably subverted in myriad ways since he descended the escalator at his signature Trump Tower to announce his bid for President in June 2015, he has, to Election Day 2020, uncannily emerged from every calumny, claim of criminal misbehavior, oral gaffe, moral or personality defect, and supposed scandal. And, he has done so with strength, defiance, resolve, and resilience. He shows out as the newest popular paragon of undaunted individualism and manly American virtues!
In just four years, Trump has devilled his way through the Russian-collusion hoax; an elaborate, protracted counterintelligence/criminal inquest into a raft of lurid but spurious claims; a partisan, fraudulently concocted, secret dossier defaming him and his loyalty; a sham partisan impeachment spectacle; and a rolling coup attempt by a cabal of senior federal bureaucrats and media horns against his candidacy, transition, and presidency. The subterfuge tools were all classic — spying, leaking, rumor-mongering, blatant deceit, and rampant conspiracy. But, true deal, the Road Runner, by and through this course per se, has a mirror-image icon in real life!
Then, just a few short weeks ahead of this year’s elections, a judicial nemesis, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dies after a long illness, creating a vacancy on the Court and allowing Trump to nominate and have confirmed in her place a firmly committed constitutional originalist. All of this in time to ensure the Court is fully staffed to be able to resolve by majority vote any dispute(s) that might — and are widely expected to — arise out of the actual conduct of the electoral contest.
Next, immediately following Election Day, a deluge of irregularities does arise in the voting process, from ballots received past legal deadlines and ballots lacking validating voter signatures or with blatant signature mismatches, to people voting who are long dead or reside in other states; from poll watchers being physically blocked from observing balloting procedures to significantly large quantities of single-vote ballots being dumped on ballot counters late and en masse, to multiple allegations of the existence of manipulable voting algorithms covertly embedded in the system software. These algorithms were purportedly designed to alter voting tallies to reach a predetermined winner.
And last, a small band of famous, intrepid, crackerjack lawyers (Powell, Giuliani, Wood) enter to raise Cain with the Democratic Party and the mainstream media about this whole array of discovered transgressions, acting to file a host of lawsuits to expose them and guarantee election integrity and the public’s trust therein. Their campaign continues as of this writing, even as Joe Biden as nominal victor starts to select his prospective cabinet members and President Trump continues to refuse to concede.
This sequence of trials and freak serendipities may suggest, if only to folks of prophetic bent, that the “Trump Good Fortune” will continue into 2021 and beyond. If the U.S. Supreme Court (i) soon hears the substantial claims of wrongdoing in the voting process, (ii) rules decisively that systemic frauds have been perpetrated against the American people, (iii) announces that the extent and depth of those frauds cannot be rectified easily, efficiently, or at all timely, and (iv) opines that the Framers of the Constitution foresaw just such an eventuality and wisely provided a remedial mechanism for same via the 12th Amendment, then responsibility for deciding the election for president may well devolve upon the House of Representatives. And, because each state’s congressional delegation is accorded just one vote in that selection process and Republicans enjoy a majority among all those delegations (now and into 2021), Donald Trump will be re-inaugurated as President of the United States for the next four years. The gauntlet of duplicitous schemes will have been fully run, and so this man’s Campbellian hero’s journey will be complete
Thus, the Road Runner beats Wile E. Coyote again, this time in real life, in front of a national audience of unparalleled size, wry joy, and excitement.
Meep-Meep!
