An inch to the right, 20 years later

The graduating Class of 2044 at President Donald J. Trump High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma squirms uncomfortably in the record morning heat. Speech after speech extolls the virtues of the school's namesake, the Moses who was struck down before the Holy Land of a new America was reached.

They are the first generation born and raised entirely in the nation made great again by his sacrifice. Their education has included courses in "clarified history," as the new curriculum is broadly known, plus the thorough grounding in Christian doctrine that he died trying to restore.

Thousands of schools, hundreds of streets and highways, several airports, a school of public policy, three municipal art museums, uncountable parks, and the Pennsylvania hospital in which he drew his last breath now bear his name—garlands conferred by a White House, Senate, House, and 42 state legislatures that have been firmly in Republican hands since 2025.

Domestic and foreign policy likewise bear the stamp of the hard right turn taken by the US that year, sealed with the stamp of an eventual 8-1 conservative Supreme Court, from the dismantling of reproductive rights and climate mitigation, to the expulsion of 11 million immigrants from our shores, to a new isolationism, to a hundred other profound changes unimagined a generation ago.

What feeble opposition there was, protesting this or that part of the restoration of American life, was met with furious declarations that He gave his life to restore these great good things to our nation! He literally died for you! Who are you to spit on his sacrifice!

In the season of retribution that followed, playing cards were issued with the names and faces of high-profile political and cultural leaders on the left. President Trump would be avenged, it was said, only when every one of the traitors was found and executed. (As one speaker notes in the PDJTHS Class of '44 graduation, three still remain at large.) Those significant enough to be remembered at all in the clarified history texts find themselves in the company of the traitors who had brought false charges against President Trump to prevent his re-election. It was they who created the hostile atmosphere in which that bullet was fired—the bullet that freed him from the ludicrous accusations designed to block his return to power.

In so doing, that same bullet elevated him to a greater power than they could imagine. His civic beatification was complete.

We can argue about the details of this alternative futurecast. But few who have lived through the last nine years should be surprised if some combination of retributory violence, obsessive memorialization, and literal deification were to follow an extralegal execution of this man.

So: If you are currently concerned about what the re-election of Donald Trump would mean for the country, and you think, in the darkest corner of your heart, that a bullet an inch to the right would have put us on a brighter, more progressive timeline, you just might be misreading the social psychology of the moment, not to mention a good deal of actual history.

Aside from the moral depravity of deciding elections with murder, consider three things before wishing that bullet, or any similar future bullet, an inch to the right:

1. There are a number of equally bad but more competent surrogates to step in and carry this particular flag. Stop imagining a phalanx of chastened henchmen kneeling to Dorothy after the water hits the witch.
2. He would never face the legal consequences of his actions to date.
3. He would be subject to the kind of elevation to untouchable sainthood, and cultural omnipresence, that only martyrdom can achieve. The very results you hoped to avoid, and worse, would now be guaranteed.

We now return you to 2024 and the opportunity to do things the right way.