The Boston Globe’s Prescient 2016 View of Our Trumpist Future
On April 9, 2016, several months before Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, the Boston Globe ran an editorial entitled “The GOP must stop Donald Trump”.
Donald J. Trump’s vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American.
It is easy to find historical antecedents. The rise of demagogic strongmen is an all too common phenomenon on our small planet. And what marks each of those dark episodes is a failure to fathom where a leader’s vision leads, to carry rhetoric to its logical conclusion. The satirical front page of this section attempts to do just that, to envision what America looks like with Trump in the White House.
It is an exercise in taking a man at his word. And his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page. It is a vision that demands an active and engaged opposition. It requires an opposition as focused on denying Trump the White House as the candidate is flippant and reckless about securing it.
As part of the editorial, they imagined a Globe front page one year into a future Trump presidency:
Some of the headlines read “Deportations to Begin: President Trump calls for tripling of ICE force; riots continue” and “Markets sink as trade war looms”. They may have gotten the timeline and some of the details wrong, but many of the Globe’s fake headlines now read as tame.
In his second term, Trump has removed any pretense of governing and is full steam ahead on indulging his bigotry, filling his coffers, playing Big Boy Diplomat, and replacing the American system of democracy with a conservative authoritarian government. And as the editorial notes, all you had to do to predict it was to take Trump at his word. (via @epicciuto.bsky.social)
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