The nightmare of a Greene New Deal
“Then tell me, Future Boy,” Emmett “Doc” Brown asks Marty Mcfly in the movie “Back to the Future,” “who’s president of the United States in 1985?” “Ronald Reagan,” Marty replies. “Ronald Reagan? The actor? And who’s his vice president? Jerry Lewis?”
Such a question, under the circumstances, wouldn’t be terribly likely, as any usual answer (like, say, “Jimmy Carter”) would be meaningless to someone in 1955. But it had to be asked for its inevitable comic value. After all, many of us watching the movie in the theatre back in 1985 (and I was one of them) still couldn’t quite believe it, that Ronald Reagan was in fact president of the United States. And he’d just begun his second term that very year.
Even so, were I to ask some visitor from the future the far likelier question of who’s president of the United States in 2025, and were I told, “Donald Trump,” I might be tempted, not as a joke but out of real horror, to ask, “And who’s his vice president? Marjorie Taylor Greene?”
Believe it or not, that’s the answer some Republicans (including Greene herself) are mooting just now. Particularly Greene. She is so drunk with the power she has recently stumbled her way into of late, that of (in her mind, anyway) de facto Speaker of the House, that she’s now contemplating one improbable future eventuality. Vice President Greene? And after that, why not President Greene?
Yes I know, brothers and sisters, I hated writing that last line just as much as you hated reading it. Greene even as veep would mean, as one conservative podcaster Jonah Goldberg puts it, “… you would actually have someone who would make you worried that Donald Trump might have a heart attack.”
I’m not in the business of predicting the future, I’m just in the business of writing sentences about what people are saying about the future. What some Republicans are saying about the notorious MJT is she might make one possible veep for the second coming of Donald Trump. Well, I’ve made the mistake of discounting Donald Trump before and I’m reluctant to do it again. In any case it wouldn’t be beyond him to pick Greene as his running mate.
However absurd this might be to contemplate, I’m in the tenuous position of having contemplated absurdities in the past, some of which came true. It’s what our beloved republic has come to. Ridiculous things continue to happen at an absurd rate. Therefore I tell you that, in the minds of some people, MJT has become a serious contender as Donald Trump’s Vice President.
Of course, it really is the case that Trump is under considerable criminal peril. But will America be in a position as a nation to contemplate a presidential bid from someone currently behind prison bars? As I say, I won’t discount anything. We will just have to see.
Another impediment to a Greene candidacy is that Trump is a snob. He sees the low rent MJT as being, well, low rent. A better reason is it would hurt his chances even more than they are hurting now. Trump doesn’t look like he’s making a comeback. A (if you’ll pardon the expression) Greene New Deal would make his candidacy a laughingstock even among some diehard MAGA fruitcakes.
There are eight million stories in the naked city of Republican stupidity. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s mooted candidacy as vice president is one of them. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.