If fabricated claims of voter fraud don’t work, a bit of the ol’ extortion might
As President Donald Trump’s “voter fraud” lawsuits are summarily dismissed and laughed out of court, one thing that judges of facts-versus-fiction aren’t laughing about is the passing of beloved Jeopardy host Alex Trebek. Trebek passed away at age 80 earlier this month after a battle with stage four pancreatic cancer.
Lovers of science, history, mythology, geography, geology, books, film, music, language, words, culture, trivia, obscure factoids and all types of objective knowledge in general are mourning the loss of Trebek. Meanwhile, lovers of the opposites of all those things are still mourning the loss of Trump in what they are calling a “stolen” presidential election. But neither Trump nor his supporters are ready to admit that their uniquely dangerous form of stage four democratic cancer is showing any signs of remission after Nov. 7’s initial dose of electoral chemotherapy.
In fact, Trump and his team are now threatening more than just lawsuits in their attempts to overturn the election results. That’s right, the Trump camp is now saying that if Americans continue in refusing to recognize how privileged they are to have Trump as their president, then he instead will take over the empty position as host of Jeopardy, by force if necessary. The Trump presidency has been nothing if not a destructive, relentless and shameless assault on truth, so stoking fear over the ominous possibility of a Trump hostship on a show that revolves around the concept of truth might just be the golden strategy that can delay Trump’s retreat back up the gaudy and garish yet cheaply-built bronzer-and-piss-stained golden elevator from whence he came.
Make no mistake—the ramifications of a Trump Jeopardy hostship would be just as bad, if not worse, than those of his presidency. Just on the surface-level, it’s a pretty safe bet that Jeopardy’s iconic set would get the same tasteless, tawdry and trashy makeover as everything Trump has ever built (via the work of contractors he refused to pay).
And I’m sure we can expect a shake-up in the types of categories we’d see as well—sometimes just as a result of Trump’s inability to pronounce words correctly on the first try. Contestants should be sure to study up on categories like “Patriotic History,” “Word Oranges,” “Homophobes and Homophones,” “Pol Pot, Pot Poory, Pot Poury, Pot Porey and Potpourri,” “Potent Potables, with pre-recorded clues read by Brett Kavanaugh” and of course, “Alternative Facts.”
Perhaps when contestants on Trump’s revamped Jeopardy don’t know the correct answer, they can simply say “What isn’t [blank]?” in order to show that they are correct in their incorrectness. This would be a perfect way for Trump to continue his long tradition of giving undeserved air time to unqualified idiots, professional liars, professional idiots and unqualified liars.
If Trump’s threat to usurp the Jeopardy hosting gig proves successful in keeping him in the White House, then he might try the same trick again in four years to become president for life—especially if “Star Trek” actor LeVar Burton is named the new host, as many fans are hoping. Lord knows that Americans wouldn’t be able to bear watching Trump yet again do everything in his power to undo the legacy of a supremely qualified black predecessor…. There’s a chance that this might be a tantalizing prospect too tempting for Trump’s fat, orange, racist ass to resist. But I think he ultimately cares more about staying in office so he can avoid prosecution for tax fraud and money laundering—and ultimately avoid prison, where he would have to confront the legacy of his fellow racist white lawmakers in the form of a large number of fellow Black prisoners.
Whether Trump becomes Jeopardy host or remains president, we are currently sitting on the precipice of a schism in which one half of the country will have a completely different set of facts from the other. Over the last decade, social media algorithms and online echo-chambers have fueled our polarization, but the mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter to Parler and from Fox News to outlets like One America News and Newsmax could result in America’s increasingly irreconcilable information bubbles becoming forever cleaved. If these trends aren’t stymied or reversed, then the false, fabricated and FRAUDULENT narrative that Trump was cheated out of a second term through an election stolen by a cabal of corrupt Democrats and establishment Republicans will in all likelihood become the primary political organizing principle for as much as half the country for a generation, just as resentment over the Treaty of Versailles was in interwar Germany.
Currently, Jeopardy is the last place of refuge where all Americans, liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican, can gather and operate with the same set of objective facts. But if Trump continues to have free reign to pollute America’s physical and informational environments with carcinogens both literal and figurative, then we risk allowing Trump’s cancer on the organs of democracy to further metastasize and become inoperable.
Trump most likely will never actually be the host of Jeopardy—but in a certain sense, he already is. So let’s honor the legacy of Alex Trebek by beating the cancer of disinformation.
Written by: Benjamin Porter— bbporter@ucdavis.edu
(This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional. The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)
