Has it really been a year since America elected a flabby, racist, melting-candle president? Gosh, how time flies. Trump has achieved so much. From insulting the mayor of San Juan, to insulting the grieving family of a dead soldier, to insulting the family of a woman murdered by Nazis, to absolutely no policy achievements. He truly has done it all. It’s almost scary to consider how close he came to not being able to Make America Great Again: he only won the election by minus 3m votes.
But what if Hillary Clinton had gained a few more votes in the midwest, if James Comey hadn’t come out with that October FBI surprise, or if Russia had spent its social media budget on LinkedIn instead of Facebook? How would 2017 have turned out then?
Welcome to the Marginally Less Dark Timeline: Hillary Clinton Edition.
9 November 2016
After a tense night of debate, media commentary and 17 Fox News interviews with Nigel Farage, America wakes up to discover that Hillary Rodham Clinton has won. Donald Trump refuses to accept defeat. He causes consternation in his not-concession speech when he shouts, “Vlad told me we had this in the bag!” Kellyanne Conway later explains that Vlad is the name of the tiny Dracula that only Donald Trump can see.
10 December 2016
As Hillary prepares for office, Trump still hasn’t declared defeat. His not-concession speech, which started in November, is still going. The networks show 24/7 footage of him shouting about how the media didn’t give him enough coverage. Eventually he heads back to Mar-a-Lago with his new wife Mevanka. (Melania divorced him seconds after CNN called Michigan for Hillary. She had the papers prepared and everything.)
At Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump Jr gives his father a hug lasting 2.5 seconds (a personal best), and tells him that no matter what, he’s the president of this house. Donald Trump Sr takes this literally, and declares Mar-a-Lago a new independent country, “Trumpistan”. After all, Robert E Lee, the greatest American of all time, taught him that the most American thing you can do when you don’t like an election result is start a new country in the south.
Fox News starts a new show on how to survive the upcoming “Feminazi Apocalypse”. It’s mostly smashing DVDs of the all-female Ghostbusters and shouting “MERRY CHRISTMAS” at every brown person they see.
22 January 2017
Hillary’s inauguration is a bit of a farce: midway through the ceremony Jill Stein grabs the mic and says that she’s going to let Clinton finish, but Bernie Sanders ran the best campaign of all time (of all time). The theme of the inauguration ball is “At Least I’m Not Donald Trump”. Lena Dunham does five hours of slam poetry. It’s as traumatic as that sounds.
The next day, millions of men in the Lads’ March protest against the terrifying new female-orientated world where women might be treated the same as men. In Britain it’s led by Piers Morgan, Justin Lee Collins and Michael Fallon. That last one confuses a lot of people at the time but a few months later it makes perfect sense.
Fox News commissions a new show where pundit Tucker Carlson punches a kitten live on air and screams “THIS IS HILLARY’S AMERICA” for two hours. It is a smash hit.
16 February 2017
Clinton presides over an erratic 77-minute press conference, where journalists ask her: “Do you still have a private email server?”; “How will the new healthcare bill affect the status of your private email server?”; “Is Colin Kaepernick kneeling because of your emails?”; and “How do you sync your professional Outlook account with your Gmail? I’ve been troubleshooting for ages and it’s still not working.”
Meanwhile, Florida holds a referendum on whether it should join Trumpistan. The vote is overwhelmingly in favour, although voting records seem sketchy – there are thousands of last-minute electoral roll registrations of people with names like “Chet USAman980131” and “Brad Notarussian2017”.
13 April 2017
Hillary delicately intervenes in the complicated Syria crisis by dropping a bunch of bombs. It leads to hundreds of pointless deaths and creates hundreds more terrorists, but it does give her a five-point bump in the polls. Millions of little girls around the world see Hillary’s actions and are inspired – it turns out women are just as good as men at killing innocent people via drone strike. One of the bombs dropped is called “The Mother of All Bombs” – while most papers focus on the death and destruction, the Daily Mail asks how the bomb has managed to keep its shape despite its age.
Fox News is conflicted – it hates Hillary but it does love bombs – but settles on a compromise: it likes what Hillary did, but she should have been wearing a Trump mask at the time.
15 June 2017
Bored, Comey decides to open up the Clinton investigation again. The press find a new email in which Hillary misspells Massachusetts, and the Republican Senate votes to open impeachment proceedings.
Fox News creates a new animated series portraying Comey as a topless Adonis, crushing injustice and Hillary mugs with his bare hands.
18 July 2017
Hillary tells the world that the US is definitely staying in the Paris accord. In fact, she loves it so much she’s made a colour-coordinated spreadsheet of all the commitments, and hands it out to everyone at the UN. Sadly, Hillary being so into the accord means that it’s no longer cool, so the rest of the world votes to leave.
Meanwhile, Trumpistan successfully annexes the bits of the south that Hillary won’t notice are gone – everywhere except Austin, Texas, and the bits of Atlanta where they film the TV show Atlanta.
19 August 2017
To distract from impending impeachment, Hillary ups the rhetoric against North Korea, threatening explosive, destructive, reckless trade sanctions. Trump tweets: “If I were president, I’d fly over North Korea, jump out of Air Force One, beat up every single member of Kim Jong-un’s government with my kung fu moves (I know really good kung fu actually, the best, the most amazing), and kick Kim right in the nuts. Then I’d blow up Pyongyang. Not good for North Korea!” When people complain, Twitter maintains that Trump is an entertainer, not a politician – if he were president, he obviously wouldn’t be allowed to say such inflammatory things.
30 October 2017
The net is closing in on Hillary. Special investigator Robert Mueller has opened a formal investigation against Hillary’s decision to use the same password (chelsea4prez2032) for her Google account and work account. A rumour swirls that Bill Clinton has left Hillary, and the person standing next to her at public engagements is actually noted character actor Harvey Keitel wearing a fake nose and platform shoes. On the plus side, Hillary finally has a majority in the House and Senate – but that’s only because every state apart from New York has been annexed. In every other state millions of Trumpistan flags fly (like the American flag, but instead of stars it’s Trump’s face, and instead of stripes it’s Trump’s face).
Today
After much soul-searching, Hillary steps down, in order to spend less time around men who hate her. Unfortunately her vice-president, Tim Kaine, was so forgettable that the secret service has lost him. Thankfully, perennial not-presidential candidate Mark Zuckerberg steps up to fill the void, citing a little known constitutional precedent: “Should the president and the vice-president be incapacitated, the next president should be the one with access to all of your incriminating Facebook messages.” Zuckerberg assumes the presidency, running with his virtual-reality avatar as his vice-president.
The one remaining United State has to stand up to a southern, foreign aggressor – Trumpistan. Vote Zuckerberg-Virtual Reality Zuckerberg 2020, and let’s build that wall.
• Jack Bernhardt is a comedy writer
