Comic books are a freaking mess. You know how many times in the pages of DC and Marvel Comics has Peter Parker been bitten by a radioactive spider, have Bruce Wayne’s parents been shot dead in an alleyway, has Baby Kal-El’s spaceship crashed into a field outside Smallville, has Steve Rogers been injected with a super growth serum? We have no idea, but we understand it’s been like, a lot of fucking times for each as all these “reboots” and “retcons” keep happening because its hard to keep a steady continuity for 80+ years of stories that get printed every week.
DC and Marvel maintain this by explaining that their fictional universes are actually multiverses, where “Earth-616” is the main Marvel Comics Universe, Earth-1610 is the “Ultimate Marvel Universe”, “Earth-199999” is the one you see in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies and TV series, “Earth-One” is DC before the “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, “Earth-Two” is DC also before the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” but before the “Golden Age”, “Earth-Forty-Three” is where Superman is dead and then was replaced by a Kandorian and eventually switched with the Superman of “Earth-215”, then there was something called “Infinite Crisis” and Jesus Christ enough already.
One of these DC Universes features a storyline where Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor is elected President of the United States. Whichever DC writer came up with the idea did so because he thought it’d be an interesting way to mix things up for Superman by putting the embodiment of the American ideal at odds with its legitimate head of state (we’re mostly guessing here, we never actually read this storyline). We doubt it got into the weeds with the electoral college and campaign finance and what not as that would probably detract from the storyline of Lex Luthor arming the US military with Kryptonite and whatever else happened. That was an easy decision to make for the writers to make because the readers of the comics were not interested in such details in the first place. You don’t have to suspend disbelief for people already on board.
The inverse is truer here in the nonfiction genre. We can’t write a paragraph that says something along the lines of “Imagine the reaction from Republicans if a Dem President Alec Baldwin had told Texas they were on their own with the COVID-19 pandemic” without our readers disputing the premise so much so that the actual point of comparison gets completely lost. Building a plausible alternate version of the world we live in is such a complicated prospect, and takes so many paragraphs in its setup, that most writers either restrict it to the most limited of contexts or circumstances or they simply avoid such propositions to their readers altogether.
For example, in December 2019, Politico editor John Harris asked Trump fans to email him explaining why they opposed impeaching Donald for the Ukraine-Hunter Biden bullshit but why they would also be 100% against it if the circumstances were exactly the same with Hillary Clinton as president. Harris got a lot of responses rejecting his “invitation to imagine what the reaction would be if President Hillary Clinton had behaved in the Ukraine matter in precisely the same way Trump did.” He could lay it out in one sentence and still they wrote to Harris to dispute it. “Your premise is flawed because there would be no impeachment if Hillary Clinton had done the same thing,” one fanboy wrote. The scenario was the only part he wanted to respond to.
On one hand it is indisputably a good thing that most people are skeptical and informed to the point where they don’t believe that scientists are lying when they say horse paste is ineffective against COVID-19 or that JFK Jr is still alive and secretly shows up in the crowd at Trump rallies with a grey beard. (That still a lot of people believe that kind of bullshit is bad enough, but that’s for another day). On the other some suspension of disbelief among media consumers could make some things easier. Like it wasn’t too hard for at least some of those Trump fans who responded to John Harris to actually answer the fucking question (even if they sounded like complete assholes doing so).
So with this meandering setup out of the way, and skipping the qualifying paragraph about how there probably isn’t an actual multiverse but just saying this is thought exercise, here goes: Alec Baldwin is the alternate universe Trump. Not because he played Trump on Saturday Night Live, but because he’s an irresponsible narcissistic egotistical fucking asshole with a conwoman fake Spaniard for his second wife. Had some things – and not a lot of things – gone differently he could have been a Democrat President of The United States and by far the closest hypothetical analogue to the real world Republican former President of The United States Donald Trump.
Sure, Baldwin would almost certainly have been more competent, but not light years so. He would 100% have been every bit as irresponsible, corrupt, egomaniacal, abusive, and intolerant of every criticism that came his way. And a lot of us probably would have loved it, looked past his flaws, maybe even embraced them as virtues. Up until the dipshit fucking killed a woman because he was too cheap to hire proper firearms managers on the set of some stupid straight-to-DVD cowboy movie, quite a lot of lefty fans of his pretty much did. “Oh haha! I loooooove 30 Rock! Alec Baldwin’s soooooo funny! Such snappy one-liners!” the Twitter libs would say over the years.
There’s no way to wrap this up properly without going on for at least another 1,000 words, so we’ll leave it open-ended. There was a day in the DC writer’s room when they said “Okay, we got to page 4 where Lex Luthor is actually elected President, so what the fuck do we do next?” Among us and among yourselves it’s time to think about the next page. But for all the ways that entertainment and politics intersect here, this is not strictly for entertainment purposes. Really think on this.
Because what if liberals are just as susceptible to the wits of a greasy degenerate from New York as the folks out in MAGA Land? If such a malevolence was elected an was on *our* side, would we still be so absolutist about character and virtue? And even if we were like those supposedly initially reluctant to support Trump Republicans who “held their noses”, would we always be like that?
Kool-Aid comes in more colors than just orange.