When Trump Said That He Meant Something Else (Satire)

 In this great satire, Alexandra Petri (in The Washington Post) has fun with Trump's statement that christians won't have to vote again after this election:

Probably, as usual, this is meaningless. You know how some people are. You cannot take anything they say literally. The speeches of Donald Trump are supposed to be surreal and unsettling. Like a Salvador Dalí painting, but with words.

So I’m sure that when the former president said, “Get out and vote just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” and, “We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote,” he meant something different than what it sounded like.

It sounded pretty scary and autocratic, I agree! But look, when you’re a nail, everything Donald Trump says sounds like a hammer. That doesn’t mean it is or isn’t a hammer. That just means you need to calm down.

Why, off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of reasons you would say something like this and not mean that you were intending to stop elections:

• Trump knows that something will happen in the lives of all his listeners — nothing bad, just something that will keep them busy in 2028, when other voters will take their place.
• He has the gift of prophecy and foresees a horrifying cataclysm that will make voting obsolete. Not his doing! Something to do with magma. He can’t elaborate because he doesn’t want to worry you.
• Trump will simply not be running in four years because he knows the Constitution doesn’t permit it, so he’s indifferent to what you do then and happy to see Democrats win!
• This quote was simply broken up wrong during transcription. The actual sentences were, “We’ll have it fixed so good. You’re not going to have to. Vote!”
• He means you won’t need to vote because the country will be so free and so far from autocracy that you won’t even have to worry.
• He didn’t mean everyone; he just meant “my beautiful Christians”! He thinks their influence in politics is too great and wants to discourage their turnout.
• Hyperbole — he only meant you will have to stop voting for president. State and local elections will still take place normally.
• In four years, the country will be overrun with bears and it will be too dangerous to go out and vote, and Donald Trump knows about this. Voting will pick back up in 2032 once the bears have had their fun.
• He means nothing. No further questions!
• Currently this does mean exactly what it sounds like, but he is going to say “... not!” in a few weeks. He loves his jokes.
• He just means the totally unworrisome thing his defenders are saying he meant: that by 2028 everything will be so perfectly arranged according to conservative Christian voters’ desires that no unanswered wish could possibly compel them to the polls. By then, we will have Bibles and the Ten Commandments in every classroom, abortions and no-fault divorce nowhere, and the married, heterosexual couple as the only valid family structure. See, isn’t that so much better?
• Or the magma!