The Flip Flop

It’s January 20th, 2018. One year to the day since President Hillary Clinton was sworn into office after losing the General Election by 2.9 million votes, but winning the Electoral College 306-227.

The election may mark the fifth time in U.S. history a president has been elected after receiving fewer votes than an opponent—but it’s the first time the opponent has completely rejected the results and refused to concede, going so far as to set up his own alternate White House on top of his Washington hotel–the hugeliest, most best, most Trumpiest White House ever! And tens of millions of American voters agree Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States.

The Flip Flop is a funny, smart, and droll vision of the alternate universe that could very well be the United States today had the 2016 Presidential Election results been flip-flopped, with a well-funded, self-aggrandizing, social-media savvy losing candidate declaring himself the rightful winner; an often detached from reality but passionate “base” (and majority of voters) rejecting the Electoral College results, and a major television network reveling in its great luck and ingeniously finding ways to fuel the fire (and its own ratings) on a 24x7 basis.

At its core, The Flip Flop offers a fresh, farcical and entertaining skewering of how quickly the Velcro viewpoints of voters, politicians, the media and others can change, depending on nothing other than political affiliation, the alternative facts one chooses to believe, and what drives profits and TV ratings. Today’s firm opposition to an issue can easily be tomorrow’s support. The Electoral College? Russian meddling? Voter registration? It seems everyone has rock solid, unambiguous convictions on those issues and others, right up until they don’t. Thirty-three years after 1984, perhaps the only person who might recognize 2018 is Winston Smith. And he didn’t even vote—or did he, perhaps more than once?

In the one year after taking office in 2017, President Hillary Clinton has found herself befuddled, her dreams and plans for a new administration constantly sidetracked as she fights to defend the legitimacy of her presidency. As for Trump, he’s on top of the world, having gotten more out the election than he could have ever dreamed. Even though he privately seethes over the Electoral College vote (and calls for the Department of Education to defund it as it's a "very bad university"), Trump is also secretly overjoyed. Why sit in dull meetings that require attention spans and the reading of “reports” when a simple 280-character Tweet is all that’s needed before hitting the golf course?

Now Clinton finds herself in a daily fight not with ISIS, but to keep her administration from spinning out of control as Trump operates from his own West Wing (but West Wingier!). In no time he’s appointing his own “incredibly great, great, great” cabinet members (with one eliminated each week on his NBC reality show “The Apprentice: The Cabinet”); hyping an “unbelievable” health care plan that is based primarily on former running mate Mike Pence’s ability to form prayer groups, and announcing an IPO for The Great Trump Wall, Inc., which he says is being created to build the wall along the Mexican border that fake President Hillary Clinton won’t build (working class Americans use what little savings they have to snap up the stock based on promises of huge returns, never seeing reason to read the fine print on something called a Prospectus).

The Art of the Deal never dealt so good.