What If...? – We Did Slip Into a New Timeline and This Was The Better Option

The Watcher from Marvel's 'What If...?'

I often joke and wonder if we slipped into an alternate timeline around the time Trump got elected because everything has just felt wrong ever since then.  Trump has gone on to become a messiah for the stupid and angry.  It’s polluted the entire Republican party.   But like, the Cubs finally won the World Series.  That’s not supposed to happen.  Hadn’t happened in over 100 years.  But in this timeline it does.  There’s other things I remember hearing about and I'm sure there's tons of write-ups on why people think this to the point that it’s kind of been a running joke to shitty things that seem to keep happening.  “well, in the Trumpverse it happens”    My sci-fi brain started wondering what would have caused the universe to shift in the first place. 

A lot of people like to say that it was David Bowie dying or the crazy theory about a weasel and the Hadron Collider that caused the ripple in the fabric of reality.  While funny and interesting I don't think that's it.   I got to thinking, did someone go back in time and change something that led us to this shitty future?  Was it the Butterfly Effect or something more deliberate and sinister? or what if...?   

But then I thought, holy shit maybe this is the better future.  Perhaps in the original timeline, Bernie Sanders or Hilary Clinton became president and caused something that spun us into disaster.  Right wing backlash could have spawned a civil war or a great depression and disrupted the entire world economy launching us into global unrest or a nuclear world war.  Maybe there was immediately an assassination and replaced by someone way worse.   How bad did it have to be that the reality we are in now was the better option? All of the bullshit we've gone through because of Trump.  I picture some scientists and historians in the future running calculations on advanced quantum AI computers in a bunker deep underground searching for the best option.  After evaluating all the results finally seeing this version of reality and going “fuck, Trump has to win” 

12 Monkeys(1995)

Maybe we needed to come to a breaking point in order to reset somehow.  As if it’s a ‘gotta get worse before it gets better’ kind of situation.   Similar to the movie 12 Monkeys could there have been one guy that’s sent back in time and has to convince some important people pulling the strings that Trump has to win for the sake of humanity.   Poor fucker.  “Trust me, I’m from the future”  Since he keeps failing, obviously, and getting sent back to try again.  Every time trying different points in time trying different ways to convince people.   Finally going back to the late 1970’s to help influence the modern republican party.  Get Reagan elected and over decades create an electorate of right wing conservatives, racists, evangelicals and every day idiots who are radicalized by talk radio and Fox news that ultimately gets Trump elected…. (barfing in my mouth a little as I type this) to save the future of humanity.  Saving it by creating the worst outcome that we could feasibly come back from. An outcome that doesn't end in near extinction of the human race.   So yea, it sucks but I guess it could be worse and maybe it was. Time travel was somehow invented and this is the fix. 
   
Sorry for all the doom and gloom on a stormy Tuesday morning. Sometimes I just think of shit like this.