Boston Globe Headlines From 2017 Are Truly Scary

The would be April 9 2017
edition of the Boston Globe.  

UPDATE: 

Donald Trump reacted to the Boston Globe fake front page, predictably calling it "stupid"

"How about that stupid Boston Globe? It's worthless. It sold for a dollar."

I guess if a newspaper sells for $1 it's automatically stupid. Sell it for much more, and I guess it's OK.

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In case you missed it, the front page of the April 9,  2017 editions of the Boston Globe are really a nightmare.

I know, I know, it's not 2017 yet and the first paragraph of this post is not one of my famous typos.

But that imagined front page, which is on the actual front page of today's opinion/editorial section of the Sunday Boston Globe, imagines a world in which Donald Trump is indeed president.

It takes Trump's campaign promises at face value, and brings us to what the world would be like.

"It is an exercise in taking a man at his word," writes the Boston Globe editorial staff.

"Deportations To Begin " screams the headline at the top of the April 9, 2017 Boston Globe. There's a subhead that reads: "President Trump Calls For Tripling of ICE Force" and as almost an afterthought continues. "Riots Continue"

Other headlines on the front page are just as grim: "Markets Sink As Trade War Looms" and maybe one of the scariest: "U.S. Soldiers Refuse Orders To Kill ISIS Families."

That's a riff on Trump's off-stated idea that not only should we kill ISIS terrorists, but their families, too.

I guess to teach them a lesson? I dunno. What lesson?

The soldier story goes on, "The military faces a 'crisis of good order and discipline,' Pentagon officials said yesterday, after days of widespread unrest in the ranks over White House orders to kill relatives of ISIS militants. More protests were planned in support of two Army Special Forces soldiers who disobeyed direct orders to kill everyone in an ISIS compound."

It's worth going on the Boston Globe web site, read the editorial explaining their mock paper, and then clicking on each April 9, 2017 article to read them in detail.

Here's a good PDF of this front page if that makes it easier to read (probably does)

The Boston Globe does insert a bit of humor in the front page that mocks Trump. In a column that advertises articles on the inside pages of the April 9, 2017, Boston Globe, we learn that NASA engineers halted an unmanned probe on fears that the new gold leaf trim would interfere with radio communications.

We also learn that heavy spring snow has closed "Trump National Park for the first time since it dropped its loser name, 'Yellowstone' in January."

The U.S. Education Secretary is also trying to force PBS to remake "Celebrity Apprentice" using hand puppets, and the president's new romance novel has been pulled from store shelves because some of it plagarizes from a May, 1986 edition of Penthouse magazine.

Nevertheless, the April 9, 2017 Boston Globe is a clever bit of clairvoyance we should all pay attention to.

The scary thing to me is that the scenarios that play out in these articles seem totally plausible if Trump is serious about what hes saying now.  (Except maybe the humorous bits.)

Here's the basic problem: Demagogues like Trump love to spill what seem like easy, common sense solutions to deep, complex problems. But he either won't or can't predict the chain reaction of stuff that will go on.

Trump and his followers are mostly a subset of the type of people who can't think: "If I do A, then B, C and D will happen." They don't have the brain firepower to to get past "I Will Do A"

Today's Boston Globe full throttle blast won't make any of his supporters think twice, I'm sure. But it is quite an exercise in predicting the future.

And it's not a future I or most people I know want.