CULTURE

The 7 Craziest Things That Have Happened Since Trump Was Elected

It's Been Three Years Since Election Night, And It's Time Look Back on the Chaos

ABC

Three years ago today, The New York Times was still proudly proclaiming the near-certainty that Hillary Clinton would be our president, and we all pretty much assumed they were right.

But if you were Biff Tannen in Back to the Future 2 (which President Trump absolutely is), travelling back in time with your future-knowledge, you could have made some good money betting on the election upset.

BTTF2: Old Biff Gives The Grays Sports Almanac to His 1955 Alter Egowww.youtube.com

In the UK, where it's legal to bet on these things, gamblers made millions by betting on Trump's victory. Still though, Trump's win is hardly the most surprising thing that's happened in the last three years. If you really wanted to get out there with your gambling, you could make some serious cash predicting stuff like…

Kanye Is Going to Come Out as a Trump Supporter

Dragon energy! Less than two weeks after the election, Kanye began the horrifying saga that is still underway by announcing that, if he voted, he would have voted for Trump. This is obviously a strange turn for the man who once visibly broke Mike Myers by saying "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Considering the fact that 80% of black voters consider Trump racist, and only 8% voted for him in 2016, and that Trump and his father were actually sued back in the 70s by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people, you might expect Kanye to have similar concerns about our current Commander-in-chief. You would be wrong, because Kanye knows that Trump has "dragon energy," which is why he wears MAGA hats and says that being enslaved was a choice.

Trump's Press Secretary Is Going to Be on "​​Dancing With the Stars​​"

Sean Spicer was bad at his job. He was easily flustered, combative, couldn't deliver a convincing lie, and was constantly distracted by having a colon literally packed to the brim with swallowed chewing gum. But once he'd resigned, it was time to start rehabilitating his image. The process began just a few months after he left the White House in September of 2017, when he made a theatrical appearance on stage at the 69th Emmy Awards—to the delight of Kevin Spacey—and joked about how he used to lie to America for a living. Since then, he's been a correspondent on Extra and finally achieved the pinnacle of his career in August of this year, when he was announced as a member of the cast of Dancing With the Stars season 28. Good luck, Sean!

He's Going to Give Omarosa a Job at the White House

Remember Omarosa Manigault? Back in 2016 the name might have rung a bell. She was the devious villain who lost the first season of The Apprentice and went on to have a successful career as "that awful woman from The Apprentice." Who better to work in the White House? After all, she recognized the importance of the office of the presidency as "the ultimate revenge", so… Actually, her addition to Trump's transition team in December of 2016 was pretty predictable. The only thing more predictable was the fact that she would eventually stab Trump in the back. The fact that she had to be physically dragged out of the White House is a nice bonus though.

An Adult Film Star Is Going to Describe His Mushroom-Penis

Everyone knows that Donald Trump has the best, classiest taste, so if he's going to cheat on his new wife with an adult entertainment star, you'd better believe that star is going to be a three-time "Favorite Breasts" award-winner, and the star of classic films like Trailer Trash Nurses 6 and Camp Cuddly Pines Power Tool Massacre. What might be a little less predictable is that said entertainer will write a book in which she compares Trump's weird penis to a mushroom.

He's Going to Compare "Button" Sizes with Kim Jung-Un

Speaking of Trump's weird penis, you know what a dick-measuring contest could be a fun metaphor for? A series of reciprocated threats between two men comparing terrifying nuclear arsenals. What fun. You could definitely make some money predicting something so stupid, but what's really impressive is predicting that these two star-crossed madmen will then fall in love.

He's Going to Create a Sci-Fi Military Branch Called Space Force

Space Force? Okay, at this point your predictions are just lining up with what a ten-year-old would do with the presidency…which is actually a pretty good model for anticipating his behavior. Unfortunately, Space Force is not going to involve kickass, Starship Trooper space marines, but the ridiculous name alone is pretty great. What could be more childish than that? Other than…

He's Going to Look Directly at a Solar Eclipse

Do you remember being warned about solar eclipses as a child? It's like the number two thing about eclipses. Number one, the moon blocks the sun. Number two, don't look at it! Surely, no adult would be so stupid, right? In his ongoing effort to be a caricature of ignorant defiance, Trump ignored this warning and looked directly at the sun during the 2017 solar eclipse.

Now just remember this list when you hop in your time machine, and you should be all set. If you want, you could also cash in on some of the more predictable stuff, like appointing an "alleged" sex criminal to the supreme court and putting kids in concentration camps, but obviously the real money is in Space Force.

MUSIC

Why Music Hates Trump: Prince's "Purple Rain" and Pop's War with the President

Using "Purple Rain" is a particularly low blow. Did anyone really expect anything different from Trump?

Prince

Uncredited/AP/Shutterstock

Donald Trump used Prince's music at a campaign rally, and Prince's estate is not happy about it.

Over a year ago, Trump promised Prince's estate that he would not use any of the late artist's music for his campaign events. But yesterday, "Purple Rain" boomed across the crowds as Trump took to the stage in Minneapolis. In response, Prince's estate posted a photo of a letter that confirmed the President's vow to refrain from using the songs.

Prince fans are as outraged as his estate. As the song played in Minneapolis, protests broke out in the theatre across the street from the rally, which is where the song's original music video was filmed. Now Twitter and the Internet are ablaze with anger, though as usual, the President will likely face no consequences for his blatant disregard of the law and all moral decency.

Prince died in April 2016, months before Trump was elected, but one would imagine that the singer—who openly discussed AIDS, criticized the machismo of the space race, supported Black Lives Matter, and relentlessly fought corporate interests in the music industry—wouldn't approve of 45, to say the least.

Using "Purple Rain" is a particularly low blow. The Trump team's decision to play the song is arguably as insensitive as the time the president played Pharrell Williams' "Happy" mere hours after a gunman killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

"Purple Rain" is Prince's number one hit, inextricable from his legacy and persona. It's a song about forgiveness and love and the expansive force that truly great music can be. One needs only to watch the first moments of the song's music video to comprehend the force of the song's meaning; you can see it written all over Prince's face.

Prince - Purple Rain (Official Video)www.youtube.com

On the other hand, Trump—as an entity, a symbol, and a politician—is fundamentally hollow, a cheap mutation of garish American greed and corruption. He never fails to dig his claws deeper into all that seems to mean something in this world, and he never expresses an ounce of remorse or empathy.

Using "Purple Rain" in a campaign rally is far from the worst thing Trump has done—encouraging white supremacy and xenophobia, imprisoning innocent children, and denying climate change are contenders for that prize—but it does symbolize something powerful. It also reveals exactly why Trump and music exist in polar opposition to each other. Music is about truth, connection, artistry, and empathy, all of which Trump lacks the ability to understand.

What makes Trump so incompatible with music? Perhaps it's that Trump as an entity is essentially atonal and dissonant. There's no harmony to his way of operating, no beat or rhythm or reason to the spaces he and his administration and supporters occupy. There's no emotional consistency and no resonance to his existence. He stands in opposition to everything that music is and all that musicians tend to stand for (unless you're Kid Rock or Kanye West, tragically). It can't be a coincidence that in The Art of the Deal, he wrote that in second grade, "I punched my music teacher because I didn't think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled."

Is anyone surprised that this man doesn't respect Prince's legacy enough to refrain from using his work against his will? Has Trump ever granted anyone that decency?

In general, musicians want nothing to do with the president. Who could forget the struggle he underwent to garner support for his inauguration, and everything that's happened since? Just this week, in her Vogue cover story, Rihanna attacked Trump in a discussion about gun violence in America. She said, "Put an Arab man with that same weapon in that same Walmart and there is no way that Trump would sit there and address it publicly as a mental health problem. The most mentally ill human being in America right now seems to be the president."

So many other musicians have asked Trump not to use their music that it would be impossible to list them all here. Adele, Elton John, R.E.M., Pharell Williams, Axl Rose, The Rolling Stones, and many more have told him to keep his paws off their work, and hundreds of others have denounced him in their music and personal statements.

Even if Trump did possess an atom of musicality or knew how to listen to a sound other than the grating industrial noise that certainly fills his own brain, "Purple Rain" would be a strange song choice to use for a campaign rally. When describing the song, Prince said that "'Purple Rain' pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/god guide you through the purple rain." In another song, "1999," he associated a purple sky with a kind of final apocalyptic revelation, singing, "Could have sworn it was Judgment Day, the sky was all purple."

It sometimes does seem that Trump is a steward of some kind of apocalypse, indicative of some sort of breaking point. It's likely that his rise represents a rupture in American democracy as we know it, marking a final ending to what we knew and the beginning of something else. This could be a very positive thing, if the anger he's churned up carves out space for new visions of justice and equity in the form of the downfall of corrupt corporate interests, or it could mark our further descent into the end times. Either way, none of this makes Trump's use of "Purple Rain" any less troubling. All we can hope for is that Trump and all he stands for faces Judgment Day sooner rather than later.