If Trump wins, I’m leaving the country. I’m serious. I’ll pack my bags, drive straight to the airport, and ask for the first ticket to anywhere. I know people say it every election, but they don’t mean it like I do. If Trump wins, I’ll hop right on a Spirit Airlines, watch The Maze Runner: Scorch Trials in-flight, and start my life over, maybe in a cliff-side Italian village or somewhere in Scandinavia.
Of course, if Trump wins, there’s the issue of my wife Joanna and our children. Would I really uproot their lives just to make a political statement? Obviously not, that would be selfish. If Trump wins, I’ll kiss my two beautiful sons Dylan and Cayden goodnight, wait until Joanna falls asleep, and disappear from the home we made together before sunrise.
No, this is not a midlife crisis. Do you see a sports car parked in my garage? Do you see me wearing Cayden’s Beats by Dre headphones and listening to his EDM music? Leaving the country has nothing to do with how Joanna and I probably wouldn’t be together if I hadn’t gotten her pregnant in high school, or the second mortgage we took out on the house. This is about politics. Do you even know anything about politics? I do.
Maybe if Trump wins, I’ll decide to settle down again someday. I’ll start a new family in the English countryside. I’ll find a wife, a green-eyed Argentinian beauty named Nadia, who doesn’t roll her eyes when I mention my literary aspirations to write a novel (without giving too much away, think The Da Vinci Code meets 1974 folk-rock song “Cat’s in the Cradle”). And we’ll have children, two girls, who do things besides play Minecraft and watch Vines all day.
If Trump wins, with all the checks and balances in the political system, how much could things really change? It’s not about change, it’s about principles. Look, I’m a man of action. I stand up for what I believe in, and I refuse to be a passive accomplice to his politics. If I stayed in this country upon Trump’s election, I’d be tacitly endorsing his every policy, and my moral compass simply will not allow it. If Trump wins, I’ll leave the country, rent a chalet in the Swiss Alps, and every Sunday, I’ll go to the marketplace in the town square, where Luca will sell me marmalade.
Of course, I’ll need a source of income to purchase marmalade. If Trump wins, the dead-end office job I fell into after college and that’s sucked the life out of me since won’t matter. We’d be living under Trump’s regime! It won’t be easy, but if Trump wins, to make ends meet I’ll have to take an apprenticeship with a glassblower in Montserrat, spend years toiling over open flames to impress tourists with my handcrafted dining sets, and then take over the studio upon my master’s death. Or maybe I’ll just join an ashram.
If Trump wins, you could leave the country too. You could leave your spouse, move to Miami, snort a ton of coc — wait, that’s still in the United States. You’re doing it wrong. If Trump wins, you could move to Puerto Rico — nope, that’s still a U.S. territory. Okay, let’s try this: You could move to El Salvador — that checks out, I looked it up on one of my son’s iPads — live on a farm where you’ll grow cacao and tend a herd of alpacas. You’ll spin the softest wool in the whole village, so soft, like a cloud and a baby had a baby. And snort a ton of cocaine!
If Trump wins, we could visit each other all the time without having our spouses complain that we’re never available to help around the house, that we treat them like a maid service, that we forgot our eldest son’s birthday party and humiliated him in front of his fourth grade class. We could hike the fjords of Reykjavík! Or care for a small Shinto shrine on the outskirts of Nagasaki! Or sail the Balkans, docking our ship in a different port every night until we’ve circumnavigated every inch of this entire freakin’ globe!
But hey, don’t get carried away. Trump winning, it’s all just hypothetical, right — the chalet, Luca, my twin girls with plaits running down their back who will call me “Papá”? Trump won’t win. The American people are too sensible. And you and I will just stay here in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, until at last we draw our dying breaths.