November Surprise, Anyone?

We’ve suffered through Benghazigate, Bordergate, Servergate, Pussygate, and now Servergate Redux. The surprises of October are behind us. But if we’ve learned anything from our three-semester lab course on the dark side of democracy, it’s that, with a FULL WEEK remaining before the election, we face the certainty of being accosted with yet more revelations. To shed a ray or two of light on the wreckage and rubble we’ve yet to sift through, our crack investigative reporter, who’s been up to her eyeballs surveying the political landscape, has submitted the following timeline of bombs, large and small, that are likely to detonate over the next seven days.

(In deference to our many West Coast readers, all times are Pacific)

Tuesday, November 1

9:15 a.m. Noted civil rights attorney Gloria Allred will file a class action sexual harassment suit in Utah District Court against Donald Trump on behalf of 360 members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (the entire ensemble). Citing an excerpt from the formal Complaint: “In full view of the choir, and claiming to have been taunted by Lily O’Toole, 54, a mezzo-soprano from Provo, Mr. Trump (who was attending a rehearsal in the midst of a campaign junket) felt compelled to lay to rest, once and for all, the “myth” about the scale of a certain bodily organ in relation to the size of his hands.”

7:32 p.m. During the sixth game of the World Series, at which Donald Trump and President Obama will occupy box seats in close proximity, Mr. Trump will engage in a heated exchange with the President that will escalate to a point at which Mr. Trump will hurl a fully dressed hot dog at the latter, narrowing missing him, but striking a member of his Secret Service detail whose shirt will be splattered with ketchup. Trump and his entourage, including several family members, will be quietly escorted from the game, which will continue as if nothing had happened. This incident will be seen live on Fox Sports by 21.4 million viewers before going viral on YouTube and surpassing the all-time record holder — the Fifty Shades Darker trailer — with 156 million hits in the first 24 hours. Two days later, Kraft Heinz, Inc. will solicit bids from several ad agencies to develop a multimedia “put some ketchup on your weiner” campaign, and Trump will briefly overtake Clinton in the polls.

Wednesday, November 2

3:05 a.m. Donald Trump will tweet, “Of all the First Ladies, Melania will be the first ten. Definitely a ten. Jackie, so overrated, was at best a six. Hillary a two, maybe a one.”

11:05 a.m. Documents will surface implicating the Clinton Foundation in the funneling of millions of dollars into offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands to promote the early careers of pop singers Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Adele in order to secure their eventual endorsements of Secretary Clinton.

2:45 p.m. The New York Times will report that Donald Trump has received the endorsement of the Workers’ Party Chairman of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Jung-Un.

Thursday, November 3

11:15 a.m. In a live interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, Trump will produce notarized transcripts proving that Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard L. Feringa, winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter,” all received advanced degrees from Trump University.

3:00 p.m. In a shocking development, Kellyanne Conway will resign her position as Trump campaign manager, citing personal reasons. Unidentified campaign staffers will reveal that Ms. Conway had been repeatedly harassed by her boss over the entire course of her tenure with the campaign, including having been recently cornered in her bathrobe and slippers by Mr. Trump, wearing a crotchless Spiderman costume, near the 6th Floor ice machine in the Des Moines Marriott.

6:02 p.m. Politico.com will publish an authenticated copy of Schedule A from Donald Trump’s 2007 federal personal income tax return, showing charitable contributions consisting solely of in-kind donations of “misc. kitchen paraphernalia” to Goodwill Industries valued at $499, the maximum amount that can be claimed without itemization.

Friday, November 4

10:25 a.m. At a rally in Sarasota, Florida, Donald Trump, flanked by Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Rick Scott, will announce the highly sought-after endorsement, the first ever for a presidential candidate, from Dan McKeague, voice of the Aflac Duck.

12:40 p.m. In an effort to put to rest accusations that the first Obama Administration left a “power vacuum” in the Middle East that was eventually filled by ISIS, Hillary Clinton will hold a press conference at which she will unpack a large carton, labeled in Arabic, containing an Electrolux “Ultra-One” Deluxe Canister Model. She will remove the vacuum cleaner bag from the unit and demonstrate that it contains nothing whatsoever resembling ISIS. This demonstration of Secretary Clinton’s surreal, twisted sense of humor will serve to restore her momentum and give her a slight edge in the polls going into the final weekend of the campaign.

Saturday, November 5

8:45 a.m. FBI Special Agent Matthew Bakker will surrender his gun and badge to authorities in Charlotte, North Carolina, admitting that, during the course of his investigation into Anthony Weiner’s alleged sexual misconduct with a local 10th grader, he hacked into Weiner’s laptop and planted several thousand emails between Secretary Clinton and Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin, all recycled from those previously reviewed by the FBI during its earlier Clinton probe. Agent Bakker, adopted son of TV evangelist Jim Bakker and the late Tammy Faye Bakker, cited “substantive differences of opinion with FBI Chief James Comey regarding the latter’s blasphemous exoneration of the nefarious she-devil from the netherworld” as his motive.

1:15 p.m. The Clinton campaign will produce an audio recording of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin having phone sex. Prominent in the recording will be a third voice, that of Melania Trump, translating Donald’s end of the conversation into German, a language in which both Mrs. Trump and President Putin are fluent.

3:45 p.m. FBI Director James Comey will hold an impromptu news conference at which he will confirm rumors that the FBI is satisfied that the Clinton-Abedin emails on the Weiner laptop were, indeed, planted by Special Agent Bakker, and that there will be no further investigation of potential wrongdoing by Secretary Clinton.

11:39 p.m. In a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live, an exuberant Hillary Clinton, after receiving a seven minute standing ovation, will announce that, during her first hundred days in office, she will initiate divorce proceedings against her husband of forty-one years, the former President of the United States and “Quintessential Arkansas Horndog,” William Jefferson Clinton.

Sunday, November 6

2:15 a.m. Donald Trump will tweet, “It’s official. If Hillary wins, North Korea will launch a nuclear missile in the general direction of Tokyo next Wednesday. Tremendous gesture.”

8:30 a.m. In special appearances on NBC’s Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday, Hillary Clinton will announce that, “when” she is elected, she plans to appoint James Comey as Attorney General.

9:00 a.m. On CBS’s Face the Nation, Dr. Winfield Pratt, professor of applied physics at Yale and renowned nuclear ballistics expert, will confirm that North Korea may have miniaturized a nuclear weapon in the thirty kiloton range sufficiently to be effectively delivered by a Rodong-A intermediate range missile.

11:20 a.m: The Washington Post will report that Swedish authorities have dropped rape charges against Julian Assange. Within forty-five minutes, Donald Trump’s federal income tax returns from 1985 to 2015 will appear on Wiki-Leaks.

Monday, November 7

3:01 a.m. A story will break on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Donald Trump had consensual sex with Hillary Clinton during her husband’s first term as Arkansas Governor, and that DNA evidence will prove Chelsea Clinton to be Mr. Trump’s biological daughter.

7:35 a.m. John Podesta will announce that, after making brief appearances at campaign rallies in Philadelphia and Scranton, Hillary Clinton will head home to Chappaqua where she plans to crack open a bottle of Blue Label in her private screening room and kick back with Mel Gibson to watch his new flick.

9:30 a.m. Donald Trump will hold a press conference at which Dr. Atwill Smee, noted psychiatrist and ufologist, will explain that Mr. Trump’s astonishing intelligence and “other-worldly” interpersonal sensitivity derive from a fateful homecoming weekend in 1961 at the New York Military Academy when he was abducted, probed, and genetically retrofitted by aliens from an undisclosed planet. Evidence of this encounter will be supplied in the form of a thumb drive, said by Mr. Trump to have been entrusted to him by his intergalactic mentors “years, many, many years, before thumb drives were invented on Earth,” and which contains numerous jpeg images of “various planets and such, like Saturn and the moon.”

12:50 p.m. At a massive rally in Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, Donald Trump will announce that, if elected, he will demand that Mike Pence, “the world’s biggest loser,” step down as Vice President-elect, and then appoint either Joe Biden or Colin Kaepernick as his replacement, depending on whose approval numbers are higher at the time.

11:50 p.m. The NSA will begin investigating metadata from a flurry of text messages that began earlier in the day between an insecure phone line in Palm Beach, Florida and an indeterminate party with a country dialing code of 850 (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.)

Tuesday, November 8

12:00 a.m. Election Day. All bets are off.

© 2016 Ron Dulaney