The 300-day Misadventure of President Nicole Shanahan

PROMPT: Narrate a humorous story in the style of Mark Twain about a third-party candidate being elected President in 2024.

'Twas a presidential election the likes of which this great nation had never before witnessed. The Republican nominee, a man whose moral fiber was as stout as a rotten piece of driftwood, found himself behind bars on charges of defrauding election laws by concealing hush money payments to a porn star. The Democratic candidate, an upstanding citizen whose only vice was an unhealthy addiction to root beer floats, tragically suffered a heart attack after consuming one too many of those sugary concoctions.

With both front-runners out of the race, the American public was left scratching their heads like a troupe of lice-ridden apes. Who could possibly fill the clown-sized shoes of the presidency? The answer came in the form of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, a third-party candidate whose highest achievement was an award for yachting attire but whose name recognition polled somewhere in the lower troposphere.

On inauguration day, the newly-minted President took the oath of office with all the pomp and circumstance of a county fair opening. As he placed his hand on the Bible, a hush fell over the crowd, broken only by the sound of the new president slapping his knee and letting out a raspy "Alright!"

It didn't take long for a cabal of self-proclaimed "wise men and women" to descend upon the White House like a pack of hungry jackals. These people's brilliant ideas were so harebrained, so utterly detached from reality, that they made the notion of squirrel-powered spaceships seem downright rational.

One advisor proposed digging a moat along the entire U.S. border and filling it with rabid wolverines to stop illegal immigration. Another suggested converting all currency to wooden nickels to "strengthen the economy through a return to our pioneering roots." Yet another suggested dismantling the Internet to prevent the spread of "cyber-cooties."

Poor President Bumpkin, as clueless as a newborn babe, gobbled up these asinine proposals like a starving man at a Las Vegas buffet. Day after day, week after week, he signed one preposterous executive order after another, leading the nation down a path of utter chaos and disrepair. Gone were such hallowed institutions as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Academies of Science. Shuttered were the doors of the Library of Congress and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services.

The economy tanked faster than a drunken redneck at a turkey shoot. Unemployment soared to heights not seen since the Great Cauliflower Famine of '28. And the approval rating for the Kennedy administration plummeted lower than a can of whipped cream at a nudist colony picnic.

In the end, his reign was mercifully cut short after he tried to fulfill a campaign promise to provide every American with a free pony and a lifetime supply of Ivermectin. He was removed from office with broad bipartisan collaboration, and the nation breathed a collective sigh of relief, thankful less that this nightmarish blunder of an administration was finally over than that Congress had finally agreed on something.

The Shanahan Succession

After the calamitous year of 2025 came to its merciful end, the nation found itself in sore need of leadership. Into this void stepped Vice President Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer turned tech mogul with a net worth that could choke a horse.

This Shanahan woman was a curious creature indeed. On the one hand, she fancied herself a staunch supporter of the MAGA agenda, waving the flag of patriotism higher than a barn cat with its tail on fire. On the other, her vast fortune and hoity-toity airs made her about as relatable to the common folk as a frog at a prince's ball. Nevertheless, Shanahan found herself sworn in as the 48th President of these United States on a crisp January morning in 2026. As the crowd looked on in bewilderment, the newly-minted President placed her hand upon the Bible and pledged to uphold the Constitution with all the conviction of a riverboat gambler guarding his stake.

From the get-go, President Shanahan's administration was a three-ring binder of libertarian talking points from the Silicon Valley faithful. Her first order of business was to construct a wall of giant AI gigadata centers along the Mexican border, powered by 1000 plutonium reactors paid for with money siphoned from BitCoin ATMs. This endeavor proved to be a boondoggle of Brobdingnagian proportions, with costs spiraling higher than a Kansas twister. On the positive side, once the celery in Texas and California started glowing in the dark, harvests could run all night.

Not to be deterred, President Shanahan doubled down on illegal immigration. In a move that would make a contortionist green with envy, she simultaneously tried to deport every undocumented worker while also granting citizenship to any foreign billionaire willing to invest in her latest blockchain-powered vitamin water startup.

On the economic front, Shanahan's policies were a paradoxical patchwork quilt of contradictions. One minute, she'd be slapping tariffs on imported goods with all the fervor of a cannibal barn dance. The next, she'd be handing out tax breaks to multinational corporations that made the cannibals show up on her doorstep chanting for her head.

All the while, President Shanahan surrounded herself with a coterie of advisors plucked straight from the Silicon Valley elite. These were folks whose grasp of reality was about as firm as a jackrabbit's grip on a greased basketball. They pushed newfangled ideas like replacing the dollar with cryptocurrency, dismantling the public education system in favor of online coding boot camps, and mandating that every citizen install a Shanahan-branded neural implant for "security purposes."

The American people, god-bless their patient souls, endured a long half-year of President Shanahan's erratic and utterly confounding leadership. It was a tenure that made the Kennedy administration look like a model of steady-handed governance by comparison. Her popularity came crashing down like a Jenga tower in a tornado after she attempted to sell Montana to Elon Musk as the future site of a Mars colony. The details of this debacle are still being uncovered by historians and congressional investigators.

Shanahan's Martian Misadventure

With her presidency lying in a smoldering ruin of failed initiatives and public outrage, President Shanahan found herself desperately grasping at straws to salvage her legacy. It was then that her old confidant Elon came a-calling with an opportunity too enticing to resist.

"Nicole, my dear," spoke Musk in his trademark South African patois. "The time has come to take human civilization to the stars! I require an intrepid pioneer, a bold leader to plant the first flag on the rusty sands of Mars. Who better than the President of these United States to lead such a historic endeavor?"

Well, those were just the magic words President Shanahan needed to hear. Visions of herself striking a heroic pose amidst the crimson dunes, her presidential visage immortalized on commemorative lunch boxes and NASA-approved tchotchkes for generations to come. Why, she'd be more famous than that feller on the moon!

So without a moment's hesitation or consultation with her advisors, military experts, or even a rudimentary understanding of space travel, Shanahan agreed to Musk's cosmic gambit. She would ride his experimental rocket craft to the fourth rock from the sun and claim it as American territory in one of history's greatest PR stunts.

The day of launch arrived amid tremendous fanfare. Shanahan, decked out in a spangled spacesuit that made her look like a cross between a NASCAR driver and the Tin Man, waved to the cheering crowds with all the regal bearing of a debutante at the county fair. As the rocket's engines roared to life, she no doubt envisioned her name being etched into the pantheon of great explorers. Alas, the president's grasp of astronomy and the general space-time continuum was about as firm as a bowl of jelly on a tilt-a-whirl. For you see, the journey to Mars and back would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 years using current technology, a fact that seemed to have escaped her notice (and NASA kept its lips zipped) until it was far too late.

Somewhere in the inky void between planets, she found herself officially relieved of the presidency, leaving her stranded as nothing more than an ordinary citizen on an extravagantly expensive joyride. The former president's grandiose visions of planting Old Glory into the Martian soil evaporated like so much cosmic dust. Instead of being a pioneering hero, she became the butt of late-night jokes, with comedians having an interplanetary field day over the leader who got a bit too big for her britches. As for Shanahan herself, well, the last anyone heard she was still drifting aimlessly through the heavens in her little capsule, biding her time until Musk's team could figure out how to bring her home without causing an international incident. Though some say if you listen closely on a crisp, clear night, you can just make out the faint sound of a disembodied voice cursing that charlatan Musk's name across the cosmos.

This is the penultimate installment in a series of posts on AI and what could happen to the public arena, democracies, and rational discourse during the emerging technological singularity. I will conclude the series next week with my non-fictional summary of Gemini Geopolitics. We will take a hard look at the lessons learned about the vulnerabilities of democracies to a breakdown of rational discourse, the poignant victimization of Yemen and Gaza, the benefits of Western Collapse to Russia (but not China), and how imperial (or silicon) ambitions create blowback of lasting impact. Please join us then.

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