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The Boston Globe Imagines A Trump Presidency
Are you the kind of person who has a healthy, entirely reasonable fear of Donald Trump winning the White House? You know, you're lying in bed at night, and suddenly you hear the words "President Donald J. Trump" ringing in your ears, and you jolt upright in a cold sweat? Or maybe you're the sort of person that Trump and his campaign have directly maligned, or threatened draconian new policies against — Latinos and Muslims have been particular targets of his. Well, check this out: Sunday's Boston Globe cover shows Donald Trump's America, and it should serve as a wake-up call to any anti-Trump voters feeling even the least bit apathetic about 2016.
Seeing a newspaper cover page, discussing all the activities of a freshly minted President Trump? It has a kind of Back To The Future Part II feel — incidentally, a movie with a distinctly Trump-like villain. Like a glimpse into some horribly bleak, alternate timeline that many people would do anything to avoid (although, obviously, about 35 percent of Republican voters seem to disagree).
And that's exactly what The Boston Globe has put together for its Ideas cover page for Sunday, April 10. Under the blaring headline "DEPORTATIONS TO BEGIN," the newspaper's faux-cover imagines the sort of stories that would be front-and-center during a Trump administration.
Now, to be clear, this isn't running as the actual front page of the Globe on Sunday — the real news will still be facing forward when people pick up their papers. The Trump cover is a special insert that'll be at the front of the paper's Ideas section, leading in to an anti-Trump editorial.
The articles on the mock-up cover include the following subjects: mass deportation, riots, a national curfew, soldiers refusing to commit Trump-ordered war crimes, a trade war and economic downturn, tightening libel laws to silence the press, and Trump naming his dog after the first lady of China.
Oh, and of course, Megyn Kelly has been blacklisted! You can see the full cover here. Needless to say, it's a pretty striking idea, one that Ideas section editor Katie Kingsbury described to CNN Money as "an exercise in taking Donald Trump at his word." It's clearly not a future the paper has any interest in actually having to cover, however — The Boston Globe's Twitter account described it Friday night as "the front page we hope we never have to print." Let's just say there's a lot of people out there who feel the same way.