Estimated read time: 16-17 minutes

This is Part 2 of author and humor columnist Dave Barry's annual Year in Review. Read Part 1 here.

Read Part 1

Speaking of strategies that do not work out as planned, in ...

June

... the Biden re-election campaign struggles to change the public perception — largely created by videos showing the president looking lost and confused — that the president is sometimes lost and confused.

Democrats insist that these videos are "cheap fakes," and that in fact Biden is sharp as a tack, but unfortunately the public never sees this because he only exhibits this sharpness when there are no cameras around to capture it, kind of like Bigfoot.

So there's a lot on the line when Biden and Trump square off in a much-anticipated prime-time debate, which was proposed by the Biden campaign, apparently on the advice of the Boeing Corp. It's obvious from the start of the debate that the president is struggling. He has trouble finishing, or even starting, his sentences; he spends much of the debate staring vacantly into the distance like a man who's trying to remember where he put the remote control, unaware of the fact that he is holding it.

In short, it's a very bad night for Biden.

Q: How bad is it?
A: It's so bad that, by comparison, Donald Trump seems, at times, to be almost lucid.

Actually, it's worse than that. It's so bad that even professional journalists can see how bad it is. In fact suddenly everybody in Washington is acutely aware of the president's decline, which previously had been apparent to only the entire rest of the world population.

And so as we move into ...

July

... the Democrats are in a state of panic. Behind the scenes, party leaders desperately want to get Biden off the ticket, but he repeatedly insists that he's going to be the candidate. This leads to an awkward national conversation:

Biden: I'm staying in the race.

Party leaders: You have our full support, Mr. President! Whatever you decide!

Biden: OK, as I said, I'm staying in the race.

Party leaders: It's your call, sir! Run, or don't run! It's totally up to you!

Biden: Again, I'm definitely running.

Party leaders: Whether you stay in or drop out, we fully support either choice! Including dropping out!

Biden: I SAID l'M RUNNING DAMMIT.

Party leaders: We await your decision, sir!

And so on.

Just when it appears that the presidential race cannot get any more insane, Trump goes to Butler, Pennsylvania, to hold a campaign rally, for which the security has apparently been outsourced to the Boeing Corp. Trump is shot in the ear by a man who is somehow able to climb, unimpeded, with a rifle, onto the roof of a building that not only is within range of the speaker's platform, but also has three police snipers stationed inside it. Really.

The attempted assassination shocks the nation but also bolsters Trump's popularity. He has a commanding lead in the polls as, a few days later, he accepts the presidential nomination at the Republican convention (Theme: "TRUMP!") with a triumphant speech lasting slightly longer than veterinary school.

The Democrats are now in utter despair. Biden continues to insist that he's running; the party has no choice but to renominate him and face almost-certain defeat in November.

Then, in a sudden reversal, Biden announces that he's quitting the race after reassessing the situation and waking up next to the severed head of a thoroughbred racehorse. Party leaders lavishly praise Biden for saving democracy, then decide, via what is undoubtedly a democratic process, to replace him with Kamala Harris.

Other than that, it's a quiet month in politics.

In other news, a massive worldwide internet disruption paralyzes global air travel, along with banks, hotels, hospitals and other industries, when Arnold A. Frinkledorp, an 87-year-old retiree who is attempting to send an email to his sister from his AOL account, accidentally presses the ALT, backslash, left arrow, F3, ampersand and right parenthesis keys simultaneously — which apparently nobody has ever done before — thereby triggering a Windows glitch that causes more than 8.5 million computers to crash. The disruption winds up costing businesses an estimated $5 billion, although, on the plus side, Mr. Frinkledorp's email — a meme of a cat wearing sunglasses — is successfully delivered to his sister, who accidentally deletes it.

As the Olympic Games get underway in Paris, tens of millions of viewers tune in to NBC to watch three action-packed weeks of Snoop Dogg reacting to French things. The Games take full advantage of the city's scenic venues, including the Seine River, which is used for the swimming leg of the triathlon race after health authorities assure competitors that intensive cleanup efforts have removed "the vast majority" of the turds.

Speaking of competition, in ...

August

... the race for the presidency kicks into high gear as fired-up Democrats hold their convention in Chicago. The first-day highlight is a grateful and heartfelt farewell to President Biden, who speaks in the prestigious 2:30 a.m. timeslot and is never heard from again.

The focus then shifts to the nomination of Kamala Harris, who is running on a platform of joy, and being joyful, and a general vibe of joyfulness, as well as a set of policies to be specified later that will take America in a new, completely different direction, in stark contrast to the policies of whoever is running the country now.

The convention gives Harris an immediate boost in the polls, and suddenly Trump faces a serious challenge, to which he responds, during a two-hour speech to a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: "I say that I'm much better looking than her. Much better. Much better. I'm a better-looking person than Kamala." Fox News confirms this.

Meanwhile, the two vice-presidential candidates, Tim Walz and J.D. Vance, engage in a spirited exchange on the issues, reminiscent of the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

Walz: You're weird.

Vance: l'M not weird. YOU'RE weird.

Walz: No, YOU'RE weird.

Vance: No YOU'RE weird.

Walz: No YOU'RE...

Speaking of weird: Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., following up on the revelation that he has a dead worm in his brain, reveals that he once picked up a roadkill bear, which he later — we've all done it — left under a bicycle in Central Park as a prank. Three weeks later Kennedy suspends his campaign and urges his followers to vote for Trump, assuming they are able to chew through their restraints.

Two astronauts are stuck aboard the International Space Station when the Starliner spacecraft that was supposed to return them to Earth develops mechanical problems. You will never in a million years guess the name of the company that built this spacecraft.

Meanwhile, down here on Earth, things are also not going so great as we move into ...

September

... when suddenly, with no advance warning, the biggest issue in the presidential election is the question of whether Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people's pets. They are not, but this fact does not prevent Trump from raising the issue in a televised debate with Harris, during which Trump gives the impression that his debate prep consisted entirely of getting his hair dyed a slightly more believable color.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs," he states, "The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there."

For her part, Harris repeatedly stresses the message that she is a regular middle-class person from the middle class who totally relates to the problems faced by middle-class people like herself, and she definitely intends to fix these problems once she is elected to high government office.

Harris is widely considered to be the winner of the debate, on top of which she is endorsed by Taylor Swift, which is a big deal because Swift has more than 280 million lnstagram followers and 53 votes in the Electoral College.

A week after the debate, police capture a would-be assassin who was spotted with a rifle on a golf course where Trump was playing. There was a time in America when this event — the second serious assassination attempt on a major presidential candidate in two months — would be considered a big story, but in the hellscape that is 2024 politics it dominates the headlines for considerably less time than the mythical pet-eating Haitians.

As the election draws closer, emotions are running high. It's also an increasingly tense time in the Middle East, where Israel and Iran appear to be on the verge of all-out war. But the good news is that at least the hurricane season has been relatively peacef ...

OK, scratch that. In late September, Hurricane Helene causes horrendous devastation in six southeastern states, and then in ...

October

... Hurricane Milton ravages Florida. It's a brutally difficult time for millions of Americans, but the good news is that at least nobody tries to politicize the disasters or use them to spread idiotic conspiracy theories about sinister forces controlling the weath ...

OK, scratch that also.

In presidential election news, Trump makes a campaign appearance at a Pennsylvania McDonald's, during which he wears an apron and serves some people at the drive-thru window. This is the kind of hokey photo-op stunt that politicians have been doing forever, so you'd think this would be no big deal, right?

Wrong. It is a huge deal. Thanks to Trump's uncanny ability — it is his superpower — to drastically reduce the functional IQ of professional journalists, this event dominates the national political coverage for days.

Newsweek runs a story headlined "Was Donald Trump's McDonald's Shift 'Staged'?" The New York Times runs six — that's right, six — stories about it, including one asserting that, among other infractions, Trump "shoveled a scoopful of fries the wrong way" and "committed what appeared to be a number of health code violations."

Somehow Trump survives all this journalism. He continues to crisscross the nation promising tax breaks for pretty much every category of U.S. resident including domestic animals, and giving increasingly improvisational speeches during which every thought fragment that seeps into his brain spurts instantly from his mouth without any kind of review. For example: Speaking to a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Trump informs the crowd that their beloved hometown hero, the late Arnold Palmer, had an unusually large putter. (We don't know whether the New York Times assigned a team of reporters to investigate this claim, but we would not rule it out.)

In another suave outreach move, the Trump campaign, ever sensitive to accusations of racism, holds a rally in Madison Square Garden featuring a comedian who jokes that — prepare for hilarity — Puerto Rico is garbage.

On the Democratic side, the Kamala Harris campaign, which has spent more than a billion dollars but is still struggling to clearly define the candidate's vision for the presidency, settles on an upbeat closing message: "Whoever She Is, She's Not Donald Trump." At exactly the same time Harris is making her big final pitch to voters, Joe Biden, who is still technically the president, somehow gains access to Zoom and lends the Harris campaign a helping hand by declaring, in response to the Trump-rally Puerto Rico joke, that roughly half of the U.S. electorate is garbage. Thanks, Joe!

Meanwhile, in an issue that neither party talks about because fixing it would require political courage, the national debt goes over $35 trillion, moving the nation still closer to the inevitable financial catastrophe that will leave future generations completely screwed. Fortunately, as we have noted, future generations are fine with this. "Don't worry about it!" they would say, if they could speak to our current political leadership. "We know you're busy leading!"

On a happier note, for the 14th consecutive year the World Series is won by a team other than the Yankees.

In space, a large communications satellite unexpectedly explodes, creating debris that threatens other satellites. In the spirit of mercy we will not name the company that made the defective satellite, other than to say it rhymes with "blowing."

Speaking of unexpected, in ...

November

... the voters finally go to the polls for the most important American election since at least the dawn of time. All the expert political analysts and professional pollsters using scientific methodology agree that the race is extremely tight, a tossup, a dead heat, especially in the crucial battleground states. It's too close to call! The experts are certain of this.

On election night, the TV networks are teeming with political commentators prepared to analyze and dissect and crunch the numbers far into the night as the nation settles in for the long, grueling process of determining the winner, a process that everyone agrees could go on for days, possibly even weeks, because of the extreme razor-thin closeness of the ...

Never mind. In roughly the same amount of time it takes to air a Geico commercial, the networks determine that Donald Trump has decisively won the election, including all of the so-called battleground states and four Canadian provinces. It's a stunning result and a massive failure by the expert political analysts, who humbly admit that they had no idea what was happening and promise that, from now on, they will be more aware of their limitations.

We are, of course, joking. In a matter of seconds, these experts pivot from being spectacularly clueless about what was going to happen in the election to confidently explaining what happened in the election.

One theory is that it was not a great idea for the Democrats to insist that President Biden was fine until it was embarrassingly obvious that he was not, then replace him, via a secret process, with a candidate who was not great at talking and did not run in a single primary and who previously advocated positions that many Americans were not crazy about, which is why they voted, sometimes reluctantly, for Donald Trump.

One branch of the Democratic Party accepts this theory and begins the painful but necessary process of self-examination. Another branch prefers to believe that the party is fine and the real problem is that most Americans are sexist, racist pro-fascist morons, which may not be a winning message for the Democrats going forward, but it does enable this branch to feel better about itself.

For his part, Donald Trump has no doubt whatsoever that the American people have given him a mandate to deport anywhere up to 60% of the U.S. population and — in his words — "turn this great nation around by appointing wildly unqualified individuals to the cabinet."

OK, he didn't actually say that, but he did nominate Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, which is like nominating Jeffrey Dahmer to be surgeon general. Gaetz is soon forced to withdraw his name from consideration after Trump is informed that the U.S. Senate, for all its shortcomings, is not completely insane.

Another controversial Trump nomination, this one for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is Robert F. "Roadkill" Kennedy Jr., who used to think Trump was basically Hitler but now thinks he's great. Kennedy is deeply suspicious of vaccines, Big Pharma, the CIA, fluoride, seed oils, WiFi, Froot Loops and chemicals in general. He also wants to make America healthy again by reducing the consumption of the overprocessed junk foods that have turned many Americans into big fat waddling tubs of lard, like ... OK, like many Americans.

In environmental news, 70,000 world leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, aides, activists, consultants, celebrities, media people, caterers, chauffeurs, bodyguards, gritters, masseurs, masseuses, and private jet pilots gather for COP29, the massive conference held every year by the United Nations to solve the pesky problem of global climate change. This year's host nation is Azerbaijan, which, as a corrupt authoritarian state whose main source of income is selling billions of dollars worth of oil and gas, naturally wants everybody to stop using so darned much oil and gas.

The conference is once again a huge success as measured in metric tons of hors d'oeuvres consumed, and everybody agrees to gather again for COP30 next year, on the off chance that global climate change is still going on.

Speaking of comically futile gestures: The Australian senate passes a law banning children under 16 from social media. This law will be enforced by adults who have to ask their children for technical support when they accidentally lock themselves out of their iPhones.

Speaking of protecting children, in ...

December

... Joe Biden, who repeatedly promised that he would not pardon his son Hunter, cements his legacy as the most Joe Biden president ever by pardoning his son Hunter, thus forcing the Democratic Party to change its mantra from "Nobody Is Above the Law!" to "Hey, It's Complicated." The wording of the pardon document is quite broad, covering "all offenses committed between 2014 and 2024, including any currently unsolved bank robberies, not that we are suggesting anything."

The pardon outrages many Republicans who would be fine with it if Trump did it, while it's fine with many Democrats who would be outraged if Trump did it. For that is how our system of checks and balances works.

Meanwhile, Trump is acting as though he's already the president — meeting with foreign leaders, signing treaties, vetoing legislation, authorizing drone strikes and ordering the beheading of "Peach" and "Blossom," the two turkeys Biden pardoned for Thanksgiving.

Helping Trump with the transition is his new best billionaire friend Elon Musk, the genius tech visionary who's going to make the federal government efficient by implementing "outside the box" measures such as:

Having veterinarians install locator chips in all federal employees.
Replacing both the Air Force and the Internal Revenue Service with laser-equipped orbital space robots.
Combining the departments of Energy, Transportation, Labor, Agriculture, Interior and Justice into a single agency called "The Guv," which will be physically located in Taiwan but accessible via an app.
Renting Hawaii out for proms.

It's an exciting time to be alive, as post-election America begins to discover, with varying degrees of excitement, what it voted for.

After numerous sightings of mysterious lights in the sky over New Jersey, government officials seek to calm an increasingly alarmed public.

"We've investigated these lights, and there's absolutely nothing to worry about," states Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who adds, "On an unrelated note, people should keep their children indoors."

In other news, a horrific crime on a New York City sidewalk leads to a national conversation about the U.S. health care system, which reveals that a truly disturbing number of people believe the following three things:

The health care system is bad.
Therefore, murder is OK.
Especially if the murderer is cute.

Clearly, this year needs to end. Which is why we're looking forward to New Year's Eve — when, in a beloved tradition, thousands of revelers will gather in Times Square to say goodbye to 2024 and welcome 2025. We like to think that on that night, as the seconds tick down to zero and that giant ball starts to descend, the people gazing up at it will all be united, if only for a moment, by a common hope — a hope shared by the millions of us watching on television — specifically, the hope that the giant ball was not manufactured by the Boeing Corp.

Also, while we're hoping, let's hope that 2025 will be a better year. How could it be worse?

Try not to think about it.