2020 brought many unpleasant surprises to America.
Now, in its last days, it seems that the worst year in the first two decades of the 21st century never happened.
Of course, no one knows what awaits the United States (and the whole world) in the future, 2021, year, but let's be honest: to surpass twony-twony in this regard, you need something out of the ordinary - like a collision of the Earth with a large asteroid.
And that's why it's time to remember how this year began.
It began with an airstrike by an American MQ-9 Reaper drone on a convoy of cars leaving Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.
As a result of the guided missile attack, the commander of the Iranian special forces of the IRGC Al-Quds, Major General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of the Kataib Hezbollah militia Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and eight other high-ranking Iranian and Iraqi soldiers were killed.
With one blow, the Americans beheaded several organizations at once, which seriously complicated their life in the Middle East in general and in Iraq in particular.
The consequences were not long in coming.
On January 5, Iran announced its final withdrawal from the nuclear deal (the United States withdrew from it back in May 2018, but Tehran, which was pressured by its European partners, was gradually withdrawing, lifting one restriction after another), and on January 8, two American military personnel fired on missiles. bases in Iraq.
It was going to a serious conflict, in the air there was a distinct smell of the third world war.
But, to everyone's relief, it worked out, largely because neither Tehran nor Washington needed this war.
Tehran realized that it would be impossible to survive the war with the West without nuclear weapons, and Trump in an election year needed only to get bogged down in a protracted and bloody conflict with such a strong enemy as Iran.
In addition, to certain forces in the Iranian leadership, Qasem Suleimani was even more profitable dead than Qasem Suleimani alive.
Therefore, a few minutes before the Iranian missile attack, the American military was quickly evacuated to protected underground bunkers, and it all ended with head injuries (although the Iranian media reported 80 killed and 200 wounded Americans, but there was no confirmation of this).
But Donald Trump announced the elimination of the "terrorist" and "enemy of democracy" more terrible than Bin Laden - which, of course, would have helped him win the presidential election in November, if ... If not for the COVID-19 pandemic that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in the last days of 2019.
At the beginning of the year, the virus slowly spread across the planet, and on January 21, the first patient with COVID-19 was discovered in the United States - in Seattle.
He flew in from China three days before control measures were introduced at three major US international airports.
This, by the way, was the first case of a new disease diagnosed outside Asia.
On January 24, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for the Study of Allergic and Infectious Diseases, who will soon become the head physician of the entire country, answering a question from journalists whether the United States should turn to the experience of the Chinese who covered Wuhan with a dense quarantine dome, confidently stated that mass isolation in the United States impossible.
“I can't imagine we could shut down New York or Los Angeles,” Fauci said.
Two months later, quarantine will be introduced in 43 of the 50 US states - but at the end of January, no one could even imagine how large the pandemic would acquire.
At the beginning of February, there were less than a dozen infected with the new virus in the United States, and all the attention of Americans was absorbed by a big political show unfolding on television screens - the impeachment of President Trump.
Impeachment of the owner of the White House has been a long-held dream of Democrats in Congress.
This dream took shape after they won a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, and the reason for the impeachment was the denunciation of an anonymous informant.
Later it became known that this informer was Eric Chiaramella, a clerk who worked in the National Security Council under Obama and at the beginning of 2017 was expelled from the White House for leaking confidential data to liberal journalists (by the way, his name is still forbidden to be mentioned on Facebook: try it, type Eric Ciaramella in Latin - and see how quickly Zuckerberg's department will block this post).
Chyaramella, who worked under the strict guidance of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Semyonovich Vindman - no, not an officer of Russian intelligence, but just an emigrant from Kiev - snitched on the head of state, Inspector General of the US intelligence community Michael Atkinson: they say, Trump put pressure on the president of "independent Ukraine" Zelensky, forcing him to look for dirt on Biden.
In Chiaramella's denunciation, the truth was mixed with fantasy, but the Democrats were not up to finding out the details.
On December 18, 2019, the House of Representatives accused Donald Trump of violating the law under two articles - "Abuse of Power" and "Obstruction of Congressional Investigation."
On January 16, the House decision was passed to the Senate, where the Republicans had a majority.
The trial itself (the judges were senators, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts was in charge of the trial) dragged on for two weeks.
A truly exciting show did not work out: the senators did not want to hear witnesses, neither did they want to ask for secret documents.
The trial ended with a triumphant victory for the president: on February 5, Donald Trump was acquitted of both charges.
Until now, luck has accompanied the 45th President of the United States - the enemies were, if not defeated, then humiliated and morally crushed, the economy grew steadily, the stock market demonstrated one record after another, unemployment was declining ... The struggle in the Democratic camp for the presidential nomination looked stupid, stupid fuss - once again they gave a ride to Crazy Professor Bernie Sanders, leaked Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren, who unexpectedly won Super Tuesday on March 3 Sleepy Joe Biden seemed a lethargic and frivolous opponent who could easily be swept off the road with a volley of Ukrainian dirt.
This was until the COVID-19 pandemic played out in the United States in full force.
That is, until the end of March.
By this time, the United States had already become the third country on the planet - after China and India - in terms of the number of cases of coronavirus.
More than 30 thousand infected!
400 dead!
Now, when the total number of COVID-19 cases in the States has already reached 20 million, and the total number of deaths is already approaching 350 thousand (almost six Vietnam wars!), The statistics of the first wave of the pandemic seem ridiculous.
But then no one knew what humanity had to face, and these figures were frightening.
Trump's big mistake was that at first he underestimated the danger of the disease, which he would later call the Chinese plague.
“Everything will work out.
Everyone should remain calm, ”he said March 6 at a meeting with his supporters in Pennsylvania.
- We have plans for all possible scenarios, and this is how we will act.
We hope it doesn't last long. ”
But "plans for all occasions" turned into a banal inclusion of the printing press, although, admittedly, so-called helicopter money - that is, subsidies given by the government - helped many families to survive in the most difficult months of quarantine and self-isolation, when millions of Americans lost their jobs - temporarily or permanently.
In total, more than $ 2 trillion was allocated for this - every US citizen whose annual income did not exceed $ 75 thousand received a check in the amount of $ 1200 plus payments of $ 500 for each child.
But this did not save the economy - the Dow Jones index on March 23 fell to almost 18 thousand points - to the values of November 2016.
It was an absolute anti-record for the Trump era, which actually became one of the most favorable periods for the American stock market in history.
Now it is clear that it was not the pandemic itself that crippled Trumponomics, but the idiotic measures to combat it - the closure of enterprises and industries, the introduction of strict quarantine, the blockade of entire cities and states.
These events were actively pushed by Democrats such as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Whitmer closed almost all operating enterprises in the state and, under threat of heavy fines, prohibited people from leaving their homes (except for a visit to the doctor or going out to a nearby supermarket), as well as visiting each other, which earned the nickname "Hitler in skirt ".
A few months later, the State Supreme Court ruled that Whitmer had violated the Constitution by her rulings, but it was too late.
Michigan, like many other states, has gone into economic paralysis.
This was precisely the goal of the Democrats, and not at all concern for the health of people.
They needed to shatter Trump's perfectly working economic machine by all means, and they didn't care that the whole country was suffering from it.
And they have achieved their goal, we must pay tribute to them.
The COVID-19 pandemic and related quarantine measures hit primarily the industrial states of the Rust Belt - thereby, thanks to which Trump won the 2016 presidential election.
And so that the enemy could not recover from the blow received, the Democrats prudently inflicted a second, unleashing a "great racial war" on the streets of American cities.
The reason for this war was the death of black George Floyd during his arrest by the police in Minneapolis.
Floyd, as it turned out later, died of a drug overdose, but since it happened while he was lying on the pavement, crushed by the knee of a policeman, he was immediately made an icon of the Black Lives Matter movement and all-American racial riots.
However, there would be no Floyd - there would be someone else.
The main thing is that the soil for the unrest that swept the whole country was ditched: the BLM movement has always enjoyed the active support of the Democrats, and the effectiveness and mobilization capabilities of the Antifa units were tested back in 2017 during the riots in Charlottesville, when leftists overthrew monuments to Confederate generals from their pedestals.
The "Great Race War" lasted most of the summer.
Demonstrations of protest, pogroms, robberies, looting, vandalism, murders shook megalopolises (New York, Chicago, Minneapolis) and even small towns.
In Seattle, the "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone" emerged - an area captured by BLMs and antifa and not subject to either federal or local authorities.
Trump tried to cope with the wave of anarchy and ethnic crime that swept the country, but faced sabotage from Democratic mayors and governors.
In states and cities where Republicans were in power, the BLM and antifa thugs were quickly brought under control.
But where the Democrats ruled - in the same Minneapolis or in Portland, for example - the anarchists felt at ease.
No one particularly bothered them - the "autonomous zone" in Seattle lasted almost a month before the city police dispersed it.
Moreover, when Trump sent the National Guard to the "blue" city or state, democratic mayors and governors raised a terrible cry about the violation of human rights, fascism and dictatorship.
The National Guard even had to be pulled out of Washington, whose black mayor said that the presence of federal agents without insignia in the capital was a threat to the security of all local residents and the city as a whole.
Trump tried to use the army - even a loophole was found for that: the old Rebellion Act of 1807, which was last used in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots.
But even here it did not work: the top of the army, in fact, betrayed their Supreme Commander-in-Chief.
At the very beginning of June, when the riots could still be suppressed in the bud, the head of the Pentagon, Mark Esper, announced that he opposed the use of the army to restore order in American cities, even under the Rebellion Act, and thus deprived the president of the most effective tool, with with the help of which it was possible to quickly restore order in the country.
As a result, America never recovered from numerous shocks by the main event of the year - the presidential elections on November 3.
And Trump himself in the fall was no longer the triumphant who triumphed over his enemies in winter - be it Iranian generals or Democratic leaders in Congress.
In October, the president was knocked down by the insidious coronavirus - however, he very quickly (and for his age - record time!) Coped with the disease and rushed into battle again, gathering thousands of rallies of supporters and fans in all states.
At the same time, only a few dozen people came to the rare meetings with Sleepy Joe Biden, who was mostly sitting in the anti-window bunker - he was so uninteresting even to his sympathetic voters.
But, as it turned out on November 3, Biden's popularity did not affect anything at all ... Because the outcome of the elections was a foregone conclusion.
The Democrats took into account all the mistakes of the 2016 campaign and threw all their forces into the fluctuating states and states of the Rust Belt - Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio.
The inhabitants of cemeteries who had long since left our world voted there by the thousands, tens of thousands of ballots with check marks "for Biden" were miraculously materialized there in one night, there, in Pennsylvania, as it turned out just yesterday, 205 thousand ballots were found more than there were voters in state!
There were Dominion voting machines running cunning software that took votes from Trump and gave them to Biden.
There, observers from the Republican Party were not allowed to polling stations (in any country in the world where elections are held under the supervision of the OSCE, this circumstance alone would serve as grounds for not recognizing elections as fair and transparent).
American democracy has been trampled underfoot and thrown into a landfill - no longer needed.
The courts refused to take into consideration the claims of Trump's lawyers.
The Supreme Court, on which there were so many hopes, did not help either, given that Trump himself appointed three judges there.
On December 14, the electoral college voted to elect Joseph Robinette Biden, 78, a Catholic former US vice president in the Obama administration, as president of the United States.
This blow, logically, should have finished off Trump - but no, nothing like that.
The 45th President is still in the saddle, active and full of energy.
And, it seems, he intends to fight for the victory stolen from him to the last.
Hope, of course, is weak - but it was not for nothing that the ancient Romans said: Dum spiro, spero (“While I breathe, I hope”).
Moreover, 2020 will end tomorrow only on a calendar basis.
There are two events ahead that will be its direct continuation.
January 5 - the second round of elections to the Senate in Georgia, which will decide whether the Republicans will retain the majority in the upper house of Congress or concede it to the Democrats.
In fact, the entire political balance in the United States depends on the elections in Georgia for at least the next two years.
The second event is the first congress session in 2021, scheduled for January 6.
This will be a joint session of both chambers, at which legislators must approve the voting protocol of the electoral college.
And in this session, Trump supporters intend to give their Democratic opponents one last and decisive battle.
A number of Republicans (Congressman Mo Brooks, Senator Rand Paul and several others) have announced that they are going to file an official protest and challenge the results of voting in those states where they believe Trump's victory was stolen.
And other Republicans - Louis Homert from Texas and Kelly Ward from Arizona - officially demanded that Federal Judge Jeremy Kernodle give US Vice President Michael Pence the authority to independently appoint electoral candidates who support Trump (the Vice President, according to the law, oversees the electoral college decision Congress).
But the president also has radical supporters, such as his former national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, who believe that Trump could use the military to hold reruns in vacillating states.
"This is not unprecedented," Flynn told Newsmax.
"Martial law has been introduced in the United States 64 times."
Flynn's interview caused a predictable hysteria among the liberals, who immediately began to frighten the audience with the specter of a "military coup" ...
Be that as it may, America is approaching the new year of 2021 in a state of confusion and deepening division.
Half of the country believes that the forces of good have defeated the most terrible usurper, racist and xenophobe in its history, and the other half equally sincerely believes that the presidential elections were rigged and that the allegedly elected president is illegitimate.
The American nation has shown signs of division before, at least since the presidency of Bush Jr. (it was then that talk of emigrating to Canada became popular among liberals).
But only in recent years - and especially in the outgoing 2020 - did the split reach proportions vividly reminiscent of the Civil War of the North and South.
And the fact that this war still did not start (just as another war did not start in the Middle East), perhaps, it is worth recognizing the main result of 2020.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.