The year was 2025, though you wouldn’t know it from the condition of the roads. The highways were cracked, the bridges rusted, and the once-gleaming cities flickered like dying campfires under a sky dimmed with smoke and slogans. America was on a great journey again. This time, not westward, but inward, toward some elusive promise whispered from the past. They called it the Reclamation. The Revival. The Great Return.
No one could quite agree on where they were headed. Only that they had to get there fast.
They traveled as a fragmented caravan, a confederation of battered wagons: the Faithful, the Frightened, the Furious, and the Forgotten. Each group spoke in its own dialect, carried its own flag, and sang its own version of the national anthem, slightly off-key.
At the front of the caravan, with a borrowed compass and a stagecoach made of gold-painted plywood, rode the man they called The Guide. Donald J. Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States, self-declared Navigator of Destiny. He rode alone but spoke as if God and the Founding Fathers were in the back seat, nodding in approval.
He had found a map, or so he claimed. Not a real map, but a pamphlet of possibility, written long ago by a frontier prophet named Lansford Hastings. Hastings once promised a shortcut through the Wasatch Mountains. A path he had never traveled himself. It looked good on paper, and that was enough. Trump, too, had his shortcut. A return to greatness through the detour of nostalgia.
“Trust me,” he called back over his shoulder. “This is the best way. Everyone’s saying it. I’ve seen the maps. Beautiful maps. Tremendous maps. This is the shortcut to salvation.”
Some believed him. Others followed out of fear of being left behind.
And so the nation veered off the main road. They left the paved path of democratic norms and institutional guardrails for the unmarked trail of gut feelings and grievance. The scenery grew strange. Reality blurred at the edges. One day it was a courtroom. The next, a rally. Then a truth social post signed like a divine commandment.
The pass narrowed. Winter came early.
Food grew scarce. Truth, trust, and basic decency were all rationed now. Factions turned inward. Accusations flew like snowflakes, thick and cold. “It’s the immigrants.” “It’s the elites.” “It’s the algorithms.” “It’s you.”
In hushed voices around flickering screens, some began to speak of what must not be spoken. That they had been led astray. That the map was a lie. That the man in front was not a guide but a gambler, one who bet the entire wagon train on his belief in shortcuts.
But by then, the pass had closed behind them.
They were trapped.
Some, like the members of the Reed family of the digital age, quietly turned back. They trudged through knee-deep disinformation in search of some remembered sanity. Others clung to the gold-painted coach, insisting the thaw would come soon. That greatness was just over the next ridge.
And the Guide? He remained perched on the hill, wrapped in the flag like a makeshift robe, scribbling his own legend into the snow.
“This is all part of the plan,” he said. “Trust me. The best is yet to come.”
Meanwhile, below, the survivors did what survivors do. They dug into the frozen earth of their principles. They tried to warm their children with fragments of the Constitution. They wondered how a nation once so full of hope had become a parable scribbled in frost.
Like the Donner Party, America had not been defeated by nature or misfortune alone. It had been undone by the seduction of a shortcut.
And by the man who promised he knew the way.