Last night, the bloody tournament that has transfixed the country opened a new chapter. Eleven courageous tributes, chosen from all the districts of the GOP — from the surrounds of the Capitol to the far-flung and deadly swamps of Florida — entered the arena for… The Blunder Games!
“Let the games began!” shouted dimwitted Gamemaker Wolf Blitzer, grinning maniacally, and so the battle commenced. At the sound of the buzzer, the tributes rushed towards the Cornucopia, scrambling for a weapon to keep them alive for the next three hours. Tribute Huckabee — from District 7, where they fry squirrels for fun — grabbed a bundle of fire in one hand and brimstone in the other, but his greed meant both supplies were exhausted.
Carly Fiorina, a tribute from District 8, whose main export is “failed CEOs” chose an unmelting icicle, while Chris Christie, from the 9/11th district, grabbed himself a hot, greasy lump of moralizing smarm. Career tribute Jeb! grabbed an eighth of weed because it’s a jungle out there and you might as well relive your glory days before you die, man, while Rand Paul eyed the sticky stuff warily. “I mean, it should be legal,” he said. “But how is that going to help him out here?” Instead of weed, Rand stole some of Christie’s grease for his mop of hair. Ben Carson’s weapon, a stethoscope from the 1950s, seemed strangely out of touch, almost in its own world.
Donald Trump, the tribute from District 2 — a large district that produces even more spectacularly braggadocious failed businesspeople than District 8 — grabbed his usual handy weapon: a small but extremely loud tape recorder that shouts, “Hahahahaaha but you’re ugly!” over and over and over and over again. This approach was successful for about half the tournament, before Fiorina destroyed the recorder with her well-deployed icicle.
One tribute fared poorly from the outset: tribute Scott Walker, sounding like a cross between Ross on Friends and Droopy Dog, was immediately knocked out of commission in the early bloodbath. His last words were, “The Teachers Unions prepared me well for ISIS!” RIP. Many misogynistic cheesemakers from his home district mourned his demise as the sorrowful cannon sounded.
The remaining tributes wiped Walker’s blood from their lips and hands, then looked around to see what obstacles lay in their way. A vicious question-hurler known as The Tapper appeared to challenge them, and proved to have a remarkable amount of stamina. “The question I actually asked was,” the Tapper repeated over and over again, a sound which the candidates reacted to as though it was a high-pitched whine, a form of aural torture. You have to be tough in the area.
But the tributes were prepared, as they were for the other challenges that they knew they’d face in the coming hours: hard-working immigrants, slutty women in need of health care, Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the Iran Deal. Their different tactics in dealing with these hurdles were revealing. They agreed on the brutal approach of funneling money out of Planned Parenthood in order to force all the slutty women into a life of STDs, cancer, and forced pregnancies.
It seemed they’d be bound to disagree a bit more on the immigrant question — but instead, they joined forces in an almost unprecedented show of cross-district solidarity, for one purpose: to build a wall. They absolutely all love walls! There was sweating, there was dirt, there were shovels… all the tributes worked tirelessly, taking shifts in fending off the Tapper Question machine and the occasional stray slut who wandered in. In the morning, with the great wall mostly built, Trump looked around and realized that several of his allies were actually descended from, or married to, immigrants. The alliance teetered, even as the other tributes begged Trump to stay calm: “But we also want a wall!”
Their efforts, however, were to be in vain: Trump tried to hoist Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz over his shoulder and deport them, shouting “We speak English in America!” as he did so. Unfortunately he proved too weak for the task, causing all the other tributes to laugh at him as he wheezed and struggled to catch his breath.
And then, drama! It was at this moment that Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson joined together to stab Cruz in the back. Another tribute down. As the light left his eyes, Cruz shouted incoherently about fetuses and Iran. Christie closed his ally’s eyes: “I know, buddy,” he said. “I know. We’ll start World War III for you someday. We swear we will.” In the ensuing melee, the fragile alliance fractured, with tributes spread out on all sides of the wall, warily watching their backs. In Texas, they played patriotic songs and wept.
Before the contest ended for the night, however, a giant sheaf of papers floated down on the arena, causing an almost unheard of frenzy among the remaining tributes. Mouths foamed. “The Iran deal!” shouted Fiorina. “This is everything the Ayatollah wanted!” There was no alliance here: the tributes divided on whether to “shred” this deal or respect it as international law. But then Huckabee climbed the wall they had built earlier that day and shouted from its ramparts. “Balaal and Beezlebub shall be called forth upon your ashes, Ayatollah!” he cried. “End Times are coming! Prepare yourselves to meet your maker in the sands of the desert!”
Unfortunately, he was so busy fulminating that he lost his balance and fell to a sadly comical death. (Or was he pushed? Carly Fiorina was nowhere to be found). Another tribute down, another cannon. They played taps and roasted many a squirrel in Arkansas.
As the TV cameras left the arena for the night, there was the promise of drama to come: despite the fact that not a single tribute had a strategy to deal with global warming, floodwaters and wildfires were closing in on the arena. The End Times, it appears, are truly upon them. Tune in on October 28 to see how the remaining tributes handle the apocalypse.
*Jon Kasich was also a tribute.