Matt Latimer is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a co-partner in Javelin, a literary agency and communications firm based in Alexandria, and contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

“For of all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.” Maybe it was watching a grinning Donald Trump munch on a taco salad—that may or may not have been bought, as he claimed, at the Trump Grill—to win the Hispanic vote. Or maybe it was Sarah Palin discussing whether or not she would accept the vice presidency again. One just can’t help shake the lingering feeling—at least around D.C.—that none of this was supposed to have happened. That somehow the country slipped into a vortex, where one mistaken move veered the nation from its intended path into an alternate Trump-branded reality.

Was Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP truly destined? Or were there events that might have changed 2016 altogether, if only we could go back in time and put right what once went wrong? Time to Quantum Leap the heck out of this election cycle.


DESTINATION: February 4, 2016

LOCATION: New York, New York

MISSION: Avert ABC’s decision to put Chris Christie in New Hampshire debate

Who would have thought that the rather last-minute decision to include Chris Christie, then dwelling at the bottom of many polls, onto the main stage of the Republican debate in New Hampshire would change history? But it did.

Countless Republicans still wonder how the primaries might have played out had Chris Christie not decided to turn Marco Rubio’s campaign into his own personal Alderaan, refusing to relent until he blew the promising Floridian’s candidacy into a billion bits over the snow-covered hills of New Hampshire. Had Christie not been on stage that night, leaving Rubio to recycle robotically his favorite clichés without incident, there’s every reason to believe that then-surging Rubio might have finished at the top of the first-in-the-nation primary. John Kasich, who absorbed a flood of panicked Rubio investors, would not have had the surprise 2nd place “victory” that fueled his campaign for months longer than it deserved, like an out-of-date Volkswagen puttering across the country on fumes. Instead, as history seemed to have intended, the Ohio governor would have joined rivals Jeb Bush and Christie in an early exit from the race, giving Rubio a chance to consolidate the establishment vote and head to South Carolina with a stronger head of steam. It was not to be, all because a few senior executives at ABC decided Chris Christie needed a break. Maybe there really was a mainstream media conspiracy to elect Trump.

DESTINATION: February 1, 2016

LOCATION: Des Moines, Iowa

MISSION: Keep Ben Carson from running out of clean clothes

When CNN reported on Iowa caucus night that Ben Carson, after what already was shaping up to be a disappointing finish, was leaving the campaign trail to return home to Florida, most sophisticated political pundits knew what that meant. The esteemed neurosurgeon was calling it quits. Why else would his team announce he was heading home, instead of onward to New Hampshire like everybody else pretending they still had a chance?

Unfortunately, this was also the reasonable conclusion some on the Ted Cruz campaign drew, telegraphing this news to their supporters in what was still a close race against Donald Trump. The result was that Carson, who later claimed he was only going home to get fresh shirts, accused the Cruz campaign of deception—a charge that took the Cruz campaign days to shake, and which led Trump to christen his strongest rival with a damaging new nickname: Lyin’ Ted. Cruz never quite got past the annoying moniker. Carson never got over the slight even after he quit the race for realz. He even endorsed Trump, one could surmise, because of it. Now a man who Trump himself once compared to a psychopath—“he says he went after his mother and wanted to hit her in the head with a hammer,” Trump noted—is being tasked with helping select the next vice president of the United States. If only someone had packed the man enough clean clothes in Iowa.

Destination: January 30, 2015

Location: Salt Lake City, Utah

Mission: Talk Mitt Romney into the 2016 race

Well, many tried. But for whatever reason Mitt Romney passed on a third presidential run. On the one hand, his decision made sense. He didn’t want to go down in history as a Jeopardy question—“This former Massachusetts governor ran for—and lost—the presidency three cycles in a row”—or scramble with Jeb Bush for loose change in the Koch Brothers’ couch cushions. Yet in hindsight the millionaire investor might have been the best candidate able to confront Trump where he was strongest—his appeal as a successful business tycoon.

On the debate stage, Romney could have undercut Trump’s message that he was the only job creator in the race who knew how to run a private company. He could have lambasted Trump—when it mattered—with the authority of someone who’d won broad support from his party only four years earlier. Instead, Romney was left giving Trump a tongue lashing that came too late, and only served to show that Trump was in fact the enemy of the Washington establishment, just as Trump had been telling his supporters all along.

DESTINATION: October 31, 2012

LOCATION: Atlantic City, New Jersey

MISSION: Stop the “hug”

If there is any one moment in his political life Chris Christie would like to take back—other than the time he looked like he was taking part in a hostage video behind Donald Trump—it’s the fulsome praise and overall best-buddy chumminess he showed Barack Obama on that Halloween day in 2012. Expressing gratitude to the president for the federal government’s assistance to New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy, Christie went way too far for Republican’s comfort, praising the president repeatedly as “outstanding,” and “incredibly supportive.” That this came six days before Obama’s close election against Mitt Romney looked like treason. (If you’re a democrat, imagine Bill Clinton flying to Indiana days before that pivotal primary and lauding Donald Trump as a brilliant visionary.) The Christie-Obama moment became so infamous to conservatives that people still remember, incorrectly, that the two men hugged.

It was the treasonous embrace of Obama that permanently sank Christie, already suspect as a blue-state governor, in the esteems of the GOP rank-and-file. (It damaged him with conservatives far more than the “Bridgegate” scandal that followed.) If someone could go back in time and take a sharpie to every fulsome adjective Christie awarded to Obama in that October 31 speech, then Christie might very well have entered 2016 the GOP front-runner and likely nominee, instead of the guy Trump bosses around at rallies.

DESTINATION: Anytime, 2011

LOCATION: Miami, Florida

MISSION: Reverse Jeb Bush’s decision not to run for president in 2012

Regardless of the final outcome, Jeb’s entry into the 2012 race against Obama would likely have changed a great deal. Had he defeated Obama, 2016 would have been his re-election bid. Had he lost, he probably would have been as reluctant as Mitt Romney to try again just four years later. And Jeb!’s skipping a 2016 run would have saved a lot of people a lot of money, freed up other younger contenders to get support and contributions, prevented a good man from being fileted daily by a gleeful Trump, and staved off more damage to the Bush family brand in and out of the GOP. In any event, 2012 was Jeb’s time, which even he later admitted.

DESTINATION: July 4, 1776

LOCATION: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

MISSION: Give America’s Founders a glimpse of the future

Uh, maybe we ought to think this thing through a little bit longer.