In a shocking development, spokesmen for Donald Trump announced the ouster of Paul Manafort as Campaign Manager and his replacement by 87-year-old Imelda Marcos, widow of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Though the replacement of Manafort, a well-known scumbag, was long viewed as a possibility, the selection of Marcos, a well-known [insert extremely terrible word here], has left “le tout Washington” aghast.

The precipitating event was the release of the latest New York Times Upshot analysis of the presidential election showing that the chances of Hillary Clinton winning have risen to 88% leaving the hapless name dropper (mostly his own) with but a 12% chance of victory.

All of the “much more Democratic” states are safely in the Clinton column as are all of the states in the “somewhat more Democratic” category. The states described as “like the country as a whole” are comfortably blue though Iowa is close.

Among the “somewhat more Republican” states, Clinton leads in North Carolina by a two to one margin and Republican forces are massing to try to save Georgia.

When they learned that the Republicans were defending Georgia, Paul Painlevé and Colonel Tricaud, who built the utterly useless Maginot Line  to defend France from the Nazis in the late 30s, were quoted as saying “that is as if we had built a fucking moat around Vichy.”

Some deft button pushing on a cheap calculator shows the odds of Trump winning the states he actually needs to get to 270 electoral votes at 0.000165807 or about 16 in 100,000. Since we hold elections every four years, on today’s odds, a Trump victory could be expected about once every 25,000 years.

Advice provided by the National Association of Large Animal Veterinarians to “put the Donald out of his misery” was rejected thanks to the vigorous efforts of campaign staffers whose objections were based on having mortgages to pay.

The selection of Marcos resulted from a top secret GOP plan to wait for the other shoe to drop on Crooked Hillary.

The primary deficiency of this plan appeared to be the lack of time available for the dropping of other shoes until an especially junior RNC intern also observed that there might not be enough shoes on earth to say nothing of the time available to drop them.

It was pretty much then that Manafort circled the drain to be replaced by Marcos, the only person anyone could think of who could rustle up the necessary shoes.