2020 in hindsight: What will this year look like a century from now?

Finally, we can say it: 2020 is almost over. Good riddance.

As we look to finally bring a close to this annus horribilis, America will be living amid the detritus for years — a devastating economic downturn, a generation of students behind in education, the collective psychic trauma of prolonged isolation. 2020 will be hard to forget.

But in 100 years, when those of us who lived through the year that everything stopped have died out, how will future generations look back on what happened? How will history be able to encapsulate just how crazy 2020 was?

We can only imagine an encyclopedia entry from 2120.

The Year 2020:

2020 was marked by a global pandemic called COVID-19, which was responsible for killing nearly 2 million people worldwide. 2020 has since been dubbed “The Lost Year,” due to nationwide shutdowns of travel, business, school and life as it was previously known.

While some countries were quick to respond to the virus, progress in controlling the outbreak in the United States was impeded by several factors, primarily ineptitude at the highest levels of the federal government. President Donald Trump’s early denial of the virus’s severity, his rank politicization of science and health, and his decision to jettison responsibility to individual states had a catastrophic impact on the U.S.’s mitigation efforts.

The president, motivated by a fateful combination of arrogance and ignorance, led large swaths of Americans [See: “Covidiots”] to reject basic public health and safety science, including recommendations to wear masks and keep socially distant. While health experts implored Americans to take these simple, common-sense measures to stay healthy and avoid dying, many reflexively responded, “You can’t make me,” and “I know you are but what am I?”

Science-denial led to an untold number of unnecessary deaths. Historians often refer to this era of prideful ignorance as Anno Americae Cacas in Scientia, or “The Year America Defecated on Science.”

There were other oddities related to life in a pandemic. Digital gatherings known as “Zoom meetings” led simultaneously to a surge in the tech sector and a deflation in the pants sector.

Virtual schooling, curbside pickup, contactless delivery, pet adoption, home renovation, bread-baking and crushing anxiety all enjoyed boomlets at this time.

Some people, called “TikTokers,” thrived in this new world. They put their precisely-honed skills — previously called “hobbies” — to good use: dancing in place, putting cream cheese on green peppers, creating a perfect eyeshadow half-cut crease, and skateboarding while drinking cranberry juice.

2020 also marked the rise of “Karen,” the generic name for women with one or more of these common characteristics: an asymmetric bob, a demand to speak to the manager, “Live, Laugh, Love” signs in their home, a penchant for calling the police on Black people, and an aversion to masks and public safety.

In 2020 racial tensions came to a head with the death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. In the ensuing weeks and months, protests calling for police and criminal justice reform spread across the country, as did increased calls for the removal of Confederate statues [See: “Civil War, losers.”]

Significantly, 2020 also marked the end of Trump’s first and only term in office, the result of a landslide election defeat by Democrat Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

Trump, who has since earned the nickname “The Greatest Loser” among historians and world leaders, pretended for months that he was the true winner of that election, even cajoling a cadre of questionably-accredited lawyers and members of his own party [now defunct — See: “Republican Party 1854-2016”] into defending the delusional claim. Though he’d eventually surrender the White House to the incoming administration, he spray painted “Trimp 4evr” (sic) on the wall of the Lincoln Bedroom, a piece of which sits in the National Museum of Regrets in Miami-Dade County, Fla., along with the movie adaptation of “Hillbilly Elegy,” cancel culture, televangelism, daylight saving time and New Coke.

Trump spent his remaining years delivering speeches to increasingly empty arenas, and at the time of his death would claim he was also the 46th, 47th, and 51st president of the United States — and the “inventor” of space.

2020 also saw some bizarre arrivals in America: Murder hornets, Tiger King, a fictitious cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a formerly royal British couple, demon sperm, things made out of cake, Quibi and UFO videos.

Finally, 2020 was known as the year America lost a number of beloved leaders and celebrities, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Kobe Bryant, Chadwick Boseman, Alex Trebek, Eddie Van Halen, Rep. John Lewis, Regis Philbin, Wilford Brimley, Kelly Preston, Jerry Stiller, Kenny Rogers and Carl Reiner — who collectively became known as “Everyone we ever loved, thanks a lot 2020.”

S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.

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