Perhaps amidst these wild political and cultural times, we can spare a moment to “have some fun just for the fun of it.” Let’s take a rather off-beat look at the events surrounding the 2020 presidential election, which eventually spun their way through to the wee hours of November 6, 2024. The more we look, the more we see the spirit of Rube Goldberg, born in 1883 on the Fourth of July, and one of his crazy gizmos playing out.

For those not familiar with Goldberg’s nutty technique of solving problems, perhaps the simplest description might be that they are a convoluted chain reaction of events and objects, many unrelated to one another, activated to bring about a useful final result. This cartoon, drawn by Goldberg as part of his long-running comic strip, illustrates the idea. (I’ve added a few more links to working contraptions to the end of this article):

Public domain.

In the period running from the latter months of 2020 through November 2024, the Democrats, along with their far-left operatives in the Deep State (i.e., the media and uni-party), engaged in endless, disparate activities aimed at preventing Donald Trump from ever again returning to the White House. Their method was a simple Domino effect: by taking Trump to court over one bogus legal charge after another, the dominoes would begin to fall. They figured that those dominoes could tumble any of several ways, including Trump himself giving up, his supporters losing heart or interest, and one (if not several) of the legal cases proving victorious and Trump ending up incarcerated and/or ineligible to run for president.

The Democrats’ gambit, as we all know, did not pay off. They played the wrong game (or played the game wrong)—and lost. What was set in motion from their whacky antics were events which followed an erratic pattern. A year before the November 2024 election, from my book, Obvious, I included a chapter entitled “Three Truths for the 2024 Election Season,” which captured the anti-Democrat cascade that eventually happened:

Instead of things falling domino-style in precise order -- A into B into C into D, and so on -- life is more like A hitting G falling into C popping up H accelerating M... all the way to Z. We take an action, start the ball rolling, and through many unseen and sometimes quirky circumstances, incredible results materialize.

Of course, one of these “unseen and sometimes quirky circumstances” happened to be the deadly attack in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 2024. Trump bounced back big-time when he darted up shouting, “Fight, Fight, Fight!” Add to that miraculous moment a wave from a McDonald’s drive-through window, a campaign-decorated dump truck—even people “eating cats and dogs”—and you arrive at Z, a victory for the nation four years in the making.

So, dominoes from courtroom dramas failed; character-assassination fizzled; flat-out assassination attempts backfired—Rube Goldberg is spinning in his grave (perhaps even literally).

There is another way of viewing the circuitous political and cultural events that transpired from 2020 through 2024, and that’s through a biblical lens:

All things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28 - NIV Translation)

God is totally in charge of all events throughout human history. He puts the pieces in place and arranges them as He likes. We either “play along” by His rules or we devise our own strategy and take our chances.

The game is not over yet, of course, and there are still moves to be made.

Let’s be sure we end up on the winning side.

Image created using AI.

As an addendum to this article, here are links to a few more fun examples of Rube Goldberg-inspired devices: “Mouse Trap,” the Hasbro board game released in 1963; and two contraptions which I created for use on various television programs can be found HERE at the 5:00 mark (from “Backchat” starring Jeff Probst on the FX Network), and HERE (a sample contraption depicting hot news topics of 2009 pitched to Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV).

Albin Sadar is the author of Obvious: Seeing the Evil That’s in Plain Sight and Doing Something About It, as well as the children’s book collection, Hamster Holmes: Box of Mysteries. Albin was formerly the producer of “The Eric Metaxas Show.”