Make Russia Great Again: A Novel Read online

  Speechwriter Stefan went to work and came up with a brilliant script. In the middle of his speech, Mr. Trump would hold up a finger and shush the crowd.

  “Did you hear something? I thought I heard a very small sound. Like a squeak. Hear it? It’s coming from Milwaukee. Sounds like… mice. Wait a minute. Didn’t I hear there’s a convention of mice in Milwaukee? Or is it a convention of rats?”

  He and Stefan were very excited about it.

  To be sure, there were logistical problems, chief among them filling a stadium with eighty-one thousand people. Son-in-law Jored had been given yet another responsibility: campaign manager, adding to his other portfolios: peace in the Middle East; the opioid crisis; climate change denial; getting the wall built; ruining Mitt Romney’s life; pulling the US out of NATO; mothballing the USS John McCain; moving the US embassy in Paris to Biarritz; and working with Senator Biskitt and me on the Glebnikov Act repeal. Jored certainly had a full plate.

  Jored was—I don’t want to say “an odd duck”—very much his own person, and not an easy read. He had a way of not answering your questions and staring at you. It could be unsettling. He looked like his own Madame Tussauds waxwork. I wondered if he started every day with a facial. His permanent look of aloofness gave him an otherworldly aspect, like an extraterrestrial being who was mulling whether to annihilate Earth with a death ray that emanated from his eyes—or not. One staff wag said he reminded them of a portrait of a Renaissance prince, “minus the codpiece.” That said, Jored and I got along more or less okay. One had to get along with Jored, really.

  His Rolodex was now chockablock with more billionaires than an issue of Forbes magazine. He was very close to Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi ruler. He phoned “Mo”—as he called him—about the rally. Mo offered to write a check on the spot to cover the estimated $40 million cost. And to provide his personal fleet of Boeing 777s to schlepp the base.

  “That’s a pal,” Mr. Trump commented. But the Republican National Committee was concerned that it might make the rally “too Araby.” Jored was miffed about having to turn down Mo’s offer. He pouted for days, refusing to take my calls. But there was no telling Jored, “Look, you little entitled shit, this isn’t about you.”

  Then “our old friend” Oleg got wind of the rally and said he’d happily write the check. I think he saw it as a way of fast-tracking the Glebnikov Act repeal. I despaired of Oleg’s grasp of the US Constitution.

  So it fell to White House Russian oligarch wrangler Herb Nutterman to pay yet another visit to Paul at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, and tell him to thank Oleg but nyet. Single sponsoring of a Trump rally by a Novichok-dispensing Russian oligarch was optics from hell.

  By now I was on a first-name basis with the guards at the MCC, including the ones who’d been a tad negligent about preventing Jeffrey Epstein from hanging himself. They were very nice and asked for my autograph, which I thought was kind of sweet.

  By the time Jored emerged from his funk, he’d lost his mojo for the Lambeau rally. (Thanks, Jored—big help.) Meanwhile, the liberal mainstream media had been working overtime to make it sound like we’d summoned Leni Riefenstahl’s ghost to produce a “Return to Nuremberg” rally, with everyone wearing cheesehead hats instead of brown shirts. Honestly. I’m all for the First Amendment, but some of these quote-unquote “impartial” reporters had me wanting to call Mo and ask if I could borrow the bone saw.

  Fortunately, we had Mr. Colonnity and his Sancho Panza, Mr. Corky Fartmartin, on our side. Mr. Colonnity offered to pay for the rally out of his $35 million annual salary. That’s friendship. He also offered to emcee the rally. Apparently neither of these very generous offers was appropriate, since he was technically a newsperson. But Mr. Colonnity wasn’t one to let technicalities compromise his devotion to Mr. Trump.

  Then the sniveling apparatchiks of the Democratic National Committee politburo weighed in and denounced us for “destroying yet another norm of American political tradition.” Please.

  Whenever Mr. Trump did something original or bold or new, immediately he was accused of destroying some sacred “norm.” I never understood what that meant. Did the Founding Fathers destroy a norm with the Declaration of Independence? Did Abraham Lincoln destroy a norm when he freed the slaves? Apparently. Well, shame on them.

  Then Mr. Trump decided, as he often did, “Screw it.” He tweeted that there had never been a plan to hold a rally in Green Bay, and what’s more the DNC could “go fuck themselves.” I was never a big fan of Mr. Trump using profanity in his tweets, but this time I cheered.

  As it turned out, there was a distraction as the Dems gathered, but not one that we’d cooked up.

  19

  This time I didn’t have to conjure the headline. It was right there in black and white on the front page, “above the fold,” as they say in newspaper parlance:

  HIGH SCHOOL FRIEND OF PANTS ALLEGES “YOUTHFUL FLIRTATION” WITH SATANISM

  As I read the account in the failing New York Times, my first thought was: Some “friend.” I didn’t know what to make of his story about how he and “Mikey” used to drink goat blood under a full moon and carve satanic-themed crop circles in cornfields with Dad’s tractor. It certainly didn’t sound like the—I don’t want to say “boring”—stolid Mike Pants I’d come to know.

  My second thought, as I vomited up breakfast, was: if this is true, how in God’s name did the FBI miss this when they did Mike’s vice presidential background check? Does their questionnaire not include a box to check if “you have ever participated in satanic or demonic rituals, including, but not limited to, goat sacrifice, blood drinking, carving satanic-themed crop circles in cornfields, etc.”? Apparently not.

  Mike Pants is not a voluble personality. Far from it. You could slap him on the face with a frozen halibut and he wouldn’t blink. Mind you, this doesn’t make him a “life of the party” type. He won’t even have a drink with a woman unless Mrs. Pants is present. That must make for a fun marriage, but whatever.

  Mike never spoke up at cabinet meetings, except in the days when my predecessor, Reince Priebus, would go around the table and make each cabinet member tell Mr. Trump what they most admired about him. On those occasions, Mike could be a real jabberer, going on ad—I don’t want to say “nauseam”—infinitum about how great Mr. Trump is. Mr. Trump likes praise, but even he would nod off as the VP got to reason number twenty-eight why Donald Trump is the greatest president in US history.

  For once the phlegmatic Mike Pants—who’d once described himself as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf”—registered something resembling actual human emotion. He flushed beet red at the podium in the White House pressroom as he said that he was “profoundly, indeed deeply disappointed with my old friend Bob Krotchmeyer for trotting out this old story.”

  I was standing next to Katie Borgia-O’Reilly. She tensed and hissed, “Old story? Jesus, Mike…”

  The vice president continued:

  “It was never about Satan. I sure as heck don’t remember drinking goat blood. My recollection is that it was some pretty nasty red wine we found in a cabinet under the sink. Bob’s mom used it for drowning garden slugs. We did get up to a bit of mischief with his dad’s tractor. I’m not proud of it. But my memory is that we were trying to carve the McDonald’s Golden Arches logo in the cornfield, not the Sigil of Baphomet.I I wouldn’t even know where to start, carving that.”

  Katie was now hyperventilating and muttering, “Shut up, Mike. Shut the fuck up.”

  Here Mike deftly pirouetted: “But speaking of the devil…” and launched into an impassioned denunciation of the New York Times and the news media in general, suggesting that maybe they were the ones who were doing “Satan’s work here on earth.” Bravo, Mike.

  It didn’t land well with the media. Oh no. They’re way better dishing it out than taking it. The warriors of the First Amendment didn’t much like being told they were “in the employ of the cloven-hoofed one.”

  O
ur friends at Fox News were valiant as ever. Mr. Colonnity had our resident evangelical, Pastor Norma Damdiddle, on his show three nights running, bless him. She said that it just went to show that Mr. Trump and Mr. Pants were doing God’s work, and “It’s driving Satan cuckoo.”

  The VP’s old “friend” Bob Krotchmeyer stuck by his story. He seemed oblivious to the furor he’d created, but then he had been diagnosed as being in the early stages of dementia. He said he’d voted for Trump and “Mikey” in 2016 and was looking forward to voting for them again in the fall. It was “nothing personal,” he said. “Mikey remembers it a bit different than me, but hey, whatever.” He added that the alleged youthful flirtation with satanism remained “among my happiest memories.” Thanks, Bob.

  Happily, our pollster, Boyd Crampon, reported that the incident caused our support among evangelicals to spike, from the mid nineties to the high nineties. Hallelujah, as they would say. Moreover, Republican voters now “despised the Jewish-controlled media even more than before.” Great.

  In other good news, ratings for the opening night of the Democratic convention were down by a third over their convention four years ago. Whaddya know: viewers seemed to care more about whether their vice president was a practicing demon worshipper than listening to Dems read aloud from the podium their favorite selections from Das Kapital and Lenin’s Greatest Hits. Maybe it’s true, as they say, that God works in mysterious ways.

  I. The official emblem of the Church of Satan, consisting of the head of a goat transfixed on a reversed pentagram flanked by the Hebrew letters of the word “Leviathan.” Bit of a mouthful, that.

  20

  Mr. Trump himself certainly works in mysterious ways. No sooner had “Satan-gate” faded from the news cycle than he began dropping hints that “maybe it’s time to freshen up the ticket.”

  As a hospitality professional, I’m all about freshening. But dumping a loyal vice president is different than providing clean towels and tuning the bedside-table clock radio to the easy-listening music channel.

  I asked the president if the “Pants Satan thing” had gotten him thinking. No, he said, he was just “bored out of my gourd by Mike.” I agreed that I, too, was bored. Still.

  “We’re going into our fifth season, Herb. You gotta have fresh material.”

  At first I didn’t get the reference to “our fifth season.” Then it dawned on me—duh, Herb—he meant the first year of his second four-year term. Mr. Trump viewed himself not as president but as the host of TV’s top-rated show. Still, I worried that dumping a loyal, if mind-numbingly boring—and possibly Satan-worshipping—vice president might be viewed as throwing him under the bus.

  “But, sir, isn’t Mike vital to our evangelical support?”

  “What are they gonna do?” he snorted. “Vote for Goldibucks?”

  “Goldibucks” was Mr. Trump’s disparaging nickname for Morris Goldberg, the billionaire nonevangelical former mayor of New York, whose evil plan was to wait until the other candidates had spent all their money and then swoop in.

  Biden had shot himself in the foot yet again, this time before the Iowa Caucuses, with his remark about how “Caucasians are the best!” Tabitha Cramp’s proposal to ban all fossil fuels “on day one” had not won over shivering voters in New Hampshire. Karl Handpuppetz’s barking about how “We’ll find the money somehow, quit worrying about it!” was wearing thin. And coming off his big win in New Hampshire, Randy Rhodes had stumbled in South Carolina with his suggestion the issue of Confederate statues could be solved by covering them with “white hoods and robes.”

  Meanwhile, every time you turned on the TV, there was “Hizzoner” Morrie Goldberg, offering to personally fund everyone’s college tuition and medical bills and pay for defense, out of his own pocket. He seemed quite blithe about giving away all his money. “What am I gonna do? Take it with me? I’m not a pharaoh, for crying out loud.”

  Goldberg called Mr. Trump “Richie Not-So-Rich.” It got under his skin. The one thing that reliably drove him up a wall was being accused of not being as rich as he claimed to be. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court—or as Mr. Trump now called it, “those dirtbags”—had ordered him to release his tax returns, which showed his actual worth to be quite significantly lower than advertised. He instructed White House counsel Blyster Forkmorgan to appeal. It fell to Blyster to point out that the “dirtbags” were the last stop on the judicial elevator. The next blow came when Forbes magazine dropped him from its 400 Top Millionaires issue. That hurt. Goldberg seized on a new slogan: “Isn’t it time we had a president who’s actually rich?”

  Goldberg was also dropping hints about how he was going to appoint Bill Gates head of the Office of Management and Budget.

  “Bill loves giving away his money,” he said in speeches. “And I have no doubt he’d love giving some of it to you.” This was well received by the so-called Millennial Pinks.

  As if to twist the knife, Goldberg also started dropping hints that he was going to nominate Jeff Bezos, the richest man on earth and publisher of the Trump-loathing Washington Post, to be secretary of treasury.

  So Mr. Trump was not in the best of moods. He responded to my question about the danger of alienating evangelicals a bit snappishly.

  “Herb, you’re missing it. Sometimes you’re very stupid, you know. It’s me the evangelicals love, not Pants.”

  “Quite right, sir. Who’d you have in mind as a possible replacement?”

  The president shrugged.

  “I don’t know. A woman, maybe. Crampon is very depressed about the suburban women. If we had a woman on the ticket… the twats would have to vote for her. What are they gonna do? Not vote for a woman? I can understand women not voting for Hillary. But this would be totally different.”

  “Who?”

  “What about Ivunka?”

  Oh dear.

  “Two Trumps on one ticket?” the president said. “Talk about wow factor, huh? The base would shit itself.”

  I didn’t know what to say. There had been concern about this. Mr. Trump had brought it up on a number of occasions. Each time, the reaction was the same: blank stares and averted eye contact. It wasn’t that people didn’t like Ivunka. Still.

  Mr. Trump said, “Seamus thinks it’s too soon. He thinks we should wait until 2024.”

  I mentally dropped to my knees and thanked Mr. Colonnity.

  “I was thinking—Cricket,” Mr. Trump said.

  I can’t say I was surprised. Cricket Singh, the former governor of South Carolina, had served as Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations. She had not pleased Mr. Trump by making a big scene over Russia supplying Syria with chemical weapons to spray on its people. Then the weasel White House staffer, aka “Anonymous,” wrote a ridiculous book about the so-called Resistance movement in the Trump White House. Anonymous praised Singh for “refusing to go along with Trump’s more lunatic instincts.” That went over well.

  But then Cricket published her own Trump memoir, What An Incredible Honor: Helping Donald Trump Restore America’s Standing in the World. The book was an extended ode to Mr. Trump, praising him for “his deep knowledge of complicated issues,” “always putting country first,” “standing up to authoritarian leaders,” and “his superhuman work ethic.”

  Washington being Washington—namely a pestilential, crocodile- and piranha-infested swamp—some regarded this as “dog whistling” calculated to seduce Mr. Trump into throwing Pants under the proverbial Greyhound and nominating Cricket in his stead.

  I felt this critique of Cricket missed the larger picture. As president, Mr. Trump’s highest loyalty had to be to himself. By his own candid admission, he hadn’t yet completed the job of making American great again. As he told the base at the rally in Testicle, “To make America totally, one hundred percent great again, I need another four years. Maybe even more.”I If this meant that Mike Pants would have to “suck it up” and lie down under the bus, well, so be it. The point is: the election wasn’t about
Mike. It was about Mr. Trump. And so far no one had accused Mrs. Singh of Satan worship.II

  Mr. Trump looked pensive. “I don’t know,” he said. “Putin hates her. I gotta factor that in.”

  True enough. In addition to making a big deal out of Russia helping Syria gas its own people, Cricket had made a number of unfriendly statements about Mr. Putin himself. Such as: “We don’t trust Putin. We never will.”

  When Mr. Trump heard that, I actually thought he might physically explode. He composed a tweet calling her “very rude” and “menstrual.” Fortunately, Greta threatened to kill herself if he posted it, so he didn’t.

  We left it there for the time being. Meanwhile, I undertook some discreet due diligence and sounded out Pastor Norma. I wanted her take on how the evangelicals might react to Mike getting bus tire tracks all over his body.

  “Say, Norma,” I said casually, “did you happen to see that item suggesting the president drop Mike from the ticket?” (There hadn’t actually been any item.)

  “What, on account of that devil-worshipping stuff?” she replied. “Why heck, we all do things as kids that we shouldn’ta. I used to drop my panties behind the barn and let boys stare at my foofie for a quarter. I was a millionaire by the time I was eleven.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. Evangelicals always seem eager to tell you the most appalling things about their presaved selves: how they drank and beat their wives; stole the church collection money; set fire to Mexicans; blew up outhouses with Gramps inside; all manner of wickedness. I finally concluded that this “unholier than thou” shtick allowed them to advertise how great they felt about themselves now. I thought Norma’s refusal to join in the carping about Mike’s Satan worship was admirably Christian.

  “No,” I said, “the item about how Cricket Singh would make a good replacement for Mike. What do you think?”

  Norma looked at me as though I’d suggested she should ask Stormy Daniels to give the guest sermon at her megachurch.