Make Russia Great Again: A Novel Read online

  “Cricket Singh?” She harrumphed. “The very idea…”

  My takeaway was that both Norma and Mr. Putin were of the same mind about Cricket, but presumably for different reasons.

  I. The comment provoked all sorts of hand-wringing about whether he was planning to run for a third term, despite the Twenty-Second Amendment. Mr. Trump certainly knew how to make everyone dance to his tune.

  II. Though she was half Indian, and Hindus have some pretty fruity gods.

  21

  Judd came to my office one morning, eyes a-popping.

  “Just got off the phone with McTight,” he said, referring to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Judd had the annoying habit of announcing that he had something of great import to tell you, then going silent and making you wait for it.

  “Judd,” I said impatiently, “I’m very busy. If the country is under attack, just tell me.”

  “He and the chiefs are not happy about your molybdenum crisis.”

  I was tempted to tell him, “There is no ‘Y’ in ‘O-U-R.’ ” The molybdenum crisis had been a hard sell on the chiefs from the get-go. I’d gone out of my way to bring them on board, explaining as earnestly as I could that the president was “highly concerned about the potential”—I was careful to phrase it that way—“that the US might find its access to the molybdenum supply chain jeopardized by a few shortsighted, politically motivated members of Congress eager to score cheap PR points with a media baron.”

  This was met with steely looks. Over the course of my career, I’ve gotten the proverbial “evil eye” from a number of people: guests who’d found pubic hairs on their bed; who’d been erroneously charged for minibar items; who resented the two-hundred-dollar fee for opening their room safe after they forgot the combination (that they had programmed). But getting it from seven scowling generals and admirals with an aggregate acre of decorations for valor on their chests does make you squirm.

  “Mr. Nutterman,” General McTight said in a tone of ill-concealed disdain. “We all share the president’s concern about strategic matériel. But we’ve seen absolutely no indications of any interruption in molybdenum acquisition. Frank?” he said to a general who, I gathered, had something to do with molybdenum acquisition. “Any difficulties there?”

  “No, sir. We’re good. More than good. We’re swimming in molybdenum.”

  I was tempted to ask him how one swam in molybdenum.

  Chairman McTight turned his death-ray gaze back on me, as if to say, Was there any other pointless bullshit you wanted to waste our valuable time with?

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “But the president feels that this is no time for complacency. He doesn’t want us to be caught short if there’s another—God forbid—9/11, or Benghazi. To that end, therefore, he feels it would be helpful if you and the other chiefs—and by the way, thank you all for your service—shared his concern in the course of your testifying on Capitol Hill.”

  Fourteen icy eyeballs. End of meeting.

  I’d been hoping for the headline:

  PENTAGON EXPRESSES “GRAVE CONCERN” OVER MOLYBDENUM SUPPLY

  When one finally did appear, it was somewhat different:

  PENTAGON “PUZZLED” BY WHITE HOUSE CONCERN OVER MOLYBDENUM

  So much for civilian leadership of the military. We ought to try it someday.

  President Putin had conveyed to Mr. Trump his unhappiness over US military aid to Ukraine. There’s a rule in the hospitality business: “If the lady is not happy, the gentleman is not happy.” If Mr. Putin was not happy, Mr. Trump was not happy.

  But the president couldn’t just cut off military aid to Ukraine, not after getting impeached for (allegedly) threatening to withhold it unless Ukraine announced that it would not rest until Hunter Biden was in handcuffs. Instead, he came up with a rather deft solution that would satisfy Ukraine (up to a point) and make Mr. Putin happy: rendering the military aid useless.

  “This is so brilliant,” Mr. Trump said. “Only I could come up with something like this.” He was just glowing, and not from the spray-on tan.

  He explained: “We tell the Pentagon to remove parts from the Javelin antitank missiles and the other stuff. Firing pins, fuses, whatever. So when the Ukies go to use them—pffft—nothing happens.”

  “Brilliant, sir,” I affirmed. “But won’t the Ukies complain?”

  The president shrugged.

  “Fuck ’em. We’ll tell them, ‘I guess you people aren’t sophisticated enough to handle this kind of hardware. It is very technical. Maybe you should stick to pitchforks and clubs.’ ”

  Clever as it was, I wasn’t 100 percent comfortable. After one staring contest with the Joint Chiefs, I didn’t relish ordering them to sabotage $400 million worth of antitank missiles and what-not. They’d probably have views about that.

  Fortunately, Mr. Trump forgot about it. An upside to his stable genius was that he had so many brilliant ideas, he simply couldn’t keep track of them all.

  But if he did remember this one, I feared the chiefs would already be in a foul mood over being asked to testify to the Congress about the coming molybdenum Pearl Harbor. So I didn’t press them further about it. You have to be careful with the military. In the end, they’re the ones with the guns.

  Mr. Trump was constantly fretting about the possibility of a coup. His—I don’t want to say “paranoia”—concern about it always seemed worse after he’d spent time with leaders like President Attajurk of Turkey, or Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, or Kim Jong-un. They filled his head with visions of conniving generals. I suppose leaders of countries like that have to “stay sharp” about their militaries. Mr. Trump kept sharp by increasing the defense budgets and pardoning overenthusiastic soldiers.

  One time we were in Marine One, flying over the Bosporus, after watching a Graeco-Roman wrestling tournament with President Attajurk. The Turkish president had regaled Mr. Trump with details of the attempted coup against him.

  The president turned to Mike Keller, head of his Secret Service detail, and said, “Mike, if it came to a coup, you guys would be on my side, right?”

  Awkward. Poor Mike shot me a glance that said, “Help.” I tried to change the subject by pointing out the Hagia Sophia, but Mr. Trump was more concerned with obtaining a guarantee of loyalty from his chief bodyguard. Mike finally said, “Sir, all of us would take a bullet for you.” But that wasn’t enough to reassure Mr. Trump.

  “The Pentagon has a lot of bullets, Mike.”

  Mike looked about ready to unlatch the door and leap into the waters of the Bosporus. Fortunately, the president got an alert on his iPhone that there’d been an episode of mass food poisoning at the Trump Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. He began furiously tweeting. Mike was spared having to pledge a blood oath of loyalty.

  22

  Rudy Giuliani, the president’s former personal attorney, was now living in the Julian Assange suite at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

  While changing planes at Heathrow, Rudy was tipped off that the Justice Department had issued a warrant for his arrest for injurious punditry and pernicious legal representation. Knowing that the British authorities would have no choice but to extradite him to the US, Rudy did the smart thing—“for once,” as one commentator said—and sought asylum from the famously fugitive-welcoming Ecuadoreans, whose motto is: “Nuestra embajada es tu embajada.”

  Mr. Trump was hugely relieved. He’d sent Rudy back to Ukraine just to get him out of the US and away from the cable TV shows.

  “Better he should be in an asylum than seeking asylum,” he said.

  The president had had enough of Rudy’s shenanigans. Mr. Trump was never one to admit that he himself might have erred, but he was now openly saying, “What the fuck was I thinking when I asked that idiot to be my lawyer? Whose idea was that? Was that Jored’s idea? Hadda be. It couldn’t have been me. I would never do something so stupid.”

  But it was no time for complacency. Mr. Trump was nervous that Ru
dy would step out onto the balcony—the very one Julian Assange had used as his bully pulpit—and start ranting.

  “Italians and balconies—very bad combination,” Mr. Trump said, alluding to Mussolini, who spent a lot of time declaiming from balconies. “If that idiot goes out there and starts spewing… I don’t even want to think about that. Get Jones in here. They handle stuff like this, right?”

  I didn’t much like the sound of that.

  “How do you mean ‘stuff,’ sir?”

  “Never mind. Just get her in here.”

  I called Miriam and told her to arrive “with an open mind.” She didn’t much like the sound of that. Meanwhile, I tried to calm the president, telling him that by now everyone considered Giuliani to be a mental case. It didn’t matter what he might say.

  From the look on the president’s face, I realized that this was not necessarily true. Rudy might be unhinged, but he was also a hoarder of documents. He stashed documents like hamsters stuff food into their cheeks. God knows what he had in there. In one of his more notorious instances of “butt-dialing,” the dialee (a Washington Post reporter) listened as Rudy offered a Ukrainian mob boss a weekend at Farrago-sur-Mer, “everything comped—coke, hookers, minibar—everything,” if he would sign an affidavit swearing that Hunter Biden had tried to hire him to assassinate Marie Yovanovitch, then US ambassador to Ukraine. Not much lawyer-client confidentiality there.

  I was not asked to sit in on the president’s meeting with Miriam; nor was Judd. Miriam emerged from the Oval looking as though she’d just donated a pint too much blood and was in dire need of a cookie and juice.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “Can’t discuss it,” she said, heading out the door, followed by her bodyguards. Years later an unusually well-sourced book on the CIA came out with the arresting revelation that “Trump inquired into the feasibility of stationing a CIA sniper on the roof of Harrods department store, to shoot Giuliani if he stepped out onto the Assange balcony.” No wonder Miriam couldn’t discuss it.

  I myself preferred to know less, rather than more, about whatever Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani had been up to in Ukraine. Public service is an honor and a duty, and I’m not complaining, but I didn’t relish the prospect of retaining a legal team in the event United States v. Rudolph Giuliani came to trial.

  Not—I emphasize—because I knew anything incriminating. But these legal cases are financial sinkholes. One minute you’re on the golf course minding your own business, thinking, Gosh, what a nice day. The next, the earth has gone out from under you and you’re in a conference room being deposed with three lawyers in attendance at a thousand dollars an hour each. Every time Mr. Trump mentioned Mr. Giuliani’s name, I wanted to cover my ears and shout, “La-la-la-la I can’t hear you, sir.” But that’s not a protocol available to White House chiefs of staff. Fortunately, Mr. Trump had been fairly tight-lipped about his dealings with Rudy.

  Imagine my joy then when my secretary, Caramella, told me that Mr. Giuliani was holding on line one.

  “For God’s sake, Caramella,” I said. “He’s a fugitive from justice. I can’t talk to him.”

  “You visit Paul in jail all the time,” she said. “He’s a convicted felon.”

  “There’s a difference,” I said. “Tell him I’m unavailable.”

  She buzzed me back.

  “I think you better talk to him. He sounds weird.”

  “He is weird. Just hang up.”

  She came back on again a minute later.

  “He says if you don’t talk to him, someone in Kiev will hack your credit cards and bank accounts. And Mrs. Nutterman’s.”

  I considered.

  “Put him through to Mr. Forkmorgan’s office.” Blyster Forkmorgan. Let Blyster deal with Rudy, lawyer to lawyer. They could hurl Latin at each other.

  Still, I was curious: Why was the man formerly known as “America’s Mayor” reaching out to me? Could it be because his client, the president, wasn’t talking his calls? Oy.

  Blyster called me ten minutes later.

  “Thanks a bunch, Herb.”

  “Anytime. Did he threaten to have someone in Kiev hack your wife’s bank account?”

  “He’s saying unless the indictment is dropped, he’ll—”

  “Whoa right there, Counselor,” I said. “Why do I need to hear this?”

  “Because you’re chief of staff, Herb.”

  “As I am woefully aware, Blyster. But unless you fix me up with a six-lawyer team who’ll represent me pro bono, I don’t want to hear one more word. And now I’m going to hang up. Let’s do lunch. Say, in the post-Giuliani era.”

  And that was that. Or so I’d hoped.

  Judd came into my office looking like Thomas the Tank Engine careening down the tracks toward the washed-out bridge with no brakes.

  “What the fuck just happened in there between him and Miriam?”

  “I don’t know, Judd. I wasn’t asked to join. Thank God.”

  “Well, I just spent fifteen minutes talking her out of resigning.”

  “What?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me why. Just kept saying she didn’t think she could continue. ‘In good conscience.’ ”

  In my experience, it is never a good sign when staff start talking about their consciences. One time at Farrago-sur-Mer I had to go mano a mano with the head of housekeeping. To cut down on costs, I’d issued a directive that bed linen didn’t need to be changed between occupancies, unless it was “visibly soiled.”

  Rosa Maria told me this was unhygienic and that her conscience would not allow her to “spread diseases.” I told her that this was a bit much, coming from someone who’d never slept between sheets until she dog-paddled across the Rio Grande. But she wasn’t cowed, even by a pointed reference about her current immigration status. I have to say, I admired Rosa Maria for sticking to her guns. In the end, we compromised. I can report that no Farrago-sur-Mer guests died of Ebola or other unspeakable diseases after their stay with us.

  I called Miriam and told her that the president had phoned me after she left. I said that he had expressed “the greatest admiration” for her for “sticking to her guns.” I was groping in the dark, since I had no idea what was said in the meeting, or what guns she was sticking to. (CIA sniper guns, as I learned years later.)

  Miriam was no fool. I suspect that as a trained intelligence professional, she saw my call for what it was—a bald-faced lie in the service of damage control. Nevertheless, I laid it on thick, telling her that the president thought she was “just aces,” and how he was “really starting to come around about the value of the intelligence community,” despite never missing an opportunity to call them “imbeciles” and “traitors” in public.

  There was a longish silence on the line. Then Miriam thanked me for the call, “Even though everything you just told me is horseshit.”

  Another day in the White House. But as they say in the Mafia, this is the life we chose.

  23

  When those of the Cosa Nostra persuasion wish to send a message, it comes in the form of a fish wrapped in newspaper, or a horse head in your bed. (For the record, the latter would qualify as “obviously soiled,” per my Farrago-sur-Mer directive.)

  When Oleg Pishinsky wishes to send a message that he’s impatient with the pace with which you’re repealing the law freezing his US assets and banning him from entering the country, it arrives in the form of a video on Facebook. The message showed in high resolution the future president of the United States performing due diligence on a Miss Universe contestant. It went very, very viral.

  Fortunately, we now lived—thanks in no small part to Mr. Trump—in the age of fake news, where, as they say in Moscow, “Nothing is real and everything is possible.” Still.

  It’s not exaggerating to say that Mr. Trump’s anger was about as volcanic as Mt. Vesuvius, circa AD 79. I was not the only one in the Oval that morning who felt like a resident of unhappy Pompeii as hot ash descended and toxic gases fil
led the lungs.

  After ten or fifteen minutes of violent excoriation, Mr. Trump finally slumped his great shoulders, his voice hoarse from bellowing.

  No one wanted to be the first to say something. Doing so risked triggering aftershocks and new issuance of scalding lava. I remained silent, knowing that my abasement would take place in private, after the staff meeting.

  Katie—brave, valiant Katie—was the first to speak.

  “I just think it’s disgusting that the Democrats would resort to something like this. They probably got their Hollywood friends to help with the CGI.” (That is, computer generated imaging. Katie was boldly asserting that the film shown of Mr. Trump ravishing Miss Sri Lanka was fake.)

  I could have kissed her. It was as if fresh oxygen was being pumped into the room. People breathed. Color returned to cheeks.

  Picking up her cue, Greta said, “And we’re asking the FBI to look into it.”

  “No!” Mr. Trump said. “No FBI! They’ll say it’s real. Which it isn’t.”

  “Right,” Greta self-corrected. “Normally we would ask the FBI. But as we learned during the impeachment hoax and the farce Senate trial, the FBI has tried again and again to mount a coup against the president. So—”

  “We can no longer rely on the FBI,” Jored said. “And how sad is that?” Jored loved to finish other people’s sentences so their ideas would appear to be his.

  Mr. Trump nodded, hunched forward in his chair, his little thumbs tapping a tweet fandango on the keys of his iPhone. I could almost see the words flying up into the ethersphere or whatever it’s called: DISGUSTING! SAD! DESPERATE! DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE, AUTHOR OF THIS HORRIBLE FRAUD, OWES AMERICA AN APOLOGY!!!!

  The TV, sound muted, showed the hosts of Fox and Fiends shaking their heads in collective revulsion. The crawl at the bottom of the screen was a conveyor belt:

  FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM REFUSE TO REMOVE OFFENSIVE POST… WHITE HOUSE: VIDEO ORIGINATED IN UKRAINE… GIULIANI COMPLAINING OF “WAY TOO SPICY FOOD” AT ECUADOREAN EMBASSY… WILL HAVE FUTURE MEALS CATERED BY FORTNUM & MASON, SUPPLIERS TO BUCKINGHAM PALACE…