Make Russia Great Again: A Novel Read online

  It was this very thing that Mr. Colonnity wished to discuss with me in that call.

  “Herb,” he said, “don’t buy into that ‘Colonnity is the real power behind the throne’ bullcrap. They only say that to drive a wedge between me and the president.”

  “Thank you for sharing that, sir,” I said.

  “Herb,” he said, “you don’t have to call me sir. You’re the White House chief of staff. You can call me anything you want, including shithead.”

  I sensed he was being mirthful, so I laughed. I had to pinch myself. Here was Mr. Seamus Colonnity himself, inviting me to call him a shithead. I wanted to say, Well, that’s awfully white of you, shithead. But I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth. A quarter century in the hospitality business had installed a profanity dam in my mouth.

  “Herb,” he said in an intimate tone. “As you know, the boss has been expressing some dissatisfaction with Fox.”

  I reassured him that so far as I knew, Mr. Trump’s admiration for Fox was undimmed.

  “I dunno,” Mr. Colonnity said. “He wasn’t pleased about that poll we ran showing the two-point drop in his approval rating among World War II veterans.”

  I agreed that he wasn’t happy, but said that he hadn’t been dwelling on it.

  “I hope he understands that I had nothing to do with that,” Mr. Colonnity said.

  I thought it prudent not to comment, so I made an ambiguous hmpf sound.

  Mr. Colonnity continued: “I don’t know what’s going on with those people on Fox and Fiends lately. They used to be team players. Frankly, I’m starting to wonder whose team they’re on.”

  I wasn’t sure where this was going, so I made another hmpf.

  “What really pissed me off,” Mr. Colonnity went on, “was that idiot they had on who said the FBI was only following ‘established procedure’ when they sent in that SWAT team to arrest Mitch McConnell’s sister-in-law.”

  Anjelica “Empress” Chong was the sister of the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and part owner of her family’s Flying Junk Shipping of Shanghai. The company had been transporting great quantities of soil from the mainland as part of China’s program of building artificial islands in the South China Sea. This apparently violated some obscure treaty, exposing “Empress” to legal action.

  “I mean, come on. Why was that necessary? She’s not El Chapo, for Chrissake. What did they think, the sister-in-law of the Senate majority leader was going to open fire on them? She’d have turned herself in peacefully. And by the way, the fuck is going on with Barr? Why would he sign off on a raid like that?”

  Careful, Herb, I told myself, for here was thin ice. I could hardly reveal to Mr. Colonnity—however close he was to the president—the real reason behind it.

  I suggested that perhaps the attorney general had intended the arrest, which involved some two dozen FBI agents, a helicopter, and two armored riot-control vehicles, to “send a message” to other sisters-in-law of the majority leader not to violate international embargoes. But Mr. Colonnity’s Wall of Talk was up and running and there was no penetrating it.

  “I’ll tell you why he did it,” he continued. “Barr’s just falling for this judgment of history bullshit that’s going around like Wuhan coronavirus. Everyone’s going, ‘Oh no! George Will says we’re all going to look bad a hundred years from now!’ Talk about summer soldiers and sunshine patriots! These people make me sick, Herb. They make me want to vomit.”

  I was truly flattered at how quickly Mr. Colonnity had taken me into his confidence. Only five minutes into our first conversation together, and here he was sharing details of his gastric system with me. It made me want to share with him the background behind “Empress” Chong’s arrest. But I couldn’t reveal that the president had instructed AG Barr to “take the bitch down hard,” as payback to Senator McConnell for allowing the impeachment trial to proceed in the Senate.

  “I’ll be sure to convey your concern to the president,” I said.

  Apparently this sounded bland, or evasive, for Mr. Colonnity’s tone suddenly cooled by several degrees. Double-digit degrees.

  After a silence he said, in a brusque sort of way, “Yeah, well, you do that, Herb.” And hung up.

  I rebuked myself. Well done, Herb. Not yet noon on your first day and already you have offended Mr. Trump’s chief media champion.

  I made a mental note to be more—I don’t want to say “sycophantic”—proactive when it came to massaging the egos of the larger personalities in Mr. Trump’s inner circle. It goes with the job. A quarter century in the hospitality business would be good training.

  A bit after noon, Greta Fibberson, our chief of communications, came into my office. Greta was a highly attractive female person: tall, dark haired, cheekbones like knives, great gams, high heels, and as the older generation would say, “A balcony you could play Shakespeare from.”I

  Greta’s default expression was one of anxiety verging on panic, not uncommon in the Trump White House, where staff were expected to function at peak efficiency or be fired by tweet.

  “Herb,” she said, favoring me with one of her three-second smiles. “Welcome aboard. Surviving so far? That’s great. Herb, we need to talk.”

  “Of course,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Why does Seamus Colonnity hate you?”

  Bit of a jolt.

  “I have no idea. Why do you say this?”

  “He just called you a bellhop on his radio show.”

  “Well, I… we had a perfectly agreeable talk, just now. He called me. To congratulate me on the job.”

  “Uh-huh. And?”

  “He said not to take seriously what people say about him being the real White House chief of staff.”

  “Was that all?”

  “No. He expressed dismay, I’d call it, over the arrest of Senator McConnell’s sister-in-law. Specifically, about the somewhat dramatic manner in which it was conducted.”

  I didn’t know if the president had looped Greta in on his reason for treating Senator McConnell’s sister-in-law like the head of a Mexican drug cartel.

  I added, “He referred to the Fox and Fiends hosts by an unflattering name.”

  “For the veterans poll?”

  “Yes.”

  Greta sniffed.

  “Okay. But why has Seamus got it in for you? You did kiss his ring, I hope.”

  A quarter century in the hospitality business may have instilled a desire to please, but it hadn’t quite turned me into Uriah Heep.II

  “If by ‘kiss his ring’ you mean was I polite, the answer is yes, Greta. But I had the distinct impression that Mr. Colonnity had called to kiss my ring. Not that I actually wear a ring.”

  She crossed her arms over her Shakespearean mezzanine and made a bemused snort.

  “It’s my fault,” she said. “I should have given you a heads-up. Seamus always calls new chiefs on their first day. To show them who’s really chief. It’s his way of letting you know you’re on probation.”

  “Oh,” I said. “And how does one get off probation?”

  “By feeding him.”

  “I was under the impression the president fed him. But thank you for the advice.”

  “Look, Herb. The boss thinks the sun rises and sets on Seamus’s ass. If Seamus shot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight, he’d pardon him before they got the handcuffs on him. Bear that in mind going forward. Okay? Gotta go. Hey—everyone is thrilled you’re here. The boss needs a comfort zone, and you are it. Mulkinson was a total disaster. Meanwhile, don’t worry about Seamus. I’ll give him a hand job. But the next one’s on you.”

  I understand that in White House communications—“commo,” in the parlance—folks like Greta were required to perform glad-handing and ego-stroking on the media. Still. I was willing to kiss Mr. Colonnity’s ring if that was the price of getting him to stop referring to me as a bellhop; but there would be no “hand job” for him from Herb Nutterman.

  It was
no time for brooding. Mr. Trump was not exaggerating when he told me he was in the middle of a “shit storm.” Indeed, the feces were incoming from every direction: impeachment proceedings; terrorist attacks by the newly formed Kurdish “Death to America” Brigade; the nomination of Roy MooreIII to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court; the court-ordered release of Mr. Trump’s tax returns (a veritable Pandora’s box of horrors); plus the news that presidential son-in-law Jored Kushner had refinanced the family company’s trouble-plagued luxury apartment complex in Puerto Vaya con Dios, Mexico, with a loan from the sultan of Brunei. It was one thing after another. The liberal mainstream media, whose motto is “America Last,” was feasting.

  Mr. Colonnity’s valiant colleague, Mr. Corky Fartmartin, was joining in Fox’s defense of the president. So we had on our side twin Galahads tilting lances. But Mr. Fartmartin’s efforts to link Hillary Clinton to all of Mr. Trump’s calamities weren’t quite getting traction. Still, one had to applaud the passion with which these two “Lions of Fox” defended their president.IV If only more members of the media were as patriotic. Mr. Trump returned the favor by inviting them frequently to golf with him, and told me to comp them whenever they stayed at Trump properties. Naturally, the media even managed to make these friendly gestures by Mr. Trump seem criminal.

  It was all enough to keep a dozen White House chiefs of staff busy. I sometimes had a cot brought in to my office so I could work through the night, catching occasional fifteen-minute power naps between incoming rounds of feces. Yet it was also exhilarating. Here I was at ground zero, doing my part to Make America Great Again. I hadn’t worked this hard since the reverse-flow sewage disaster at Farrago.

  I. I stipulate that in the #MeToo era, one would never use such a description. Still.

  II. An unpleasantly servile Dickens character.

  III. Former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, alleged by some to have had a perhaps overzealous interest in fourteen-year-old girls.

  IV. The term “Lions of Fox” seems incongruent, but the promotional department at Fox made good use of it.

  3

  No need to go into too much detail. You’d have to have been living on Mars—or Pluto—not to know that on that fateful day the world awoke to the arresting news that Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, had been defeated by the candidate of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Many a cup of coffee cooled before being drunk that morning.

  Mr. Putin had proposed the bold idea of moving the 2024 presidential election up by four years, so as to make him president for life, thus eliminating the need for endless periodic elections. This would result in considerable budget savings as well as eliminating the inevitable disruptions that elections cause.

  Mr. Putin and his newly renamed Putin Forever Party—formerly United Russia—had been comfortably ahead of the others. Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Russia for Russians Only Party was twenty points behind. Anatoli Zitkin’s Communist Party trailed by almost fifty points. No one expected him to win, even the nincompoops at the New York Times who gave Hillary Clinton a 97 percent chance of winning in 2016.

  Then—cue the kettle drums in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture—ba-boom: Putin came in second, behind Zitkin. Around the globe could be heard a collective “What? That can’t be right.”

  Because Zitkin’s margin of victory was less than 2 percent, Russian law mandated a second, runoff election.

  Now it’s no secret that Mr. Trump was a huge admirer of Mr. Putin. But I stress, this was not, as his detractors have so malevolently suggested, because he owed his presidency to him. No. Not at all.

  Yes, some alleged that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Specifically, all seventeen of the US intelligence agencies, giving rise to suspicion in the Trump camp that the “deep state” was determined to make his victory appear illegitimate. But there was never any hard evidence or smoking gun. No ballots were found in Michigan with “Trump” written in Cyrillic.

  Mr. Trump was understandably aggrieved by allegations that he owed his presidency to Russian military intelligence and so-called troll farms and “bots.” And yes, technically, Hillary Clinton got three million more votes, but as Mr. Trump said, most of those were fraudulent, cast by Mexican drug gangs and agents of George Soros. Anyway, presidents are elected by the Electoral College, not by actual people.I

  The plain truth is that Mr. Trump “clicked” with Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump has always admired strong personalities. This is why he got along so well with such world leaders as Mr. Kim of North Korea; President Attajurk of Turkey; Mr. Orban of Hungary; Mr. Duterte of the Philippines; Mr. Goerring, the new chancellor of Germany; and the new boy on the block, the frisky, bellicose Emperor Hirohito II of Japan.

  So when the astonishing news broke that Mr. Putin had lost to a Communist, the general reaction was “No way.”

  Mr. Trump typically lost interest in his daily intelligence briefing after about thirty seconds. Not this morning.

  “How could this have happened?” he demanded of DNI Miriam “Mother” Jones.II

  I liked and respected Miriam.III She struck me as a no-nonsense sort, which is what you want in a director of national intelligence. I’m sure that as the first female DNI she was aware that she was on probation. If she didn’t know the answer to a question, she would say honestly, “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Hadda be a hack,” Mr. Trump insisted. “Putin was fifty points ahead of the other guy, whatshisname?”

  “Zitkin,” Miriam said, since she did know the answer to this question. “Anatoli Zitkin.”

  “Whatever. Well what do you know?”

  “I have a briefing paper on him for you,” Miriam said, handing the president a thick folder.

  “I don’t have time to read that crap. What’s he look like? Do you have a picture of him?”

  Miriam had come prepared.

  Mr. Trump stared at the photo before him of a stout, balding, bespectacled man in his early sixties. He was smiling, which struck me as unusual. In most photos I’ve seen of Communists, they’re scowling and grim, as though someone’s just insulted their mother or told them that Das Kapital was so boring they never made it past page three. Smiling might give them away for having a sneaky bourgeois thought, or deviating from true Marxist-Leninism, or putting out capitalist attitude.

  Comrade Zitkin didn’t look scary enough to be a Russian Commie. I couldn’t imagine him ordering the czar and his entire family to be shot, or sending millions of people off to Siberia, or signing a nonaggression pact with Hitler. I could see him standing on Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square with his fellow Commies, waving at tanks and missiles and the goose-stepping soldiers. But he’d probably still be smiling, unlike the old Soviet sourpusses who as the parade went past seemed to be thinking, When is this fucking parade going to be over? I’m freezing. Who’s got the vodka?

  Mr. Trump tossed the photo back at Miriam.

  “That’s not a winner,” he said. “That’s a loser. What’s his story? Not that I care. Twenty-five words or less.”

  “A brief brief?” Miriam said. “Okay. Sixty-three. From Tbilisi. Like Stalin. But not a Stalinist himself. Probably as a result of his father and three uncles dying in the Gulag.”

  “The what?”

  “The old Soviet network of political prisons. Slave labor camps.”

  “He didn’t fuck around, Stalin. You gotta give him that.”

  Sensing that Mr. Trump’s attention was already wandering, Miriam finished her brief with: “Came up through the trade unions. Organizer. Married the boss’s daughter. Two grown children. This is the third time he’s run for president. Apparently against the wishes of his wife. She calls him Comrade Quixote.”

  “Comrade what?”

  “I take it as a reference to Don Quixote. The muddleheaded Spanish knight. Man of La Mancha?”

  “Yeah, yeah. So what’s his thing?”

  “Thing?”

  “Why is he
a Communist?”

  “Ah. He only became one after Putin came to power. His principal theme is”—Miriam seemed to be mentally editing—“that Putin is running a kleptocracy.”

  “That he’s a thief?”

  “Essentially. That he runs the country much as a mafia don would run his empire. Got the oligarchs organized and functioning as the underbosses, the capos, if you will.”

  “He hates rich people, in other words. He’s Bernie Sanders.”

  Miriam smiled. “I imagine he and Senator Sanders might agree on a few things.”

  “Okay. Got it. And you and the however many intelligence agencies we have didn’t see this coming?”

  “We were as surprised by the result as everyone else, sir.”

  “What’s the intelligence budget these days? Trillions?”

  “Fifty-four billion.”

  “How could this loser pull off something like this?”

  Miriam said she would rather wait until she had “actionable humint,” a phrase that probably meant as little to the president as it did to me. (It turned out to mean “human intelligence,” as opposed to “siginit,” which means “signals intelligence.”)

  The moment Miriam left the Oval Office, tightly clutching her presidential daily briefing tablet, Mr. Trump picked up the phone and told the operator to get Mr. Putin on the line.

  “Sir,” I said, “do you want me to get Mr. Wootten?” Judd Wootten was director of the National Security Council. I thought it would be prudent to have him in on a conversation between the president and the leader of Russia. While speaking with world leaders on the phone, Mr. Trump had a tendency to improvise. The fallout from his “perfect” call with the leader of Ukraine had been rather considerable.