Make Russia Great Again: A Novel Read online

  I groaned, outwardly.

  “I was going to call you about it,” I prevaricated. “But while I’ve got you—any progress with the chiefs?”

  “I’m shakin’ it, boss, I’m shakin’ it. I even dropped a hint on them that the Armed Services Committee is considering turning all their golf courses into bombing ranges. Meanwhile, Admiral Fletcher—the CNO—he’s all bent out of shape on account of the McCain decommissioning. I could threaten him with mothballing a couple of carrier battle groups. But he’s likely to call that bluff.”

  “Well, keep at it. The president is counting on you.”

  “Right. So my invitation is on the way? Herb? You there?”

  “Sorry. They’re arraigning Zitkin and the other Reds… Wow… They just charged him with treason.”

  “Reckon that’ll teach him to keep his little red mitts out of the ballot box. So, the invite…”

  “They’re all being charged with treason. Oy.”

  “Herb?”

  “Senator?”

  “Where’s my damn invite?”

  Deep breath.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much good news for you on that, Senator. The president has decided to make the dinner more, uh, intimate. They’ve been paring the list pretty heavily. Culling, really.”

  Silence.

  “Don’t give me that, Herb. Don’t give me that. Half the damn Senate is attending that dinner. Cricket Singh is attending. She’s been out of government for two years.”

  “Has it been that long?”

  “What’s going on, Herb? This is no way to treat your friends.”

  I was tempted to quote “Ask not.”

  “You’ve been a rock of Gibraltar,” I said. “And to think that only three years ago you were calling the president a ‘kook’ and a ‘retard’ and a ‘disgrace to the human race’ and all those other names.”

  “Then how come I’m being dropped like a sack of cee-ment?”

  Awkward. Like the time I had to tell Governor Christie of New Jersey he couldn’t sit in the president’s limo because the president was afraid the tires would blow.

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Senator, so I’ll just give it to you neat. Rightly or wrongly, the president feels that you’ve let him—and the country—down by failing to deliver on the repeal. The way I see it, I think you’re a victim of the high standard you set for yourself.”

  Silence.

  “Okay. But there is one thing you can do for me, Herb.”

  “Name it.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  So that went well.

  39

  And here’s the irony: if Squiggly had called twenty-four hours later, there’d have been no reason for him to call.

  The dinner was off. The Putin visit was off. Off, as in “not happening.”

  I was aboard Air Force One with the president and Katie and the rest of the retinue, en route to a big preelection rally in Philadelphia.

  The president liked to watch “enemy TV”—CNN and MSNBC, that is—prior to rallies. He said it got his blood going, and also gave him fresh material with which to denigrate Chip Holleran and Jake Tapper and the other Trump bashers.

  The president was glowering at Jake Tapper when Tapper suddenly paused in mid–Trump disparagement. He put a finger to his earpiece and furrowed his brow.

  “Hold on… we’re getting word out of Moscow… the Putin visit has been postponed. Or canceled. We’ll get that clarified as soon as we can. Meanwhile, from the Kremlin comes the announcement that the upcoming visit to Washington by President Vladimir Putin of Russia is no longer upcoming. It is in fact not-coming…”

  I was in the presidential cabin, handing Mr. Trump various documents to sign: deportation orders, notifications of intent to withdraw from various trade pacts, pardons for military personnel charged with crimes against humanity and such.

  “What the fuck did he just say?” the president said. He muted CNN and unmuted Fox News, where Dana Perino and Juan Williams were discussing a report from London that Rudy Giuliani had fallen asleep with a lit cigar and caused a fire in the Ecuadorean embassy.

  One of the military aides came in with a secure fax from our US embassy in Moscow.

  It wasn’t lengthy, but Mr. Trump doesn’t like to read, so I read it to him. It confirmed what Tapper had just announced. Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman who’d recently embarrassed Mr. Putin by wearing a $620,000 wristwatch, had issued a release: Putin would not be coming to the US, “owing to pressing matters of high importance.”

  “That’s all it says?” Mr. Trump asked.

  I nodded.

  “Nothing about regrets or apologies?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why didn’t he call me?” His expression changed from bewilderment to realization. “Motherfuckers!”

  It took me a moment to decode this. I knew that yesterday Miriam had informed him that the CIA’s asset—what an ironic term—was probably singing for his interrogators like the proverbial canary. Now Putin had just abruptly canceled a much-heralded visit to Washington, without so much as a courtesy call. Not hard to connect those dots.

  I decided not to mention my talk with Miriam. Neither courageous nor forthcoming, I know, but this was not a caca of my making. And I’ve always felt that one should scoop one’s own poop.

  “Sir?” I said with faux innocence. “When you say ‘Motherfuckers,’ to whom are you specifically referring?”

  “The motherfucking deep state, Herb,” he snarled.

  “Sorry, sir? Still not following you, there.”

  The president was too livid to tell me (what I in fact already knew). He plunged into a silent, mineshaft-deep funk. I asked if he wanted me to tell the cockpit to turn back to DC, but he waved me away.

  I went back to huddle with Greta and Katie. I couldn’t tell them about Huggybear, but we had to have some response ready for the slavering beasts awaiting us on the tarmac in Philadelphia. (The press corps.)

  I glanced at the TV monitor. It was set to MSNBC. The closed captioning said:

  TRUMP-PUTIN BROMANCE! COITUS INTERRUPTUS? YOU’RE WATCHING EIGHTBALL…

  “Herb,” Katie asked, “is there something you’re not telling us?” A sharp one, that Katie Borgia-O’Reilly.

  I sighed.

  “Katie, dear. This is an artichoke with many leaves. But for now let’s take it one leaf at a time. What do we say in Philadelphia?”

  “That on the whole, we’d rather not be in Philadelphia,” she said, wittily inverting the W. C. Fields line.

  The enemies of the people were waiting behind the Secret Service rope line like cattle, mooing and baying. Katie gamely approached on high heels as the rest of us scurried like beetles into the motorcade.

  I got into “The Beast,” the presidential limo, with Mr. Trump. The TV was preset to Fox. As we sped off, we watched Katie take up her position in the hot glare of the TV cameras and flashes—a thousand points of spite.

  “Hi,” she said girlishly. “Great to be back in Philadelphia. Great city. Love Philadelphia.”

  “What the fuck is she doing?” the president said.

  “Her best, sir,” I said a bit sharply. He scowled at me and returned his gaze to the TV.

  Katie was beset by a tsunami of shouted questions. She gave them her raised-eyebrow do-you-want-me-to-answer-or not? What a cool customer, that girl.

  The tsunami broke over her; the waters receded, swirling about her attractive ankles. She said in her—I don’t want to say “zombielike”—robotic way, as if she were channeling from a spaceship hovering above Earth:

  “The president completely understands why President Putin is postponing his visit. Look at all he has to deal with right now. An attempted coup by Communists. In a way, you might say that President Trump is dealing with almost the same thing, here. Sadly. What with this pink pair of Socialists running against him. Let’s just hope they don’t try to steal the election.”

  “He didn’t postpon
e it,” Mr. Trump growled at the TV. “He canceled it! Now the Kremlin’s going to say, ‘We didn’t postpone it. We canceled it! Because Trump and Zipkin were in cahoots. And we’ve got proof.’ ”

  The president had let the cat out of the bag. So I more or less had to ask, “Cahoots, sir? Proof?”

  “Shut up, Herb. I’ll explain later. I gotta concentrate on what I’m gonna say.”

  * * *

  All in all, I thought the president did a commendable job at the rally, considering what must have been going on inside his head as he stood in front of twenty thousand people.

  They’d had trouble filling the arena. At the last minute, thousands of unemployed coal miners and their families had to be bussed in. It must have been a thrill for them to be there, breathing the same air as their champion, the president. True, they were still waiting for him to make good on that 2016 campaign pledge to “bring back coal.”

  At first, their cheering wasn’t what I would call “robust.” But Mr. Trump soon warmed them up, telling them how the Democrats were going to confiscate their guns and give what few coal-related jobs remained to transgendered Guatemalan and Sudanese immigrants.

  They liked his riff on Nancy Pelosi’s “horrible teeth,” though it appeared most of them didn’t seem to know who Nancy Pelosi was. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Mr. Trump hated her. That was good enough for them.

  Entertaining as it all was, I braced, waiting to see how he’d deal with the dead eight-hundred-pound Russian bear on the living room floor.

  Katie joined me, a bit out of breath.

  “Did he watch?” she asked.

  “He thought you were magnificent,” I said.

  “Herb, what the fuck is going on?”

  “Let’s listen,” I said.

  “So tonight, on my way here, to beautiful Philadelphia. Such a great city. Philadelphia. Great people. Philly cheesesteak? Come on! Who doesn’t love Philly cheesesteak? Am I right? You know I’m right, folks.”

  The coal miners didn’t join in the paean to Philadelphia cheesesteaks, but then they were from western Pennsylvania, where they probably have their own regional heart-attack-inducing cuisine.

  I telepathically prompted: Russia. You were talking about Russia.

  “So on the way here tonight, we got word from Russia”—telepathic message received—“that President Putin can’t make it, after all. Is that sad, folks?”

  The audience appeared to have no strong opinion.

  “It makes me very sad. Why? Because I was looking forward to showing him what a great country this is. Washington? Not so great.”

  That brought them to their feet. You’d have thought he just announced free cheesesteaks or whatever suicide hoagies they have in western Pennsylvania.

  He quieted the crowd.

  “We were gonna have such a great visit. Very sad. But no wonder President Putin couldn’t get away. Look what happened to him. Look what the Commies tried to do to him. They tried to steal the election!”

  This didn’t seem to bother the folks much.

  “Let me tell you something, folks. You don’t do that to Vladimir Putin.”

  No roars of approval, but enough murmuring to suggest general agreement that no, this was probably not a smart thing to do to someone named Vladimir.

  “The reason I invited him in the first place? To show our support for him. After the disgusting Commies tried to steal the election the first time. What is with it Commies, anyway?”

  For a moment I thought we were segueing into Henny Youngman “Take my wife—please!” territory. But then like a large orange matador, Mr. Trump deftly pivoted into an inspired descant about how after Mr. Trump crushed Loser One and Loser Too, they were going to move “back” to Russia and run against Mr. Putin in the next election, on the Communist Party ticket.

  “Oooh,” Mr. Trump said, trembling and shaking his arms the way he does when he mocks people with degenerative muscle disease. “I bet President Putin is sooo scared!”

  40

  The next day the Kremlin clarified: the Putin visit was not “postponed.” It was “canceled.” Emphatic, terse, with just a hint of “And fuck you.”

  “I gotta call him,” Mr. Trump said.

  “Sir, are you sure that’s a good idea?” I said. “What if he… what if he asks you directly if we were involved in the hack? What will you say?”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “Oh, sir.”

  Much as I admired Mr. Trump’s quick thinking and ability to charm—he had Kim Jong-un eating out of his hand within five minutes, though to judge from Dear Leader’s physique, he’d probably eat out of anything—I strongly felt that improv was not advisable in these circumstances.

  He picked up the phone and asked to be connected with Mr. Putin. I waited with him. We watched Fox. He became fidgety. He kept getting up to throw cans of Diet Coke at squirrels in the Rose Garden.

  “Fucking tree rats. We need a wall around that,” he groused.

  Two hours passed, which is a lot of Fox and an eternity to a man accustomed to getting people on the blower, pronto.

  His phone rang. He picked up, listened, frowned, and hung up.

  “President Putin is unavailable,” he said. “Unavailable? Herb. The president of Russia is not taking my calls? Well, that’s just fucking great.” He sounded so like my mother. (Though she didn’t use four-letter words.)

  “Shall we get Miriam’s input?” I suggested.

  He looked at me.

  “Herb, do you not see that Miriam and Admiral Frankenstein are the reason Putin is not taking my phone calls? Fuck their input. I’ll tell you who’s going to get output. Miriam fucking Jones and Admiral Frankenstein. Deep state motherfuckers. I’m gonna fire both their asses.” He paused. I could see the cogs moving as he thought it through. “That might make Putin happy again.”

  I told Mr. Trump that it was a bold move, to be sure. But that crippling America’s intelligence infrastructure in order to appease America’s principal—I didn’t want to say “enemy”—adversary could have political costs.

  The election was ten days off. I don’t claim to be a political savant, but inflicting an October surprise on yourself struck me as unorthodox. Surely it’s preferable to inflict it on your opponent.

  “How many intelligence agencies are there?” he asked.

  “Seventeen, I think.”

  “How much do we spend on these bozos?”

  “Fifty billion? I’d have to—”

  “Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna fire the whole fucking bunch. That’s got to make Putin happy. Look at the money we’d save. It’s not like we’re getting value for it. Right? Aside from the drones. The drones, we’ll keep. We’ll let the Pentagon run them. They’ll love that. And the savings—we’ll spend that on the wall. Herb,” he said, suddenly excited.

  “Sir?”

  “We build the wall with whatsit called? Oleg’s metal…”

  “Molybdenum?”

  “Yeah. That. Oleg’ll make so much fucking money he’ll be able buy the entire US Congress and Senate and get the anti-Oleg law repealed. Herb, do you see how brilliant this is? Everyone is happy. Putin. Oleg. The intelligence people? Not so much. But fuck ’em. They’ve had it in for me from day one, when they told those horrible lies about the size of my inauguration crowd. It’s brilliant, Herb. You see how brilliant it is, right?”

  I was without words.

  So there it was, the Placate Putin Package—“3P” as he code-named it. He instructed me not to tell anyone. “The timing’s gotta be just right.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. At all. The final debate with Loser One was in two days. Was he planning to unveil this three-headed monster then?

  I returned to my office and pondered heavily. I was so gloomy I wouldn’t have been surprised if a raven appeared and started tapping on the window.

  I understood the president’s urgent need to placate Mr. Putin. If Putin, or Oleg, rele
ased the tape of Mr. Trump asking Oleg to “take care of” the beauty contestants—with its odious (and I emphasize, false) insinuation that he wanted Oleg to give them all a rubdown with Oil of Oleg—that would be the October surprise from hell. Even the Ever Trumpers who’d offered to be gunned down by the president on Fifth Avenue might say, “Really?” On the other hand, maybe they’d just shrug and say, “Bitches had it coming.”

  I called Miriam on a secure line. Whom else could I turn to?

  Miriam listened in her usual calm way. Unflappability in an intelligence person is a good thing. I expected her to say “Oh shit” or “Suboptimal.” But she just said, “Hm,” which struck me as mild, considering.

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  “Well, Herb, I don’t know that there’s much we can do at this point.”

  “Miriam,” I said, “I’m not asking for the ‘Once more into the breach’ speech, but there must be something.”

  She considered.

  “Who does he listen to? Take advice from?”

  “No one. He’s always insisted that he’s the smartest person in the room.”

  “He listens to those two baboons on Fox, doesn’t he?”

  I stiffened. “By ‘baboons’ do you mean Mr. Colonnity and Mr. Fartmartin?”

  “Yes, Herb. Those baboons.”

  “I don’t agree in the least with your characterization. But yes, he does listen to them. As you’ll recall, Mr. Fartmartin talked him out of starting that war with Iran. Nice work. For a baboon.”

  “Okay. So, tell them everything you’ve just told me. If they’re not baboons, they’ll recognize 3P for what it is and Trump-whisper some sense into him, on live TV.”

  “Miriam. That’s hardly a practical solution.”

  “Alternatively, you could inform Vice President Pants that the president is off his meds. And if he can tear himself away from carving satanic crop circles, he might do his duty and get the cabinet to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. And actually make America great again. By ridding us of this ghastly, toxic man.”