Make Russia Great Again: A Novel Read online

  “Yes, sir,” I said dutifully.

  “How many this week?” the president prodded.

  “Hard to say. Certainly… a number.”

  The president turned his attention back to the senator, who looked like he’d just seen another sea lion, away from which there was no scampering.

  “The armed services are very concerned, Squigg.”

  “They are? I’m on the Armed Services Committee and I haven’t heard a—”

  “Squigg. Wakey-wakey. The military runs on moly… nemmin…”

  “Molybdenum,” I interjected.

  “Right. They need it. Our military says they can’t make anything without it. Bombs, tanks, missiles. Ships. This guy Pishinsky is sitting on the world’s biggest reserves of the stuff. And we’re making his life miserable because of some asshole journalist? Whose death, by the way, he had nothing to do with. Okay? It’s nuts. Completely nuts. Another bullshit Obama move to cripple the military and make us vulnerable.”

  Squiggly was perspiring.

  “I certainly don’t want to sound in any way contrary,” he said. “But I’m not sure five people in the whole country even know about the Glebnikov Act.”

  “You come with me tomorrow on Air Force One to Testicle, Ohio, to my rally and you’ll hear more than five people chanting, ‘Free Oleg!’ ”

  I made a note to get with the speechwriters to come up with a chant that sounded less Russian. Something more generic. Making a chant out of “molybdenum” was probably a bad idea.

  Squiggly took in another deep breath of rarefied Oval air.

  “Overturning a law is a complex business, sir. We’d need fifty-one votes in the Senate. That’s not necessarily a problem. But we also need 51 percent of the House. And… well, I don’t need to tell you that’s a tall order.”

  “I have tremendous faith in your abilities, Squigg. You’re an amazing parliamentarian. The way you walked out of the Senate trial—how many times?”

  “Three.”

  “You know what Colonnity said about that, right? He said it was the most principled thing he’d ever seen in the United States Senate. Ever.”

  “He’s very generous, Seamus.”

  “Generous? Fuck generous! He understated! You were fucking magnificent. I’ll never forget it. I’ll tell you who else won’t forget it. My base. Come with me to Testicle, Squiggly. I’ll give you a shout-out like you’ve never had.”

  Yet again I marveled at the president’s powers of persuasion. Come with me to Testicle, Squiggly, is up there with “I have seen the promised land.” I got goose bumps.

  “Let me get with the leadership and get back to you.”

  “You’re a great man, Squigg Lee Biskitt. Very great.” Squiggly blushed. Mr. Trump added, “Don’t let anyone tell you different,” which I thought somewhat undercut the first part. Mr. Trump turned to me and said, “Herb, anything Senator Biskitt asks for, he gets. Got it? Anything.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Herb, could we talk for just a moment?” Squiggly whispered to me outside the Oval.

  In my office with the door closed, he said, “With all due respect, what the hell was that about?”

  Careful Herb, I cautioned myself. It’s a fine line between loyalty and perfidy.

  “Well, Senator,” I said, “seems to me the president is genuinely concerned about the molybdenum situation.”

  “Well, this is the first I’ve heard anything about that,” he said. “I sit on that committee and no one’s said word one about molyb—however the heck you pronounce it.”

  “Senator,” I said, “I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of it. I come from the hospitality world, not the military industrial complex. But I can tell you that the president deeply, deeply cares that our men—and women—have the tools they need to protect the country. And if the generals tell the president, ‘We need this Pishinsky fellow’s molybdenum,’ the president’s reply is going to be, ‘How much do you need and when do you need it by?’ ”

  The senator looked flustered, as well he might. I threw in, “By the way, Senator, we were going over the president’s schedule yesterday. Someone in the room—I won’t say who—said, ‘Two trips to South Carolina? We’re not going to South Carolina twice.’ Do you know what the president said?”

  “What?”

  “He said, ‘We’re going to South Carolina as many times as Senator Biskitt asks us to go.’ ”

  “He did?”

  “Those were his words,” I said.

  Not exactly a “cue ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ ” moment, okay. But the commander in chief had tasked me with what he viewed as, well, a task. And if a little dissembling was what it took to close the deal, so be it.

  With a bit of on-the-hoof inspiration, I added, “He also wondered if you’d care to go golfing with him this Saturday at Bloody Run. Just you, the president, and President Attajurk.”

  “He did? Well, yes, I would like that very much.” He frowned. “He’s not gonna ask me again to dedicate the statue to that nonexistent Confederate colonel is he? I can’t do that.”

  “No, sir,” I said truthfully.

  It had gotten to the point where I felt virtuous merely by not saying something false. As epiphanies go, not a “road to Damascus” level moment. But something.

  I. I don’t mean this critically.

  12

  Our chief speechwriter, Stefan Nacht von Nebel, had come to the attention of the president with his thought-provoking essay, “The Final Solution to the Mexican Problem.” Mr. Trump, not being a reader himself, had learned of Stefan’s essay from Mr. Colonnity’s show.

  Naturally, the liberal mainstream media did its best to make Stefan out to be the love child of Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl. Stefan took it all in stride. “Good thing I don’t have a club foot,” he quipped.

  Communications director Greta had asked him “please”—a word Greta rarely used with staff—to drop the “von” from his name. At first Stefan refused. The “von” apparently signified that he was of der Adel—the nobility. He even mentioned it to Mr. Trump, who was proud of his own German ancestry. He told Greta to stop bothering his “word bitch” (as he playfully called Stefan) about his name. Mr. Trump often spoke of his Drumpf family’s relations, which apparently included Kaiser Wilhelm, Ludwig II of Bavaria, Frederick the Great, Frederick the Beautiful, and a fearsome, hirsute personage named Teutonicus, who, Mr. Trump proudly averred, “kicked Roman ass.” Greta did at least persuade Stefan not to wear his monocle in the presence of reporters and to stop clicking his heels when greeting the president.I

  I explained to Stefan about the repeal of the Glebnikov Act initiative and the need for a less Slavic-sounding slogan than “Free Oleg!”

  It was a tough sell. Stefan was hardwired against immigration in general. So the idea of rescinding a law that kept just one person from entering the US went against his grain. When I told him that it was personally important to the president, Stefan yielded. He said he’d get to work on a slogan to “arouse the beast in the breast of the base.” (He loved alliteration, Stefan.) A few hours later he came up with “Thou shalt not crucify mankind on a cross of molybdenum.”

  I thought it was a bit of a mouthful, but I was always careful to sugarcoat with Stefan. (Speechwriters are all divas.) He removed his monocle and arched his eyebrow and explained condescendingly that it was a subtle echo of a famous speech by William Jennings Bryan. Whatever, I said. I took it to Mr. Trump, who frowned, then said it “sounded smart” but to run it by Norma.

  Pastor Norma Damdiddle was our in-house evangelical. She was a catch. Getting her to come aboard was a major coup. Mr. Trump had seen her TV show and was highly impressed. (“She’s almost as good as me,” he said.) He called her the next day and asked her to join his “crusade against the left-wing atheists who want to destroy God’s kingdom here on earth.” To his delight, she accepted.

  Norma had rocked the historically male evangelical establishmen
t with her bestseller, Camels Can Too Pass Through the Eye of a Needle—Three Abreast! Her audacious reinterpretation of the gospels as financial seminars proved hugely popular, especially among the less educated and those serving prison sentences. The male evangelical establishment quickly embraced the “Damdiddle Dogma of Enlightened Self-Enrichment.”

  Norma commuted between Washington and her base in Hosannah City, Georgia, home to her fourteen-thousand-seat megachurch, where she broadcast her regular Sunday TV show, Are You Investing in Me, Jesus?

  Needless to say, the liberal mainstream media portrayed Norma as a shill, hypocritical, shameless huckster—yada yada yada—for embracing a thrice-married president who employed a full-time lawyer to handle hush payments to porn stars and other assorted jezebels. Yada yada. To which Norma would coolly respond, “Let him who is without stones cast the first sin.” That usually shut them up, but inevitably the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth resumed. No matter. Mr. Trump’s approval rating among “my evangelicals” was higher than the pope’s among American Catholics.II

  Norma approved Stefan’s “cross of however you pronounce it,” so we were good to go.

  Prior to the Testicle rally, Greta called Mr. Colonnity at Fox to give him a heads-up. Mr. Colonnity was “all in” on repealing the Glebnikov Act, which he agreed was “another outrageous instance of Obama overreach.”

  After more than three years of strenuously refuting the notion that Russia had elected Mr. Trump, Mr. Colonnity was now reflexively in favor of anything pro-Russian. And reflexively anti anything Ukrainian.

  He and Mr. Fartmartin, Fox’s number two personality, made mincemeat of the State Department officials who’d testified at the first impeachment hearing. Who could forget Mr. Fartmartin’s reinterpretation of Ambassador Taylor’s fifty years of government service as “a half century of feeding at the public trough”? Magnificent. Every night, Mr. Colonnity and Mr. Fartmartin tried to outdo each other with their brilliant put-downs of these self-regarding agents of the deep state as they mounted their odious coup against the democratically elected Mr. Trump.

  Mr. Colonnity called Mr. Trump as we were en route to Testicle, to wish him good luck. He urged him to practice saying “molybdenum.” The two of them said it to each other over the speakerphone, again and again. It remains one of my most vivid memories, listening to the most powerful man in the world and the most powerful broadcaster in America saying to each other, “Mo-lib-denum… mo-libb-denum… mo-libbbb-denummmmmm.”

  “My lips are going numb,” Mr. Trump said.

  “You’re almost there, sir,” Mr. Colonnity said. Finally he pronounced Mr. Trump’s pronunciation perfect.

  “Sir, with your leadership, the name of that metal will be on the lips of every patriotic American.” Those of us present aboard Air Force One that day felt our hearts glow.

  In the end, the “M-word” did not roll trippingly off the presidential tongue. And the crucifixion metaphor only seemed to confuse the base. The focus group kept asking how nails could be hammered into a cross made of super-hard metal. In the end, Mr. Trump saved the day, brilliantly improvising, leading the crowd, chanting “Olé, Oleg! Olé, Oleg!”

  Still too Russian sounding, I thought. But the basic job was done. America was now alert to the looming molybdenum crisis.

  As it turned out, that crisis would be a precursor to an even more critical crisis. But as it has been said, it is in the nature of crises to be critical.

  I. After a highly unpleasant profile in the Washington Post, Stefan did drop the “von” and replaced it with a hyphen.

  II. It was this that led the president to make his perhaps ill-advised remark that he was more popular than the pope.

  13

  The state dinner for President Attajurk of Turkey could not in truth be called a complete success.

  The fault lay not in my dunderheadedness in the matter of the croissants. The more serious faux pas was the inclusion of the Kardashians.

  I myself have never quite understood the extraordinary celebrity of these people, but one bows to public opinion. Mr. Trump was a huge fan of the collagen-lipped, steatopygous-rumped Kim Kardashian, primus inter pares of the clan. He was always saying, “If she wasn’t married to Kanye, I’d be in there in a New York minute.”

  One never quite knew how to react to these mischievous, lubricious remarks by the president, especially when Mrs. Trump was present. But Melania, with her stern, even chilling Slovenian dignity and adamantine runway model poise, never seemed to register emotion. I put it down to the language barrier.

  Or did she?

  Mr. Trump invited Kim and Kanye to the Turkish state dinner for a number of reasons. One, it was a way of thanking Kanye for likening him to Jesus. Two, because—as he put it—“who wouldn’t want to stare at that ass?” (Ms. K’s, that is.)

  Normally, Mrs. Trump never involved herself in the seating of state dinners. But this time she did ask for the seating plan, which came back with a few changes, including putting Ms. K on President Attajurk’s left, and Mrs. T on his right.

  Mr. Trump was delighted that the Turkish president, whom he admired and wanted to please—as he did all authoritarian leaders—would be bookended by such high-quality pulchritude. As he put it, “Atta”—as he called him—“won’t know whether to crap or go crazy.”

  I was curious that she placed Senator Biskitt, whom she detested, at her table. I was at a different one, seated next to the wife of the Turkish minister of fear, who turned out to be not only delightful but also full of fascinating Ankara gossip.

  It wasn’t until after the dinner that I heard what happened at table one.

  Mrs. Trump, speaking across President Attajurk, said to Kim, “Keem, you are Armenian?”

  President Attajurk stiffened (as well he might). Kim replied in the affirmative, noting that she was “not Armenian” on her mother’s side.

  “How many relatives on your father’s side were genocided by the Turks?” Mrs. T asked.

  That was an icebreaker.

  That very afternoon, Senator Biskitt had blocked a vote in the Senate denouncing Turkey for slaughtering 1.5 million Armenians. Not for reasons of principle, which rarely influence Senate votes, but out of courtesy. As he explained to Fox, “How would it look if I was visiting Istanbul and the Turkish senate, or whatever they have over there, denounced me for slavery? A fine welcome that’d be, huh?” Rather good point, I thought.

  Senator Biskitt gamely intervened in an attempt to change the topic, complimenting President Attajurk for agreeing to the cease-fire in the (now former) Kurdish border area. But complimenting someone for pausing in the slaughter of one group of people, as a means of changing the topic from the slaughter of another group of people, is slicing the salami pretty thin. The senator was trying to throw him a lifeline.

  President Attajurk would not be beguiled from his rage over Mrs. T’s mischief-making. The dinner proceeded in what one observer described as “minus-Celsius-degree silence.” Mr. Trump was furious when he learned what had happened.

  President Attajurk canceled the rest of the state visit and left Washington that night, claiming he had to return to supervise lifting the cease-fire and resuming shelling the Kurdish refugee camps.

  I’ve often wondered since: What was Mrs. T’s “game” that night? Was it to punish her husband for his quips about how he yearned to disappear into hillocks of Kim-flesh?

  Or was she out to spoil a) President Attajurk’s relations with the United States, b) dinner, and c) his ogling of the famed Kardashian bazoombas, abundantly on display?

  I never asked. Mrs. T remains to me, as she does to many, a Sphinx.

  14

  As a rule, I did not sit in on the presidential daily briefings, during which the director of national intelligence would bring Mr. Trump up to speed about whatever horror was most pressing at the moment.

  I don’t mean to sound cynical, but PDBs, as they are called, are almost never cause to make a presidential
heart “sing hymns at heaven’s gate.”

  I was only attending the PDBs in order to stay abreast of Russia-related developments, specifically US Cyber Command’s rogue Commie-electing computer program, and of course my number-one priority, making Oleg happy again. Judd and I were also concerned about the CIA’s new star recruit, Huggybear.

  DNI Miriam had told us that CIA’s Moscow station reported that their recruited asset was feeling a bit on edge these days, owing to the Communist Party’s newfound prominence. The FSB—the Russian not-so-secret police—had been up to its usual tricks, puncturing Comrade Zitkin’s tires, rearranging the books in his library, leaving nasty notes on the refrigerator, poisoning his ferrets, and lacing his pipe tobacco with hallucinogens—standard FSB intimidation tactics “to throw you off-balance.”

  “Good God,” I said. “That would certainly throw me off-balance. Wouldn’t it be best to retire him as an asset? Give him a nice severance package and tell him his services are no longer required?”

  “That’s not how it works, Herb. He’s already asking about exfiltration.”

  I had no idea what exfiltration was. It sounded like something to do with making coffee. Miriam explained that it is the opposite of infiltration.

  “We’re doing what we can to calm him down. We don’t want him to have a nervous breakdown in the middle of all this.”

  “I don’t mean to sound critical,” I said, “but this Huggybear of yours doesn’t sound like a nerves-of-steel type. If all they have to do to put him over the edge is poison his ferrets and let the air out of his tires, what happens when they start pulling out his fingernails? And why recruit someone who keeps ferrets in the first place?”

  Miriam said that CIA Moscow was considering all options. That made me not want to know what those options were. Meanwhile she agreed that it would be best not to inform Mr. Trump about it, “for now.” There was an awful lot of “for now”-ing going on these days. The three of us proceeded to the Oval for the PDB.