You Can't Spell America Without Me

by Alec Baldwin

  Second of all, she was so right about shooting the cruise missiles into Syria, the Tomahawks, which I did as soon as I landed in Palm Beach—“We’re locked and loaded, sir!” Mad Dog actually said, which was so fantastic, and “Fire away!” I then commanded— the media and all the globalists were all “Oh, now he’s a major, major president, so strong, not like Obama, Russia criticized him, which means he’s not a puppet!” So easy. I said to my team at Mar-a-Lago on Friday—Bannon, Jared, Reince, Tillerson, McMaster—I told them: “This is what I’ve been saying, the presidency really is like a TV series, okay, each season you need certain big moments, and we have to do something like the cruise missiles once a season, okay?” I think they get it now. And nobody died, which is also great, almost nobody, very few, they say rounded off it’s actually zero.

  By the way, I’ve also been good lately about not beaming too many tweets Ivanka and Jared don’t like.*

  Third of all, thanks to me, after my long weekend in Palm Beach with President Xi, which by the way you pronounce like you pronounce Zsa Zsa, America now has a relationship with China the likes of which we’ve literally never had ever before.

  “Wow, President Xi,” I said when he arrived at Mar-a-Lago, “what’re you, six feet? So tall! Very tall! Most Chinamen not so tall! Good for leader to be tall!” He appreciated the compliment, and that I was speaking clearly, since he doesn’t really speak English. “Sorry you had to drive from airport,” I said, making a steering wheel motion with my hands, very diplomatic. “Next time take chopper directly—best helipad under construction, right there, on lawn.” The two of us had great chemistry immediately.

  Because North Korea had just fired a missile, like they did when the Japanese prime minister was visiting, and we were at Mar-a-Lago, just like with Abe, it was a crazy déjà vu thing, so at first I mixed up the two leaders a little—mentioned sushi and the yakuza to President Xi, forgot for a second he already does have nuclear. So actually it turned out to be a good thing that Xi doesn’t golf, because I could use that to keep straight which was which. I also used China big, Japan small, because Abe was the normal Asian miniheight. (Xi told me Kim Jong-un is a little guy, too. So I’ve just ordered the National Security Council to make me this fantastic chart, like a brochure, that has pictures of every world leader arranged from tallest to shortest. I think it’ll come in very handy. When you see all of them on the master chart, it’s amazing how many aren’t white. Which is fine.)

  WORLD LEADERS BY HEIGHT

  6’2”

  PRESIDENT TRUMP

  United States

  6’2”

  JUSTIN TRUDEAU

  Canada

  6’2”

  BASHAR AL-ASSAD

  Syria

  6’

  BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

  Israel

  5’10”

  MALCOLM TURNBULL

  Australia

  5’9”

  EMMANUEL MACRON

  France

  5’9”

  SHINZŌ-ABE

  Japan

  5’8”

  ENRIQUE PEÑA NIETO

  Mexico

  5’8”

  THERESA MAY

  United Kingdom

  5’7”

  KIM JONG-UN

  North Korea

  5’6”

  VLADIMIR PUTIN

  Russia

  5’6”

  MOON JAE-IN

  South Korea

  5’5”

  ANGELA MERKEL

  Germany

  Xi’s First Lady, Madame Peng, is actually a very good-looking woman— I’m serious, especially for her age, reminded me of Imelda Marcos, who by the way once tried to pick me up at Studio 54 when her husband was president of the Philippines.

  MITZI: Presidential to-do list

  Tell Rodrigo and President Duty-Free about Imelda.

  Madame Peng was one of the biggest celebrities in Chinese entertainment before Xi was even president, which means we have a lot in common. Although, it turned out, she wasn’t related to my friend Mr. Peng, the chef who invented General Tso’s chicken and when I was young operated a very nice restaurant, Uncle Peng’s, right near the UN, where I built my fantastic Trump World Tower. In fact, Madame Peng never even heard of General Tso’s chicken, and says she never met Ivanka’s friend Wendi Deng, Rupert’s ex, which also surprised me, so my joke about Wendi Murdoch dating Putin didn’t really land. She did giggle when I told her that her husband looks exactly like my regular waiter at Uncle Peng’s, Lew or Lou or Lu, great guy who’d lost half his thumb and index finger from a cherry bomb, because the Chinese really are completely crazy about fireworks. During dinner one night at Mar-a-Lago, Madame Peng mentioned their daughter just graduated from Harvard, and since Jared was right across from us, I joked that at least she and President Xi probably didn’t have to spend $2.5 million to get her into Harvard like the Kushners did! We had a truly great chemistry.

  During the day, between my golf games and the dinners, I had fantastic conversations with President Xi about Korea, totally opened our kimonos. (Which Tillerson later said I probably shouldn’t have said, that term, but whatever, I’m not PC.) What I thought before we talked was that North Korea was their Puerto Rico, if Puerto Rico had its own nuclear; a poor, rough little place over to the side that he runs. I was somewhat wrong—and I do admit it when I’m somewhat wrong. Anyhow, President Xi is going to take care of North Korea for us now, and we’re good on the big trade deficits and everything else, maybe in the future America won’t keep so much military in South Korea, who knows. But here’s the thing: I’ve never been to North Korea, never read a book about it, never took a course on it, none of that, but now, by discussing it strongly for ten minutes with the real expert with the real power, not some CIA “analyst” or State Department know-it-all, I now totally, completely, absolutely understand. I guess it’s like with the special tutors who helped get my kids into good colleges. That’s efficiency, that’s Management 101, that’s how CEOs do it, and it’s how President Trump does the presidency.

  Everybody for the last two weeks has been all, “Oh my God, Trump’s going to attack North Korea, oh my God, he’s gonna start a war, oh no.” But I had several great follow-up phone calls from my very close friend Xi, who respects me in a way he never respected Obama—that I can tell you, trust me. He reminded me that Kim just wants to feel good about himself—nobody likes being called unbalanced or overweight or spoiled. Especially if you’re powerful and rich but all isolated from the world like Mr. Kim is, right? Trump understands how to flatter people. Negotiation 101.

  IN ADDITION TO PROTECTING AMERICA and keeping the peace, as president you still have to take care of little things. Like when after we spanked Assad and Sean got into so much trouble with the rude, mean media for saying even Hitler didn’t gas his people like Assad does. When he was apologizing to me in the Oval afterward, he told me he thought “holocaust center” was a more dignified way to say it than “concentration camp,” which is actually true, and then Sean cried a little, which I must tell you does make a big impression on me, like people who can speak foreign languages or when women have their periods. So in my regular call with Rupert the next day, after I thanked him for getting rid of the Wall Street Journalʼs one columnist who hates me, I asked if he’d give poor little Sean a phone call to buck him up, and he did. Management 101.

  That was right before Ivanka’s special Georgetown leadership scientist, Dr. Müller, came in for our first briefing. Such a smart lady, Yale, U.S. Navy intel
ligence four years, very knowledgeable about what presidents go through, and extremely good-looking, a little younger than the First Lady, like Kelly McGillis when she played Tom Cruise’s girlfriend in Top Gun, “Charlie” the Air Force “scientist.”

  She said what Ivanka told me was true—that because she’s technically a doctor, everything I say to her is private, if I want, like with a lawyer, patient-attorney privilege. She said my scores on the leadership tests, she called them “inventories,” were “really exceptional” and “almost literally off the charts.” Which I thought she might have been saying just to get on my good side, but she didn’t say it with a smile, she said it in this serious and neutral and kind of mysterious way, the way the First Lady talks a lot in private. Then Dr. Müller showed me the graphs and I saw it was totally true on both, the Goldberg and especially the NPI, my scores on both were so high, so amazing. Although I wasn’t surprised.

  She asked if any of the presidential duties made me tense, or if I ever doubted my “abilities.” Very flirty, I was thinking.

  I NEVER DOUBT MY ABILITIES, NEVER, BECAUSE IN THE LONG RUN I ALWAYS SUCCEED, SO DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT.

  “Well, Charlie,” I said, “may I call you Charlie? I never doubt my abilities, never, because in the long run I always succeed, so don’t worry about that. It’s all tense, winning requires tense. Forget ‘tense,’ what I really wish, between you and me, is that I didn’t find so much of being president so boring. And not just boring— I mean, lots of things are boring, like the news on PBS, which I turned to by mistake last night, even though it was pretty nice to me. And most people are boring, like I know people who even say their daughters-in-law and even some of their children are boring. But so much of being president is complicated and boring. Like instructions on appliances, or filling out your own tax returns, or college.”

  When she asked how I “relieved the tension,” I really wondered if she was sliding into Monica Lewinsky territory, but she meant religion, hobbies, exercise, et cetera. “All of the above,” I said. I told her I play two rounds of golf twice a week while I’m having presidential meetings, “multitasking,” went to church in Palm Beach on Easter, very nice, and my new hobby is music, writing songs, great songs, platinum records.

  I also told her my best tweets relieve a lot of the tension. “But they don’t want me to do those tweets, Ivanka and Jared and all of them. The boring tweets they have me do feel like . . . nothing. I go for a few days, sometimes almost a week, and then I just have to blast out some real ones, you know? I feel penned up.”

  “Pent up?”

  “Penned, like an animal, you know, like the pigs on the farm next to Trump Turnberry, my fantastic golfing resort in Scotland. And I feel more penned up when I’m at the White House, which I don’t own, just like I don’t own that Scottish bastard’s pig farm, pardon my French. Firing those missiles at Syria felt like the greatest tweet ever, like a tough and important message that made everybody go whoa, he’s the president, he’s the man, America first. I guess that’s how a lot of presidents do relieve tension. And I did it from the Southern White House, so I felt very, very relaxed afterward.” So then I guess I understood what Dr. Müller had been getting at—tweeting and firing missiles and having sex are all very different things, but afterward you’re relaxed in a similar way. Smart lady.

  She said what she’s learned as a historian, studying leaders, is that what the greatest ones do is figure out who around them they trust the most and “invest even more” in those trustworthy people.

  “Wow,” I said, “no wonder Ivanka likes you—you sound just like her!”

  I totally trust Ivanka. I don’t not trust Jared, and he can be very annoying, and he’s too skinny for a man, but I trust him, the way I trust Rodrigo and Anthony, the way you trust trustworthy people who don’t contain Trump genes.

  Dr. Müller also said that if I feel anxious around Bannon, or I have a feeling he’s reading my thoughts, I probably ought to spend less time with him. Which got me thinking—that when he finally leaves the White House, and if he returns to entertainment, I could let him develop my President Batman and Kung Fu President ideas as movies or shows, and use my songs on the soundtracks. When I said that, Dr. Müller gave me two thumbs-up, which was nice, very cute, since that’s a Trump thing.

  MITZI: Presidential to-do list

  Rodrigo, pharmacy, pick up new Dr. Müller supplements and vitamins.

  And speaking of “multitask,” I just wrote half a chapter of this book by talking to a professor for an hour, the way I used to talk to the “writers” of my earlier books, but this time I’m totally in charge of what gets written, it’s really me, and I keep the total advance and all the royalties. Win-win.

  I NEVER PANIC

  As Rodrigo brought in my breakfast, he was shaking his head. I thought it was still because he was upset about what happened last night when Ted Nugent and Kid Rock and Sarah Palin came over for dinner—the mooning on the Truman Balcony, the fingering the baked Alaska, the two missing saucers, et cetera.

  He was still shaking his head as he picked up the empty Doritos bags and Diet Coke cans from my bedside table.

  I looked at the Filipino proverb on my breakfast tray, which he now includes every week or so, in the language the natives there call “Tag Along” and also in actual English. A sleeping shrimp is carried away by the current.

  “Are you saying I should get out of bed, Rodrigo?”

  “No—but I saw on Fox News that you have been fired as president, my friend, oh, really sad, because of what those women said in the New York Times about sex.”

  I was so surprised that Ovaltine and bacon bits sprayed out my nose all over my newspapers. “You mean Bill O’Reilly, Rodrigo— nobody fired me, nobody can fire me.”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. President, that’s what I said—I’m sad for your friend Mr. O’Reilly, because he’s out at Fox News.”

  Bill was actually more of a colleague than a friend, like Stone Cold Steve Austin and Hulk Hogan weren’t really “friends.” But for the elitists and liberals and fake media, getting O’Reilly was like a dress rehearsal for getting me—“We can’t destroy Trump, so we’ll destroy the next best,” a tall guy in his sixties on Fox all the time, a well-known guy from the New York suburbs but so successful in Manhattan the Manhattanites hate him, a controversial guy with a sense of fun who doesn’t put up with PC and always calls a spade a spade, almost never literally. They were all fantasizing about whacking me when they whacked him, that I can tell you, 100 percent. Last night when I heard the news about O’Reilly, it did make me call down to the Secret Service and tell them we needed to permanently close the sidewalk outside the White House for security reasons, and I did get short of breath for a couple of minutes, although the White House chief usher was wrong and inappropriate when she very loudly said she was sure “the president seems to be having a panic attack.”

  I don’t panic. I never panic. I didn’t panic from 1990 to 1992 when I did not go bankrupt. Ask any member of my family, anybody who knows me or ever worked for me. “Trump does not panic,” every one of them will tell you, I promise. Anybody who ever might have seen me panic, such as when I was little, is dead now—such as my father, who died on a fantastic summer Friday a week after my birthday in 1999, when I was single, such a great time in my life, although “bittersweet” because of the funeral, although he was extremely old and totally out of it by that time. Instead of panicking, I always eliminate the problems that are trying to make me panic.

  I’m not panicking now. It wasn’t panicking to change my mind about China or Syria or NATO or being nice to North Korea or anything else. In fact, I didn’t really change my mind at all, now I can reveal that—my current positions were always my true positions, but winners don’t show their cards, winners are unpredictable, winners keep the losers off guard. Also, it’s like on every season of The Apprentice and The Celebrity
Apprentice and in all movies—to keep people interested you need what they call “an arc,” with the hero doing surprising things and going through plot twists. Entertainment 101, which is really just a different name for Leadership 101 and Marketing 101.

  I’m not panicking about the Russia hoax or about the disgusting “intelligence” leaks or about the fake polls. I’m not panicking about Mike Flynn betraying me, because he knows loyalty, and the section of the Constitution that lets the president pardon anybody for anything, which is amazing, and why I sent Mike a message today—“Stay strong, you’ll be fine, promise.” And I’m not panicking about the dishonest fake media and archaic rules in Congress and all the so-called judges and pathetic Democrats and bureaucrats in the “deep state”—which, like most people, I’d never even heard of until now, so scary—all of them “colluding” to stop me from making America great.* I don’t believe they all hate America, the way Bannon thinks, because many of them are really just like Ivanka but without money or nice clothes or Trump genes, but they do all hate the idea that I’ll succeed, so they’re willing to keep America in terrible, terrible shape so that Trump looks worse. But I will win, I will win, I will win—or as my dad used to say so loud the neighbors could sometimes hear, “Sieg ist mein,” which means the same thing.

  My amazing son Barron just put a countdown clock on my phone, a “widget” he calls it, that shows me all the time how many days I have left in my first one hundred days—I’m down to nine.

  I’m not panicking—I’m focusing. Very, very different. If you panic it means you’re scared. When I need something important to happen quickly, I command, I make demands, I make other people panic if necessary, make them scared, the people who work for me and the people against me, so then they do whatever has to be done—and therefore Trump doesn’t need to feel scared or humiliated. And the people around me will always feel much more scared and humiliated than I ever will, which is actually the next best thing to never feeling it yourself at all. Management 101 and Leadership 101. ME-dership 101!