Chapter Twenty-Four
WWTDYL
Before the State Dinner, the best meal of Jimmie Bernwood’s life had been at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in downtown Atlanta.
Cat, whom he was sort of dating at the time, was in Atlanta at one of those week-long journalism conferences. The kind with all the panels and workshops. Not Jimmie’s bag, but whatever.
By day three on his own in New York, however, he’d run out of packaged food in his apartment and had wicked-smart blisters on his hands. From, uh, playing video games. Why not surprise his girl by driving thirteen hours straight and showing up at her hotel unannounced? A grand, romantic gesture.
When Jimmie arrived at her hotel room, she’d answered the door in a robe, giggling deliriously. She looked at him first with confusion and then second with more confusion.
“Hurry up, babe,” a man’s voice said from inside the hotel room. Jimmie could see a pair of naked feet on the bed, just over Cat’s bare shoulder. The naked, wrinkled feet . . . of a naked, wrinkled man. The hair on the back of Jimmie’s neck stood up. It was the hetero Spidey-sense every straight guy possesses that lets him know there’s an exposed penis in close proximity.
“I’m sorry,” Cat whispered. “I thought you were—”
“In New York?” Jimmie said.
She shook her head. “I thought you were room service.”
He could have given her a chance to explain herself, but what was going on seemed pretty self-explanatory. He could also have pushed her aside and confronted whoever she was sleeping with, but he didn’t know if he could control his anger. He was sure he would learn who the man was eventually (and he was right—it was that Pulitzer-winning prick, Lester Dorset).
Jimmie stumbled backward, awkwardly, and then sprinted down the hall to the elevators. When the elevator door opened, a bellhop pushed a food cart out the door.
“Room 1273?” Jimmie said.
The bellhop nodded.
“I’m taking it to go,” Jimmie said, shoving the cart back into the elevator. He pushed the CLOSE DOOR button and waved to the stunned bellhop as the elevator doors shuttered. Jimmie lifted the lid off one of the food trays. Salmon and rice. Not bad. He hadn’t eaten a thing since his journalist power lunch, which consisted of a banana and a hard-boiled egg swiped from coworkers’ lunch bags.
He uncorked the pinot grigio that had been resting in the wine chiller and drank and drank and drank some more, riding the elevator up and down, up and down until he was thrown out of the hotel.
That was a good meal.
The State Dinner, however, was giving that stolen room-service meal some serious competition. The White House chef, Guy Fieri, had prepared an array of appetizers, culled from the finest fast-food joints in the DC area. They’d all provided the food gratis for the free advertising. No president had ever had sponsorship deals in place with fast-food restaurants before, but the United States had never seen a president like Donald J. Trump before. It was all quite practical—and, dare to say, somewhat genius.
For Jimmie, the best part was that it was all on the house. He wasn’t expected to tip the waitstaff even 10 percent. The White House was taking care of the bill.
No, scratch that. The best part was when he spotted Cat Diaz seated at one of the press tables . . . and then she spotted him sitting next to the world’s two most powerful leaders.
Jimmie raised his Miller Lite to her from across the room in a mock toast. He thought about dialing his smirk down a notch or two but couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was like those bracelets, the ones they sold in the White House gift shop: WWTDYL? (What Would Trump Do, You Loser?). When Trump won—which he did often—he let people know about it. “If you don’t talk about your successes, nobody’s going to know about them,” Trump wrote in the expanded coloring book edition of Trump: The Art of the Deal, which Jimmie had only colored a quarter of the way through. “And if nobody knows about your successes, then you haven’t really won, have you?”
Jimmie puckered his lips and threw a smooch Cat’s way.
She rolled her eyes and looked away in disgust.
Hashtag: WINNING.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Panda Express
“It’s good to be king,” Trump said, startling Jimmie. The president had seen his little back-and-forth with Cat.
“President,” Jimmie said. “Don’t you mean, It’s good to be president?”
“Same difference.”
A trio of waiters rolled carts up to their table. The main course had arrived: burgers. Trump’s favorite food. Distinctly American.
Unlike the rest of the appetizers and side dishes that had been rolled out, the burgers weren’t served in fast-food wrappers. The burgers stood half a foot tall, with buns the size of Trump’s ego. The meat bleeding onto the plates had to weigh at least a half pound. At least. And the smell . . . the smell was so invigorating that Jimmie had to shift the napkin in his lap because of how hard it made him.
The KGB agent stepped in to sample Putin’s burger. Jimmie eyed Trump’s plate, awaiting an order to do likewise.
“Touch my burger, and I cut your fingers off,” Trump snapped. “No joke, buckaroo.”
Jimmie dug his teeth into his own burger, tearing off a chunk like a velociraptor tearing into the belly of a just-felled triceratops.
“This . . . is . . . wow,” he said while chewing. What few manners he had had completely gone out the window. “Trump Steak?”
“Panda Express,” Putin said, causing Trump to giggle with a full mouth.
Panda Express didn’t serve burgers, as far as Jimmie knew. Then again, when you were the president of the most powerful nation in the world, you could probably call in a few favors from your friends in the fast-food industry. Maybe they’d made MSG burgers, just for the State Dinner.
Putin took a sip of beer. “I kill it myself. You like?”
Jimmie nodded. “Venison?”
A look of confusion crossed Putin’s face.
“Deer,” Jimmie said. “From when you guys went hunting today?”
“Panda,” Putin said. “Is panda. Is most challenging animal to track since they sleep so much.”
“You have pandas in Russia?”
Putin shook his head. “You have pandas here. In zoo. We go hunting at zoo.”
Jimmie stared at the burger in his hands. Red juice ran down his palms and dripped onto the plate.
He’d visited the National Zoo a couple of years back. Which of the giant pandas was he eating right now? Tian Tian? Mei Xiang? Bao Bao? Or—God forbid—the cute-as-a-button cub, Bei Bei? Any of them but Bei Bei!
Jimmie looked around the room at the packed tables. The State Dinner guests were busy gnashing their way unawares through panda burgers. It would be a miracle if Trump and Putin had left a single giant panda alive at the National Zoo. It would be a miracle if they’d left any animal alive. How they’d let Trump and Putin stalk and kill caged animals was beyond him. Diplomatic immunity, perhaps?
The first lady was right to be distrustful of Putin. The man was a bad influence on Trump. How much of the talk about “going for a three-peat against England” was just Trump trying to impress his BFF? Was the Russian president influencing the American president in even more direct ways . . . advising him, perhaps? Had this clearly dangerous man thrown Lester off the roof so that they could continue beating the war drums together?
Jimmie set the burger down. The thought of eating one of the last two thousand pandas in the world disgusted him. He couldn’t bring himself to finish the burger.
However, he couldn’t let it go to waste, either.
He flagged down a passing waiter. “Could I get a to-go box for this?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Check, Please
Jimmie glanced in the direction of Clinton Plaza as he stepped off the bus. Had the president known about his little clandestine meeting last night? Unlikely. The “dangerous people with dangerous ideas” could have been the
Occupy protestors who camped out in the park when the weather was nice enough. If the president had known about his midnight meeting, Jimmie would surely have been fired by now.
Or worse.
As Jimmie turned the doorknob to his room, he noticed the frame was splintered around the lock. It hadn’t been damaged this morning.
He pushed the door open slowly, holding the key out like a knife. It was the only weapon he had on him. He hoped the key might catch the streetlight and appear to be a weapon in his hand.
“I’ve got a knife,” Jimmie announced, peering into the darkness. Then as an afterthought, “And a gun.”
Why not add some nunchucks to that list while you’re at it, genius?
There was no response from inside the room, save for the sound of his own voice rattling around his head. He flipped the light switch on.
The room was empty. There was no assassin in the bathroom. Ditto with the shower and the closet and underneath the queen-size bed.
His laptop was still under the pile of soiled laundry. Nothing had been stolen. Maybe somebody had opened his laptop—maybe they’d hacked into it—but why not just take it? While there were unanswered questions, he had no doubt that someone had been in his room. Somebody besides the cleaning staff.
He ran down the list of suspects. While Putin had been with Trump all day, he could have sent one of his KGB goons over to do the dirty work. Corey Lewandowski could have snuck away from the White House at any point during the day, though it seemed unlikely with his busy schedule. Chris Christie? Yeah, that sounded about right. A little B and E seemed right up the White House janitor’s alley.
The Socialist Justice Warriors could have also been upset he rejected their offer. They could have come for his laptop, looking for evidence of presidential wrongdoing on it. If so, they were pissing up the wrong tree. Jimmie knew better than to access his work e-mail from his home computer. He didn’t want to pull a Hillary.
Regardless of who the culprit was, the Royal Linoleum Hotel was no longer safe. If it ever had been.
Excerpt From the Trump/Dorset Sessions
June 1, 2018, 10:16 AM
Dorset: Before you decided to run for president, you were a larger-than-life presence in Manhattan and Atlantic City real estate, as well as on television screens with The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice.
Trump: And let’s not forget Trump Resorts all over the world. I had my own magazine, my own water. I had my own steaks, sold through the Sharper Image catalog. Who did that before Donald Trump? Nobody. They all told me it was a stupid idea. Now, everybody orders meat through the mail. If you go into a grocery store to buy steak, they’ll look at you like you’re a dummy. You buy it through Amazon now, and a drone drops it off thirty minutes later directly onto your grill.
Dorset: It’s interesting that you would bring up Amazon, what with all the animosity in the past between you and Jeff Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post—though they’ve been surprisingly gentle on you during your first term in office.
Trump: He’s a businessman, I’m a businessman. If there’s a deal to be made, I’ll make it. Bezos asked me to loosen the restrictions on commercial drone usage, and I asked him to call off the Post. So we made a deal.
Dorset: A lot of people would consider it unethical for the president of the United States to be trading favors for relaxing government regulations.
Trump: Unethical? Who’s using that word? I’ve never taken a dime from anyone in exchange for influence. I don’t need their money. I’m very wealthy. This is two consenting adults agreeing to a mutually beneficial situation. That’s never unethical.
Dorset: Surely you’ve seen tweets to this effect. Twitter seems to be rife with critics of the administration. There are entire parody accounts—
Trump: Illegal parody accounts. I’ve had many of them shut down. You can’t impersonate a sitting president. Can’t do it. So I have my lawyers get on them.
Dorset: There’s actually a Supreme Court precedent that says it’s legal: Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. If a reasonable person wouldn’t interpret a parody to be true—if it’s clearly a mockery, in other words—then it’s covered by the First Amendment.
Trump: Who’s reasonable? You? Most people aren’t logical. I’m talking mostly about women, but I know plenty of men who can be really bitchy.
Dorset: Fair enough. But you have to admit that nobody would mistake @WriteinTrump for the real thing. Here’s a sample tweet—again, clearly not something you’ve ever said: “I’m not willing to say that I’m one hundred percent sure O. J. Simpson committed those murders until I know where Obama was that night.”
Trump: Well, where was Obama that night?
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Say Cheese!
The first thing Jimmie did when he arrived at his office the next morning was push his desk up against the door and open the ceiling tile. He breathed a sigh of relief—temporary relief, but relief nonetheless. Lester’s recorder was still there.
Too bad he couldn’t just smuggle it out of the White House. Not with the insane, paranoid security in place. He could, however, listen to the taped interviews when he had the opportunity.
Not now, however. He’d just received an e-mail that an emergency meeting had been called for nine o’clock. No dessert this time, from the sound of things.
Jimmie slipped through the door at the top of the stairs and into the Reagan Library. A group of tourists stared at him, bewildered expressions on their faces. A couple of them raised their phones, snapping photos. They probably thought he was somebody important. Let ’em. It wasn’t every day you saw a sharp-dressed man slip out from behind a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Jimmie straightened his tie. He raised an eyebrow—slowly, slyly. Take all the pictures you want. If anyone posted pics of him online, it might drive some chatter in certain circles. There were probably shots from the State Dinner floating around, too. Although he wasn’t allowed to discuss his project with others, anyone with half a brain would figure out shortly that he was back—in a big way. And working on something bigger than anything he’d ever worked on before. Maybe something even bigger than a ghostwriting project, if this Lester Dorset situation yielded a juicy story.
“Is this great or what?” Trump whispered in his ear. He was standing behind Jimmie, smiling and waving to the tourists. They’d been trying to snap the president’s photograph. Jimmie, primping and preening for their cameras, was nothing more than a photobomb.
“Good morning, Mr. Trump,” Jimmie said. He tried not to think about his face going fifty shades of red. He wanted to ask how the president and the Secret Service agent just behind him had slipped so silently into the room. He hadn’t heard them clanging on the ancient staircase. Presidential teleporter, maybe? Naw—teleportation was an impossibility, even according to the nuttiest professors.
After Trump signed a couple of babies, they moved through the long hallway and into the West Wing.
Jimmie said, “About your offer last night . . .”
“I knew it wouldn’t be long. I’ll set you up in the best place—one of my favorite properties. Close to here, too. The Watergate. Ever hear of it?”
“Yeah. There was break-in there. Years ago. It was made into a movie.”
“Haven’t seen it,” Trump said. “The hotel is beautiful now. Amazing place. Luxurious. You’ll love what I’ve done with it.”
Trump didn’t seem able to leave anything well enough alone. Once he got his hands on something, he remade it in his own image.
Jimmie wondered if he was getting a Trump makeover. He was already wearing a suit and tie to work. In college, he’d told his roommate that if he ever got a job that required a tie, to strangle him with it and drag his body to the curb to be taken out with the trash.
Now Jimmie was going to be living in a Trump building. How long before he started tanning and turned the color of Cheetos dust? How long before he grew his thi
nning hair long enough to comb it over his receding hairline in the Trumpster’s signature style?
He looked at himself in a passing mirror and tried to smile, but all he could do was smirk.
It was already happening.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Boomtown
Trump swaggered into the Tyson Room and headed straight to his seat. Jimmie headed for the corner, where he tried to look invisible by sucking his gut in.
“All right, guys, what is it?” Trump said. “This better be important. I was midbronzing all the way down in the subbasement.”
The cabinet members looked around anxiously. Finally, it was Secretary of State Omarosa who spoke.
“The United Kingdom seems to be preparing for an escalation.”
Trump snorted. “What are we talking about? Another insult? These guys are terrible at insults.”
“No—this time they’ve taken actual action.”
“What, like recalling their ambassador or something?”
Omarosa shook her head. “They’ve recalled Patrick Stewart. Also Emily Blunt and Andrew Lincoln.”
“Aw, crap,” interjected the secretary of transportation, Clint Eastwood. “That means no more Walking Dead. I gotta find out what happens to Daryl!”
“Just read the comic books,” grumbled Corey Lewandowski.
“Why don’t you read the comic books?” snarled Eastwood with such a menacing tone that Lewandowski paled and became very interested in his glass of water. Jimmie made a mental note to bring that moment up the next time Lewandowski got in his face (not that Jimmie would do any better if he got a full blast of Eastwood).
“So what?” Trump shrugged. “Let the Brits go crawling back to their fog and their bars that close at eleven.”
“Bringing their citizens home means they expect things to turn violent,” said Omarosa.
The Day of the Donald Page 8