The Day of the Donald (16 page)

“Y
ou’re not the first person to do this job,” Trump said as they strolled down the hall. A pair of Secret Service agents trailed them.

Jimmie considered feigning ignorance but decided to roll the dice. There was no sense playing stupid around the man who was the master at playing stupid.

“Lester Dorset,” Jimmie said. “We weren’t friends or anything, but I knew him.”

“I had a feeling you would find out about him,” Trump said. “You’re a good reporter—you can sniff stuff out. I’m a little concerned you may have the wrong idea about what happened to Lester.”

“I don’t have any idea, actually.”

“That’s good,” Trump said. “You know, the
New York Times
was never nice to me. My hometown paper, and they would say the most awful things about me! I should have bought them. I could have, you know. I had the money.”

“We’re often hardest on those closest to us. In my experience.”

Trump snorted. “Well, nobody was harder on me at that paper than Lester Dorset. One time, in the nineties, he wrote something personal about me—something about my first
wife and the alimony. I called him up and chewed him a new asshole.”

“I’m sure he deserved it.”

“You know what he did, though? He stopped writing about me for six months. That was his punishment.”

Jimmie followed Trump up the Grand Staircase.

“I learned then that I’d rather have someone write something bad about me than write nothing at all,” Trump said. “If it’s painful, the hurt goes away in a day or two. But if there’s nothing there . . . just some void . . . the ache just grows and grows. I never liked Lester Dorset, but I respected him. That’s why I hired him when I had the chance.”

The Secret Service had stopped trailing them. Jimmie looked over his shoulder with worry. Trump must have seen the look on his face, because he said, “The Secret Service doesn’t come up to the second and third floors. They think the family quarters are haunted.”

“Are they?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Trump said.

That didn’t necessarily answer the question, but Jimmie let it slide.

They entered the Lincoln Bedroom. “Are you carrying a phone? Anything electronic?” Trump asked. “Take it out and leave it on the dresser before we go outside.”

Jimmie’s phone was in the subbasement charging, but he’d brought the recorder with him—he didn’t trust Christie, not entirely. If Trump recognized it as Lester’s, he’d be screwed.

Jimmie set the recorder down. He watched Trump for a reaction. There was no sign of recognition on the president’s face. All audio recorders probably looked the same to him.

“One of the many upgrades I added around here,” Trump said, opening a great pair of double doors. “Private patios for the family quarters.”

He ushered Jimmie onto a deck overlooking the backyard—the same deck where he’d seen the first lady in her towel. Jimmie shielded his eyes from the glare of the gold-plated Washington Monument.

Trump put a hand on the railing and pointed up. Jimmie craned his neck to look at the curved overhead ceiling. “He was up there, on top of the roof,” Trump said. “There are multiple snipers stationed up there at all times. But they’re focused on external threats to the White House: someone jumping the gate or streaking across the lawn. Nobody saw Lester up there until he was at the edge of the roof. By then, it was too late. He jumped.”

Trump whistled while tracing the man’s path off the roof and down into the garden of flowers below. The Rose Garden.

“It was just after ten, I believe,” Trump said, now peering over the railing and into the flower bed below. “Very, very dark. There was a Secret Service agent stationed just a few yards from the Rose Garden. He thought we were under attack, by ninjas jumping off the roof or some shit. I mean, who wouldn’t think that?”

“Seems reasonable,” Jimmie said.

“He ordered Lester to stay on the ground. It was a goddamn miracle, but Lester wasn’t dead. He’d survived the fall and was laying there with a broken leg. Two broken arms. Broken everything. But he was still alive.” Trump paused. “Until he tried to stand, and the Secret Service fellow shot him six times, square in the chest. It would have been a great, great embarrassment to
the Secret Service,” Trump said. “For one thing—shooting an unarmed man. I mean, thank God he was white, right?”

Jimmie didn’t say anything.

“Since it happened so late, and in almost total darkness, we swept it under the rug. More or less. Not just because it would embarrass the Secret Service, but because it would embarrass Lester. His wife and children didn’t need to know that their father had taken his own life—the coward’s way out. It was better for them to think he’d gone hiking. Which, come to think of it, is such a cowardly thing to do too. It’s like going hunting without carrying a gun.”

“Do you know why he did it?”

“No note,” Trump said. “Not even a Snapchat. He wasn’t struggling financially, from what my people could tell—we would have helped him out if we’d known about any difficulties. He was doing great work. Fantastic work. We’d spent hours talking in the Oval Office, which is all lost now, I suppose.”

The president’s usual hyperbole had temporarily gone dormant.

“Afterward, my advisors and I spent hours watching and listening to tapes of him, looking for clues,” Trump said. “There are eyes and ears everywhere, Jimmie. Even the bathrooms.”

Jimmie already had a shy enough bladder as it was—he didn’t know how he was ever going to use the restroom at the White House again. Thank God there was a Starbucks across the street.

“Unfortunately, there’s only so much time one man has,” Trump said. “When you’re the leader of the free world, you don’t have the time to do everything yourself. What good are a hundred different surveillance tapes if you don’t have time to
watch them? You have to outsource tasks to people you trust. People who don’t need to check in every fifteen minutes for your stamp of approval. I give my staff a lot of leeway. It’s the same thing I tell my pilot: Fly the plane. As long as it takes off and lands, I’ve got bigger things to deal with.”

Jimmie nodded.

“The trouble is,” Trump continued, “when people see you’re distracted or your attention is elsewhere, they take that as a sign that it’s okay to slack off. Or worse: They think they can take advantage of you. Same thing happened with my casinos in Atlantic City. Unless I was there, on-site, things just went to hell. And Atlantic City was also just kind of like hell, so I preferred to spend as little time as possible there. If you had the choice between a penthouse overlooking Central Park and a dump on a boardwalk in Jersey, which would you choose?”

“I—”

“Exactly,” Trump cut in. “You’d take Manhattan. Anyone would. God, I wish I were back in New York.”

“It’s a beautiful city,” Jimmie said. It had been his home, too, for nearly a decade.

“Some days, I think of just taking off in my chopper and heading back to Trump Tower. Leave Washington and all these dirty politicians behind. But I would never do that. I made a promise to the American people, and I’m not leaving until I’m finished with that promise. We’re winning. By the time I’m done with this country, they’re going to be so tired of winning, they’ll elect some loser to take my place. Paul Ryan, or some schmuck who will do his best to cock up everything I’ll have accomplished.”

“Seems to be how the political cycle works.”

“It’s dumb—it’s a cycle of ignorance. The people think they know what they want, but when you give it to them, they change their minds. Democracy is a broken system. If you want to get anything done, you need to lead from the top down, not the bottom up. Look at the Empire.”

“The Ottoman Empire?”

“The
Empire
Empire.
Star Wars
. Darth Vader. Say what you will about his parental skills, but that guy knew how to get shit done. He built not one but two Death Stars. You know how many of his citizens he put to work on those projects? The scale is unimaginable. A small group of agitators—the Rebels—destroyed everything he’d worked for.” Trump lowered his voice. “We have a Rebel Alliance in this country, plotting against me as we speak. They call themselves ‘Socialist Justice Warriors.’ We haven’t had a Kardashian attack on US soil during my presidency, and suddenly I’ve got these domestic terrorists to deal with? Give me a break!”

As far as Jimmie was aware, there hadn’t
ever
been a Kardashian attack on US soil—or internationally, for that matter. While Trump may have been misguided there, he was correct about the Rebel Alliance. One for two wasn’t bad.

“Not only that,” Trump continued, “but we have a leak in the White House.”

T
he blood in Jimmie’s veins went ice-cold. Did Trump suspect that he was the leak? Sure, he’d met with a Socialist Justice Warrior in Clinton Plaza. Had Christie showed Trump the Gideon Bible? Even though he’d rejected the offer, he hadn’t reported the meeting to law enforcement. That probably made him as good as guilty in Trump’s eyes.

“We can speak freely out here,” Trump said, mistaking the reason for his silence. “There are white-noise generators at both ends of the veranda, which we bought from Hillary’s staff at a yard sale. Even the Secret Service can’t hear us from the Rose Garden below.”

Jimmie swallowed hard. “You said there was a plot against the White House?”

“Homeland Security picks up chatter from time to time. Kardashians, mostly. We hear things on social media, on texts. We read e-mails. But these SJWs are smart. They know how we operate. They don’t communicate online. They use paper and pens; they use landlines. They’re invisible to us.”

“I hope I’m not out of line here . . . but, outside of a few protestors at rallies, are you sure they exist?”

“We have surveillance photos of a meeting of the agitators,” Trump said. “We identified one of the rally leaders and tortured
the hell out of him. He sings for some musical group named the Pearl Jams.”

“I’m familiar with them,” Jimmie said.

Trump raised an eyebrow.

“Their music, I mean.”

“He gave us the name of who we assume is the leader of the rebel alliance,” Trump said. “Jeremy.”

“Do you know anything else about these . . . agitators?”

“They wear blue caps.”

“That should make them easy to find, then,” Jimmie said. “The obvious problem being that lots of
other
people wear blue caps. Like Chicago Cubs fans, for instance. Are you sure Eddie Vedder, a noted Chicago fan, wasn’t simply wearing a Cubs cap?”

“You might be on to something there,” Trump said. “We did pick him up at Wrigley Stadium. I might have to put in a call to Guantanamo.” Trump rested his proportionally small hands on the railing and sighed. “You know, I wasn’t too sure about you at first. You refuse to stay in the finest, most sumptuous hotel. You throw up on me. You’re a different cat, Jimmie.”

“Thank you?”

“When I said I handpicked you, I wasn’t lying,” Trump said. “Or I was, a little. Because although you’re my new ghostwriter, there’s another job that I wanted you for. I want you to help me find the leak in this administration. Be my plumber.”

“Emma didn’t mention anything about this.”

“This is between me and you. You’re one of the dirtiest players in the game. I had to get a feel for you before springing this on you, though.”

“Emma doesn’t know. What about Christie or Lewandowski?”

“This is between you and me and the man upstairs,” Trump said. “Baby Jesus.”

“I’ve never really done anything like this before,” Jimmie said. Not only that, but Jimmie wasn’t sure if he was
up
for this sort of political espionage. He didn’t know if he could continue to hear the word “leak” without giggling.

“It’s easy. When you find the leak, you tell me. No one else. I’ll take care of it myself. Because, as you know, it’s the only way to ensure something gets done properly. No offense.”

“None taken,” Jimmie said.

“It should go without saying that nothing less than the future of our great country is at stake here,” Trump said. “If England continues taunting us and the shit goes down, we need to have all our dicks in a row. Enemies outside our country could conspire with those within our borders. That’s why we need to clamp down on these PC clowns. I need to know now: Are you my guy?”

Jimmie was about to dive further into the web of political intrigue that already had a body count several times that of the Watergate and Lewinsky scandals combined. For the record, nobody had died in either of those scandals, but both had brought presidents to their knees. While Jimmie still didn’t know the full extent of what was happening inside the Trump White House, it was bound to trump those so-called scandals. The Pulitzer would be his. And then Cat would see just what she was missing out on. If she was lucky, he might even take her back.

Jimmie Bernwood, with two fingers crossed behind his back, shook Trump’s hand. “I’m your guy,” he said.

Trump nodded. There was a long, awkward pause.

“Any plans for the three-day weekend?” Jimmie asked, trying to make casual conversation. Jimmie was terrible at casual conversation. Then again, he was terrible at formal conversation too.

“Mar-a-Lago,” Trump said. “A little golf, a little cookout. And you?”

“Nothing much . . .” Jimmie slapped himself on the forehead. How could he have been so stupid? “Do you know what time it is?”

Trump looked at his Rolex. “Ten ’til six. You have somewhere to be?”

“Meeting an ex-girlfriend for dinner. Do you need me much longer, or . . . ?”

Trump waved him on. “Can I also give you some advice, though? When you’re out at dinner, head into the men’s room and crank one out. That way, you’re less likely to be tempted to fall back into old habits. Take it from me: Ex-sex is one of the worst decisions you can make. Think with your big head, not your little head.”