The Day of the Donald (2 page)

Eighteen Months Later

J
immie Bernwood didn’t know what was more suffocating: the darkness or the stale air. How far below the surface were they now? Forty, fifty feet? As long as the concrete-reinforced tunnel didn’t collapse, he supposed it didn’t much matter.

Jimmie heard a cough behind him. A deep, phlegmy cough. The old man. The moment he’d seen the man’s sunken face and withered body in the back of the Toyota, he’d pegged him as a goner. Unfit to army-crawl underneath a limbo stick, let alone the mile and a half of tunnel leading to the promised land. Yet here they were, nearly at the end of their journey, and the old man was still breathing. For how much longer, Jimmie couldn’t say.

Sad truth was, the old man wasn’t his problem. Jimmie was simply a journalist on the trail of a story. Once the migrants set foot on the other side of the Even Greater Wall, he would watch as they stumbled off into the desert. He’d take a drink of water from his canteen. Slip back into the tunnel. Repeat the trek a few more times—as many times as it took to get the story. As many times as it took to get inside the heads of the men and women desperate enough to make the dangerous journey. All any of them wanted was a better life. Was that a
crime? In the immortal words of Secretary of the Energies Palin, “You betcha.”

Something crunched beneath Jimmie’s forearm. Lots of scorpions and tarantulas down here. Whatever it was, he brushed its crumpled body aside and crawled on. He’d been stung and bitten more times than he could count. His bare arms were as mottled with scabs as a fry cook’s.

What you really had to look out for down here were the bigger pests. Run headfirst into a pack of hungry rats, and say hello to heaven. There was no room to turn around; they’d eat you alive.

Another cough. Even if the old man survived the coming days and nights crossing the no-man’s-land, he wasn’t going to get a job picking fruit. Not in the condition he was in. The last thing anyone hiring migrants wanted to deal with was body disposal. Though they might just let him lie there in the orange grove to fertilize the plants.

Up ahead, he could see a faint sliver of light. The edge of the tarp that covered the opening let a shaft of moonlight through—not much, but just enough. The end was in sight.

Twenty-five minutes later, Jimmie Bernwood was throwing the tarp open and gulping down his first breath of fresh air in hours. Fresh, unpolluted air. It smelled like jobs. Like health care. Like hope.

Thirty-six minutes after that, he was helping the last of the American migrants to their feet in Mexico.

And ten seconds after
that
, he was staring into a bright light, straight down the barrel of an AR-15.

A
fter the Mexican border agents lowered their guns but before they could cuff him, Jimmie pulled out his duct-taped wallet.

“I have rights,” he said, fishing out his press credentials. “Don’t you believe in freedom of the press down here?”

A helicopter buzzed overhead as the agents examined his 2009 Cannes Film Festival press pass.

Jimmie shielded his eyes from their spotlights. “They don’t hand those out to just anyone. You have to be a member of an elite media organization to be on the red carpet at Cannes. That year, I interviewed Harrison Ford and Natalie Portman.”

This piqued the interest of one of the agents. “
¿Harrison Ford?
”

“Han Solo,” Jimmie said, pointing at the press pass. Although his days on red carpets were long gone, the Mexican border patrol didn’t need to know that.

“
Han Solo
,” the agent repeated, staring for another moment at the press pass. He shook his head and handed it back to Jimmie. “
No eres Han Solo. Te ves como . . . Chewbacca.
”

This got a few chuckles from the other agents. With the crazy beard and unkempt hair, Jimmie had to admit he probably
did look a little like a Wookiee. His postbreakup “no-shave November” scruff had eventually given way to a “zero-fucks-given 2017” beard. He was pretty sure it was 2018 now. Like, 90 percent sure.

The agents weren’t really interested in hearing a sob story. They carted Jimmie and the American migrants off to San Miguel—the most lawless prison this side of Guantanamo. No phone call. No text. Not even a tweet. “I want my hundred and forty characters!” Jimmie shouted as they tossed him into the general population.

The Mexican authorities no doubt expected him to be shivved and left to bleed out in the shower. If so, they had no idea just how resourceful Jimmie Bernwood was.

On his first day on the inside, he would seek out the baddest
hijo de puta
in the yard . . . and beg him for protection. In exchange, he would use his superior command of the written word to pen love letters to the man’s girlfriend or wife.

Unfortunately, Jimmie quickly learned he wasn’t the only aspiring Nicholas Sparks in San Miguel. The prison love-letter racket was every bit as competitive as New York City publishing. Too many pencil jockeys. Not enough horses. The big difference between New York and San Miguel, however, was that if you scored a cover story for
Rolling Stone
, your competition wasn’t going to shank you in retaliation.

Anyway, that’s how Jimmie came to be shivved and left to bleed out in the shower.

J
immie woke in a hospital bed. An IV drip was feeding into his right arm. Based on the fuzzy feeling in his head, he was being drugged. No casts on his arms or legs, though, so he hadn’t been broken too bad in the prison attack. If this were a movie, Jimmie would rip the needle out and stagger off into the night. Unfortunately, the handcuffs on both his wrists put a damper on any escape plans.

A television mounted on the far wall was tuned to an English-language station—MSNBC, according to the scroller. They cut from a commercial for Trump Cola straight to video of a Trump rally.

A banner across the stage read, “AMERICA IS GREAT AGAIN.” So did most of the red hats in the crowd, Jimmie assumed. The crowd was hanging on Trump’s every word, even though he was probably twenty minutes into his third massive digression of the afternoon. They’d paid two large for these tickets, and by gosh, they were going to enjoy them.

“Prince Charles? That guy’s a boob. Total. Boob. Let me tell you something, folks, all of England’s princes and princesses together don’t add up to one of our princesses at Disney. Not even close. You want to see some real princesses? How about the USA Freedom Girls for America?”

Trump exited to thundering applause as the dance team took the stage to perform their new single. Not their strongest. Jimmie thought about changing the channel, but nobody’d left him the remote.

Trump returned for an encore and launched straight into his List of Enemies (always a crowd pleaser). The audience shouted along with the president: “Hillary! Hollywood! Pelosi! Rowling!”

Trump raised his hand for quiet. As had become the custom, the crowd all raised their hands back at him, also calling for quiet.

“You’ve been great today, West Virginia! This is my favorite of the Virginias. Let me tell you, America is close to being the greatest it’s ever been. It really, truly is, folks. You know this. We have the greatest people, the greatest cities. We have all the greatest freedoms . . .”

“EXCEPT FREEDOM OF RELIGION!” a lone voice shouted, loud enough to be picked up by MSNBC’s microphones.

Heads swiveled to stare at a woman who had ripped off her Trump shirt to reveal her true colors: Underneath, she was wearing a Bernie shirt—the one with the golden house finch, which was somehow appearing on more and more bootleg merchandise even after being banned on Etsy.

A shocked murmur rumbled through the crowd.
A protester? Here?!
The protests at Trump’s rallies had dwindled to almost zero once he’d started handing out free bike chains. Now this woman’s sudden appearance created the same reactions a cockroach would. Most people were getting as far away as possible, while a few rushed toward her, eagerly awaiting their chance to stomp on something.

“Equal treatment for Kardashians! Let them in! Let them in! Let them—”

The woman’s chanting was abruptly cut off when a man who looked like a middle school social studies teacher backhanded her across the mouth. Then the man balled his hand into a fist and punched her square in the face, garnering applause from the crowd and knocking the woman to the pavement.

“Okay, okay, that’s enough,” said Trump from the podium. “No more of that. What have I told you? Two punches is plenty for a broad. Let her up.”

The crowd obediently pulled the protestor to her feet, even though it had technically been one punch and one slap.

“Okay, look, lady. I don’t know what it is that sent you on the warpath—though we can guess, it’s probably cramps,” said Trump, drawing a huge roar of laughter. The danger had passed; they were having fun again.

“But you need to understand, I love the freedom of religion. It’s one of the five top freedoms. Those Kardashians can be any religion they want. But if it’s a religion that wants to blow us up, they don’t get to come here. Anybody is welcome in America—they just have to change to a religion that doesn’t want to blow us up. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

As the crowd cheered, several security personnel appeared, each holding an oversized American flag. With swift, practiced movements, they wrapped the flags around the protestor before pinning her arms and legs, then covering her completely. They lifted her on their shoulders like a roll of American-flag carpet and carried her out of the arena.

“Husbands, this is what happens when you don’t give your wives enough attention,” Trump said. “Be good to them. Even if they’re as ugly as that one.”

The station cut to the in-studio host, Lena Dunham. She rolled her eyes so hard that Jimmie worried she might have been having a seizure. “That was the president, speaking at a rally promoting his new program retraining out-of-work coal miners as golf caddies—”

The TV went black. Jimmie glanced around the room. He spied a dark-haired woman in a sharp, navy-blue blazer pointing a remote at the television. Her matching skirt only made it to midthigh, giving him a not-unpleasing view of her long legs.

She spun around in one fluid motion, like she’d reached the end of a catwalk. “Look who’s done napping,” she said with a polished British accent. “Think you can stay awake this time?”

“Do we know each other?” Jimmie asked. He doubted they’d met—he would have remembered those legs.

“You’ve been in and out of consciousness for over seventy-two hours. This is the third time we’ve had this conversation.”

“Sorry about that.”

“That’s the third time you’ve apologized as well,” she said. “You’re nothing if not consistent.”

“First time I’ve ever heard that.”

The woman said, “Third time.” She paused. “Anyway, since I don’t have all day, here’s the pitch: My name is Emma Blythe. I’m with the White House.”

“You’re a Brit in the White House? Not a Prince Charles sympathizer, then?”

She smiled a patient, thin-lipped smile and continued. “I’m here to extend you an offer of employment as a ghostwriter.”

He’d never tried his hand at ghostwriting before. Hadn’t even attempted a book-length manuscript, outside of an abandoned
novel or two. Or five. Okay, nine, but who was counting? Point was, she’d mistaken him for someone else.

“Too bad you came all this way,” he said. “Doesn’t sound like my sort of thing. And even if I was into ghostwriting, I couldn’t care less about politics. But I’ve already told you this.”

She nodded. “You’re not interested in politics, but you are interested in writing about the American migrant experience for
Cigar Aficionado
magazine. Strange, isn’t it?”

“Apparently their readers enjoy chomping on stogies while reading about poor, unemployed people crawling around in the dirt,” Jimmie said. “It’s just a paycheck.”

“What are they paying you?”

He told her the number, which wasn’t much.

“Here’s what we can offer you,” she said, quoting a number four times as large. Maybe five times—his math wasn’t super.

“For the entire project? Do I get, like, half now, half later?”

“That would be your salary. Per week. And to answer your next question, you would be ghostwriting the president’s memoir.”

“The president of . . .”

“The United States.”

“You want me to help write the autobiography . . . of Donald Trump?”