Black Books-Chapter Seven

A fictional account of life in MAGAritaville.

With the smugness of a hairless cat, the thin white scion luxuriated in the South Florida sun.

“Botox don’t burn bitches!” he exclaimed to Vanky as she attempted to pass him the sunblock.

They both laughed out loud.

His more of a whinny than a guffaw, like a chipmunk on ecstasy.

She possessed a heartier laugh which was more akin to her natural throaty timbre, it had the guttural retort of a longshoreman with the flu.

Her laughter hit your ears like a rock being thrown into the water, more splash than celebration.

She often cursed like a sailor too.

In a voice that was a good octave lower than her sotto voce-over-sibilant-baby-doll voice her father had trained her to speak in for his own titillation.

A game she allowed herself to go along with early as it got her what she wanted. It soothed him and enriched her. She was a girl used to getting her way.

An SUV at Choate so she could drive into the city and go clubbing after getting kicked out of Chapin.

A model needs her access and Vanky was all about the velvet rope from an early age.

Bungalow 8 was practically her backyard well into the early aughts.

While other girls born into the privilege she possessed were training their dressage horses and crushing on the lifeguards of Nantucket, she was out all night on weekends making Manhattan her playground.

She was not most teens, she was a princess.

At least in her father’s eyes and that suited her just fine.

She was being groomed for greater things, taking to the life her father lived like a duck to water.

In many ways becoming the brains of the operation, as her brothers were not exactly ‘the sharpest tools in the shed,’ as her old man like to say.

One of the many inside jokes they shared with each other.

He also liked to rate the girlfriends she brought home from boarding school on a scale of ‘hotness,’ from one to ten.

Anything below a six was not welcome in Trump Tower.

Daddy’s house, Daddy’s rules.

He tried to impart in her early on that image was everything and she dutifully complied.

She also learned to willfully turn a blind eye to his more nefarious habits which were one of the worst kept secrets in New York City.

The ‘Trump Model Management’ years were long behind her. She never thought about those he had hurt.

She thirsted for power too much to care.

As her father like to proclaim with a gleam in his eye, “Vanky is a killer - just like me.”

She and Jared had reached a comfortable understanding.

In their minds they were not simply building an empire, they were building a dynasty.

The old man was dumb as a box of rocks and everyone knew it.

He wanted to get high, hit on women and for music to play when he walked into a room.

The baubles and pageantry filled the hole in his narcissistic heart.

His needs were immediate and his soul so broken that he was like a lost traveler stumbling through a desert of desire - just looking to slake his never-ending thirst moment by moment.

This made him wide open for manipulation, a trait the Russian mobsters he went into business with in the early 90’s had been exploiting for decades.

He was like a shark that was constantly feeding that couldn’t see he was not in the ocean but feeding in a pool that other men owned.

He was merely a pet to those who could buy and sell him - real billionaires.

The fish were provided for him but he was too dumb to see it.

Jared and Vanky were not - and they wanted their cut.

They wanted to own their fair share of the pool - and thanks to Putin and KSA they were well on their way.

Kush walked out of the White House two billion dollars richer and that doesn’t include the almost half a billion they grifted while serving in his administration.

Perhaps the most unqualified folks to ever have offices in the West Wing and by a country mile the most dangerous.

Even Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon treated them with caution and still got shanked by their slender and manicured hands.

Jared had the deadest eyes they had ever seen; even the CIA warned against allowing him security clearance.

Of course the old man overruled them and all it took was a tiny whisper in his ear by Vanky.

The only muscularity in Trump’s approach came from the body men and goons that had always been his companions.

He possessed no grace or stealth himself and didn’t understand the axis between true power and strength.

He needed thugs and lawyers and greasy ex-cops at his side to feel protected.

Vanky and Jared understood that a piece of paper and a backchannel to MBS or the Kremlin could rain down more destruction than a thousand bullets or brass knuckles.

And for those that knew what they were looking at, this not only inspired trepidation but fear for our democracy.

Trump was still living in chapter one of his story.

He seemed incapable of evolving.

It had lasted for decades, fed by an insatiable media looking for gossip and pulp - and zero desire to report on actual facts.

Jared and Vanky instinctually knew this left a hole so big they could drive a giant truck filled with cash right through it and that is exactly what they did during their days in D.C.

They would be the ones to write chapter two; it began as they settled into Indian Creek Island, a private resort-like setting for the billionaire class.

It had the sort of security and exclusivity that their new life required.

It also allowed them to rub shoulders with the likes of Tom Brady and Jeff Bezos.

Jeff liked to joke, “Hey, you owe me a reporter Jared,” as they gathered for drinks in the tony enclave to watch the sunset.

“I’ll ask my father-in-law, he still owns a bunch of them!” came Kushner’s reply.

They both smiled the smile of men who had long since risen above any sort of accountability and viewed the human collateral damage along the way as simply the cost of doing business.

The sort of callous and banal evil that made moral men shudder.

A perfect place to pull the strings on the puppets they controlled.

It was curious that Jared had such a large hedge fund now and all of his AUM came from overseas investments.

One would think a man with so much access to domestic private equity would be building wealth for his neighbors but he wasn’t really managing an investment fund.

He was managing expectations and access to Trump and the myriad secrets of U.S. intelligence agencies - and everyone on this tiny island knew it.

So did the folks an hour up the coast pressing flesh and dining on Costco shrimp at Mar-a-Lago, hoping for some face time with the figurehead of this criminal organization passing itself off as a political party.

As they sat in the sun under the giant fluffy clouds floating their way across Biscayne Bay, they thought back to how they almost missed out on all of the rewards their marriage of convenience and opportunity had provided.

They had broken up after dating briefly and were ready to walk away, Jared was repulsed by Donald and still held a grudge about what had happened to his father Charles.

He wasn’t stupid and he knew where Chris Christie, then a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, got the tapes that forced his father into a plea deal.

Not the ones that were made public as evidence in the case.

The other ones that went away as long as his old man did too.

He had visited his father every weekend while he was in a federal prison camp down in Alabama.

No simple feat for an undergraduate at Harvard but the dutiful son did it anyway - and got a better education on how business really works for the wealthy than he would receive in some classroom in Cambridge that his parents bought him a seat in.

The young man was a quick study and knew enough to listen as Rupert Murdoch coached him on giving Vanky another chance.

At the same time, the heiress herself was cruising the azure waters of the Mediterranean with none other than Wendi Deng Murdoch, a one time Putin paramour and a woman so deeply entwined in the global netherworld of real power that her words weighed more than a solid gold Chanel bracelet gifted in a mahogany box.

Like the kind Vanky found gift-wrapped on the nightstand, as she sashayed into her private cabin on a yacht moored to the coast of Turkey.

It only took a weekend and both sides were convinced.

Within a year, as the rest of the Trump clan were wiping vomit from their mouths after over-imbibing and puking into the hedgerows of Bedminster, the young couple was saying,’I do’ - and an allegiance was formed.

Later that fateful Saturday night a phone rang in a darkened office in the Kremlin.

Ironically, in a chair Vanky herself would soon sit in, at least for a moment on a visit to Moscow, a shaky hand reached for the receiver.

“It is done,” came the words in Russian.

“Good!” came the reply.