Black Books-Chapter Thirteen

A fictional account of life in MAGAritaville

‘Hey, Vlad, it’s no problem, I got you my friend. I’ll send you some COVID tests right away….what’s that? - yeah they’re almost impossible to get but Kushner has a stash he pilfered from the Blue States. That little bastard is ruthless but you already know that. Listen, we’re happy to help anyway we can Mr. President…yeah, sure I can hold. No problem, Sir’.

Donald Trump leaned further back in his chair behind the Resolute Desk.

He knew Putin was putting him on hold to show dominance and he was more than happy to submit, that was no secret by now.

Donald pressed the little red button he had installed on his desk so an aide would bring him another Diet Coke.

He only drank from the small glass bottles, as they made his freakishly small hands look bigger.

He watched as the aide bent towards him and popped the top with a bottle opener in front of him, as she had been instructed to by Hope Hicks.

She had an ample bosom, a low-cut top and he made no pains to hide his ogling eyes.

Women who worked in the White House were there to please Trump, at least visually, and he felt no shame in helping himself to a good look at the perky young blonde from Ole Miss.

He saw women as one of the perks of power; Vanky had helped set up a pipeline of sorts from Oxford, Mississippi where he had developed a a fondness of sorts for what he thought of as the MAGA look. The White House interns were a well-stocked pool.

He appointed a lot of political positions based on this quid pro quo, including a new federal prosecutor who just happened to be the father of Vanky’s White House executive assistant.

He knew that might come in handy later, especially around election time.

He watched as the comely young ‘thing’ walked out of the Oval Office and mumbled ‘gotta love it’ under his breath - they all seemed to be named Ashley now but he didn’t want to risk calling it out and getting it wrong so he simply said, ‘Thanks, sweetie.’

It was like working for a horny grandpa who was also the biggest threat to national security in the world.

The disparity between a guy who would most likely be just as happy sitting in a Hooters in Boca Raton right now but was about to get back on the line with the United States’ greatest adversary seemed especially obscene in this moment.

The entire world was imperiled by a global pandemic and he was offering up favors and the perilously scarce testing machines to dictators.   

Putin came back on the line after a lengthy hold offering praise and gratitude to Donald who lit up like a little boy.

He only really smiled when the Russians praised him.

His happiest memory was Kislyak & Lavrov back slapping him in this very room.

He went on to reveal classified Israeli intel that day early in his term; the two Russians proclaimed, ‘this big dumb asshole while tell us anything’ and laughed along with Trump. He had no idea the two men were making fun of him in the Oval Office - a victory for Putin and all the long-gone KGB agents, as if to say ‘we finally won’.

Now the diminutive dictator himself was laying it on thick and big, dumb Donald was lapping it up.

Putin remarked, ‘You better not tell anyone you gave me these machines or you will get in trouble’.

To which Trump gushed like a schoolboy with a crush, ‘I don’t care WHO finds out, Vlad!’

Funny how the smitten always behave like fools.

He was the President of the God Damned United States and just days earlier he had told his fellow Americans to inject bleach to fight the coronavirus. Now he was giving away COVID test machines to our biggest adversary and the globe’s most notorious bogeyman.

A real patriot would have wanted to keep Putin exposed to the deadly disease - not safer from it.

It stunned the National Security Council staff who were listening on the call and later incredulously studied the readout.

But what could they do? Save it for a book someday perhaps.

In this awful moment keeping Trump’s ways a secret had become part of the job description.

Now it was four years later, he was on the wrong side of an attempted coup and getting ready for his next round.

He should be in jail but instead was luxuriating in Palm Beach at his private club.

There’s different rules in life for most men, Trump seemed to play by a different set altogether.

As if he alone was sent to the world to disprove the existence of karma.

He should not still be here - let alone running for POTUS again.

Yet here he was pushing himself back from a table in the middle of the ballroom.

Little bits of grease and orange concealer left tiny print marks on the white, polyester table cloths.

Getting up required a cantilevered motion; it semi-mirrored the ‘drunk minotaur’ stance many had seen from the side view. A byproduct of the hard plastic girdle and shoe lifts he favored - it presented the eyes with what could only be described as an optical illusion.

As if the entire mass of salt and fat that was poured into a blue Brioni suit would go tumbling down to earth the moment he came in contact with a gentle breeze. Or an ostrich feather.

He had finished stuffing his face with the meatloaf he so adored - ’Chopped Steak,’ they called it on the Mar-a-Lago menu but every one knew it was meatloaf.

Trump liked anything you could put a lot of ketchup on.

His palette could only accommodate three flavors - well done, salty and sweet.

His staff shoveled out the kind of food that would make a cruise ship kitchen say, ‘Hey guys, I think we could do better’.

The dignitaries and dilettantes alike were all fed from the same trough.

Many of the newer members, especially the Europeans who had paid exorbitant dues to gain access to whisper in his still intact ear knew it was a cost of doing business but still found themselves stunned at the poor quality of provisions provided.

They were there to do business, many at the behest of Putin himself; to keep tabs on both sides of the equation, so to speak, and Trump was too dumb to know it.

He saw himself as popular - not as being played - but he was the fiddle for much smarter and more cunning men.

‘Did he think Viktor Orban visited him here because he liked the shrimp cocktail?’ the Russian cutouts would laugh to themselves.

‘They serve fresher shrimp in a fucking Las Vegas casino then this guy does ten feet from the Atlantic Ocean!’

Everything was an illusion here at Mar-a-Lago.

The smell of mildew hung in the air like the contempt most of the resort staff felt for having to address the man they secretly despised as ‘Mr. President’.

Trump spent his days on a golf course and seemed allergic to books.

He got his news from Fox News or from a handler who had been hand-picked by Kushner.

Basically making him an employee of both Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin thought he was too far gone to notice. He stumbled through most days with bloodshot eyes and bad breath.

Jared and Vanky still kept a close eye on who came and went at Mar-a-Lago, despite hiding out a little father south at their lair on Indian Creek Island.

Since bringing KSA & MBS into the fold, their management of Team Trump required a higher amount of discretion and opacity, which both seemed preternaturally equipped to deliver.

‘Putin’s Bitch’ was how the various Russian cutouts referred to Trump.

Many of them had direct ties and training from ex-KGB agents, making their way in and out of Mar-a-Lago daily.

They would reconvene in the back rooms of Sunny Isles strip clubs and laugh at their good fortune over vodka toasts and lines of coke.

They couldn’t believe how much kompromat they collected to send back to Mother Russia over the last four years.

It was the perfect set up - they knew it would make their long-suffering forebears green with envy.

Sunshine, women, cocaine and a mark so stupid you could walk up to him, kiss his ass and he would start spilling secrets just to hear his own voice.

Nobody in the field of espionage had it better than these mooks and they damn well knew it.

The man with ’45’ emblazoned on his golf shirt walked as a couple of b-cups protruded from underneath his cheap cotton. They seemed to bounce in an almost polyrhythmic way as he lumbered down the hall to his private office. Followed by the ever-present smell of dead possum. You never quite knew if it was coming from his mouth or the other end but if you were in his orbit long enough you learned not to ask questions.

It was something you never really got used to but learned to live with, like war or herpes.

‘That will be all for now, Waltine!’ Trump exclaimed as he closed the door behind him and stepped into the same room the FBI had ‘raided’ a few years ago.

His personal quarters resembled that of a hoarder.

It gave a bit of a tell as to what it must be like in his mind.

A collection of papers and documents strewn and piled up everywhere.

Detailing things he wasn’t really equipped to understand but knew held value nonetheless.

Donald was always good at leveraging access to others, he learned early a fool could go far that way.

Walt hung right outside the door, as did his Secret Service agents - he said he had a call with the ‘Big Guy’ today’ and they all knew immediately who he meant.

More than one agent raised an eyebrow at the revelation.

A wiser man wouldn’t have given Waltine the intel to know he was gonna be on a call with Putin that day, nearly four years since he had been President but Trump couldn’t help but brag - even to the help.

He was that insecure; in the end that would be his biggest weakness and ultimately lead to his downfall.

He was just too dumb to know it yet.

Donald was too deep into his own self-obsession to understand how unmatched and outfoxed he was about to be by the man on the other end of the phone.

His shaking hand picked up the phone and dialed the private number recited to him back in ’18 in Helsinki by Putin himself (why he had stolen the interpreter’s notes).

He listened as the call rang through and then his face brightened, ‘Hello, President Putin, how can I help you today?…yes, of course I can hold.’