The Day of the Donald Read online

  The car finally let Jimmie out near the surprisingly unassuming staff entrance. As he waited in the line to pass through the metal detectors, Jimmie looked over the large sign showing items he was forbidden to bring inside with him. The list now included hair dryers, after an event last month in which Trump had to be evacuated from a rally after a blow-dryer-armed protestor had gotten close enough to give Trump’s hair a nearly fatal tousling.

  “Any liquids, perishables, electronics, flammable material?” asked the guard as he unzipped Jimmie’s backpack.

  “No, sir,” Jimmie replied. “Except—well, notebooks, which could be flammable. They’re paper.”

  “What’s this?” asked the guard, pulling Jimmie’s microcassette recorder out of the bag.

  “That’s just my tape recorder,” Jimmy said. “I’m going to be interviewing the president.”

  The guard nodded in understanding, placed the tape recorder on the table, and then smashed it to pieces with a hammer.

  “Whoa! Hey! Come on, man! No!” Jimmy wailed. “Why did you do that? That recorder survived the Playboy Mansion!”

  “No outside recording devices,” the security guard said, trying on Jimmie’s backpack. “This is nice. Is it new?”

  Jimmie nodded. “Could I have it back now?”

  “No backpacks allowed, sorry,” the guard said. “You can buy it back later on eBay, unless you’re outbid.”

  As much as Jimmie wanted to grumble about it, he knew that the heightened security measures were warranted. Even though most dissenters were fleeing the country, the occasional protestor still slipped through the iron gates with a can of white spray paint to “take back the White House.”

  Dissidents didn’t have a leg to stand on, though. Trump had won the election in a landslide. Some commentators believed the “landslide” was more than just a metaphoric natural disaster. Jimmie had heard the 2016 election called the biggest single natural disaster in world history. Donald J. Trump, they said, was a meteor that was going to wipe the human race off the face of the earth. Trump had been in office for more than eighteen months now, and the human race was still going strong.

  Trump was either the savviest or the luckiest president in history. His day-one repeal of Obamacare left millions of unemployed Americans uninsured. Without health care, they were dying in record numbers. The resulting drop in the unemployment rate sent the Dow skyrocketing.

  To give him credit, he’d created jobs as well. Construction of the Keystone XXL Pipeline employed thousands. The Keystone XXL Oil Spill cleanup employed thousands more.

  Trump had found creative ways to fund federal programs while lowering taxes. Who else would have thought to pay for FEMA’s budget by suing the Catholic Church over property damage caused by acts of God?

  And for every environmentalist who was furious about Secretary of the Energies Sarah Palin’s “frack ’em all” policies, there were three consumers thrilled with the money they were saving at the pumps and on their heating bills.

  Whether Trump had actually made America great again was a moot point—he made America feel great again. And if that meant that Jimmie would need to bid on his own backpack to get it returned to him? That was simply the price of greatness.

  Chapter Six

  The Apprentice

  A White House aide appeared as Jimmie was putting his change back into his pockets. “Mr. Bernwood? This way, please.” He led Jimmie down a dimly lit, wood-floored hallway.

  “Wow, the inside of this place is a lot less fancy than the outside,” said Jimmie.

  “The president believes in containing costs,” explained the aide. “He had all the marble and brass removed from the staff areas and placed out where visitors and the public can see it. He said, ‘Marble has wow factor, so why waste it on a bunch of secretaries and cooks?’”

  “I guess I see his point,” said Jimmie.

  “Well, then, I think it’s sad that you don’t believe you deserve wow factor,” said the aide. “Here’s Miss Blythe’s office.”

  He entered to find Emma smiling at him with her huge Miss Universe–quality anime eyes. Wow factor indeed.

  “You look like an entirely new man, James.”

  He took the seat across the desk from her—gently, as he still had lower back pain from being shivved. The scar, however, looked totally rad in the mirror. Like a pink lightning bolt. Women were going to be super-impressed by it. Now Harry just needed to find his Hermione.

  “You didn’t like the beard?” he said, running a hand across his freshly shaved chin.

  “When I visited you in the hospital, there was a scorpion in it.”

  All Jimmie could say was, “Alive or dead?”

  Emma tossed him an employee manual. As she rifled through her filing cabinet, Jimmie marveled at how she looked even hotter than she had when he’d last seen her. Rare was the woman (or man) who looked better without a little medicated haze to smooth out the imperfections. Then again, Emma Blythe was a rare specimen.

  As he’d learned via Wikipedia, she was a former Miss Universe winner from the United Kingdom who was now the White House apprentice. The position had formerly been known as chief of staff—a sort of personal assistant to the president. Though beauty pageant contestants got a bad rap from some in the femisphere, they were often intellectually heads and tails above their peers. Emma Blythe, for instance, had graduated at the top of her class from Cambridge. She was now the youngest chief of staff in history. If pageant contestants also had heads and tails above their peers, well, you couldn’t very well hold that against them, could you? That would be discrimination. At least in Jimmie’s book.

  “Did they give you any trouble in security?” Emma asked.

  “They took my tape recorder apart. With a hammer.”

  “I should have warned you about that. We’ll provide you with one to use on-site—one that doesn’t leave the White House under any conditions. One with an internal hard drive, to prevent tapes being lost. Until we get you on President Trump’s schedule, however, you’ll be free to use a notebook to record your informal observations.”

  “When will I get on his schedule? What sort of time frame are we looking at here?”

  Emma leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “We’re going to take this one day at a time. You’re to be a fly on the wall. Like a child during the Victorian era. You’re to be seen but not heard. Blend in with the background. The less anyone around here sees you, the better. Case in point: That jacket has to go.”

  The bright-blue suit jacket and American flag necktie had cost him nearly thirty bucks at JCPenney. Along with the generic white button-up shirt, they were the only “dress-up” clothes he owned. In fact, they were some of the only clothes he owned. He’d been living out of a duffle bag for a while now.

  “If I could get an advance on my first paycheck—”

  She opened her drawer and peeled five fifties off a stack of bills like she was a bank teller. “It’s important to the president to always have cash on hand. Just remember to replace this after you get paid.”

  This was a pleasant surprise. He decided to push it. “Do we have a per diem for food? Because all I had for breakfast today was reheated Chipotle. Didn’t have enough cash on me for the salmonella-free upgrade last night, so I spent half the night with my head in the toilet.”

  “If you got sick off something, why did you even keep the leftovers?”

  He shrugged. As if on cue, his stomach rumbled.

  “You can request reimbursement online,” Emma said. “The cap is seventy-five dollars a day, though.”

  “I can . . . probably work with that.”

  So far, Jimmie was liking his new employer. He’d never been much for politics before, but he could get used to the expense-account lifestyle. Pity the clueless taxpayers who were going to be footing his bill.

  “So where’s he at?” Jimmie said. “The president.”

  “Most days, he’ll be right on the other side of that door with
the brass T on it, in the Oval Office. Right now, however, he’s in a meeting with his top-level advisors. Once we have your dot-gov e-mail set up, you’ll be receiving daily updates with President Trump’s schedule. I don’t think I have to tell you how important it is to keep this information to yourself. If somebody—some outside agitator—were to get ahold of such vital information . . .”

  “Understood,” he said. “My lips are sealed.”

  “You built an entire career out of digging up dirt on celebrities. I strongly doubt it was a one-way street. There’s a fair amount of trading gossip in your line of work, am I right?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not judging you,” she said. “It’s not my call, anyway—it’s the president’s. And you’re his guy. We had to give up considerable assets to bring you home. The relationship between our countries is strained at the moment, as you’re well aware. President Trump sent me to personally negotiate the transaction.”

  “What’d they want for me?”

  “Adam Sandler.”

  Jimmie nodded. Depending on your comedic sensibilities, America had either gotten the better of Mexico or been ripped off. “You said the president is a fan of mine. What about you? Have you read my stuff?”

  “What I think is irrelevant.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what do you think?”

  She leaned forward. He could see that her blue eyes were shaded with green. “What do I think? I think—”

  The door behind Jimmie flew open, startling him. He turned to see a man clad in a sharp gray suit whose pits were sopping wet.

  “We have a situation,” the man said. “And it rhymes with ‘muclear.’”

  Chapter Seven

  First Impressions Are Everything

  Jimmie’s pulse shot through the gold-trimmed ceiling, but Emma was nonplussed. Maybe there was another word that rhymed with “muclear” besides the obvious. “Heather Locklear” almost rhymed. So did “Spooktacular.” Had Heather Locklear pulled out of this year’s White House Spooktacular?

  “You couldn’t have just phoned me?” Emma said. “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Your phone went straight to voice mail,” the man said. “The Security Council is convening in the Boardroom right now.”

  She found her phone in her desk drawer. “Could somebody dig up Steve Jobs’s corpse and get it to make a phone that doesn’t need to be charged every six hours?”

  “We can find out who’s in charge of Apple now and put some pressure on them,” the man said. “Or, better yet, we can draft a bill mandating batteries on smartphones last seventy-two hours. And if they don’t do it, we punch them in the face.” He pulled out his own iPhone. “Hey, Siri, tell the CEO of Apple to call the White House pronto.”

  The phone beeped, and Siri’s voice replied, “I’ve added it to his schedule for tomorrow at three PM eastern time.”

  The man caught Jimmie’s astonished expression. “Come on,” the guy said. “The amount of data these things collect on you—of course that works.”

  Emma tossed her phone back into the drawer. “Corey, I’d like you to meet Jimmie Bernwood. You’ll be seeing him around quite a bit—he’s President Trump’s new ghostwriter. Jimmie, this is Corey Lewandowski, the press secretary. You may remember him as President Trump’s campaign manager. Or maybe not.”

  Lewandowski crushed Jimmie’s hand. “You’ve got some pretty big shoes to fill,” the man said. Then he turned to Emma: “We’ve really got to hustle. They’re waiting—”

  “Fine, fine,” she said, following Lewandowski out the door in a huff.

  Jimmie watched them leave. He flexed the fingers of his right hand, trying to regain feeling. What was he supposed to do now? He didn’t have a desk of his own, as far as he knew. She’d talked about setting him up with an e-mail, so he assumed he should find someone in their IT department. Even though he was sitting just a few steps away from the president of the United States’ office, he was struck with déjà vu. It was that Not only do I have no idea what’s going on here, but I’m also not entirely sure anybody else knows, either feeling.

  Emma poked her head back into the office. “Well, are you coming?”

  “He said something about a Security Council?” Jimmie asked. He swallowed a burp. “That sounds top secret. I didn’t think I’d have clearance.”

  “That badge on your lanyard gives you the same clearance as the POTUS.”

  He fingered the badge. His clearance level was listed as “ORANGE.” Just underneath a terrible picture of his face. Or maybe it wasn’t the picture that was terrible—maybe it was his face. Shaving the beard had done him wonders, but there was that Sarah Palin saying: You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Jimmie had grown up in rural Iowa, and damned if he didn’t know that to be the truth.

  “What’s POTUS?” he asked, trailing Emma into the hallway.

  “You really don’t follow politics, do you? POTUS,” she explained, “stands for President of Trump’s United States.”

  Jimmie had the same security clearance as the president. The president of the United States. He couldn’t believe it. Somebody had to have screwed up.

  While they were waiting at the mirrored doors of the elevator, who to his wandering eyes should appear but Cat Diaz. She was on the warpath, absorbed in her phone, when she glanced at Jimmie out of the corner of her eye. She returned to her screen but immediately did a double take and slammed on the brakes.

  “Jimmie,” she said. There was a look of confusion on her face.

  “Cat,” he said. “You work here now? That’s crazy, meeting like this.”

  Her gaze went straight down to his badge. As she read his clearance level, her brow only furrowed further.

  My eyes are up here, he almost said but thought better of it. He was staring into her cleavage like it was the abyss.

  “I’d heard you dropped off the grid,” Cat said, looking up at him.

  “Turns out, if you want to buy a clean pair of boxers, you need to get back on the grid.”

  The elevator opened behind him. “You can catch up later,” Emma said, shoving him in so hard he almost knocked over the bonsai tree on the decorated pillar in the corner.

  Jimmie gave a little wave to Cat as the doors slid shut. He had no idea why he’d brought up his boxers, but all in all, not a bad chance encounter. He was looking forward to catching up later—not romantically, of course. He kind of had an eye on Emma. Was there a Mr. Universe in the picture?

  Emma pressed the button marked “B.”

  “The White House has a basement?” Jimmie asked.

  “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, I thought it was like the Alamo.”

  “The Alamo has a basement,” she said. “It’s a secret military facility. If you ever visit, take your badge along, and they’ll be happy to give you the full tour.”

  “Next thing you know, you’ll be telling me there are aliens at Area 51.”

  The elevator lurched. Jimmie’s stomach fluttered.

  “There aren’t any aliens at Area 51,” Emma said, staring ahead as they descended. “We keep them at Area 61.”

  “What’s at Area 51, then?”

  “Souvenir shops, mostly,” she replied, “and the frozen bigfoot corpse. But in 2021, the biggest Trump casino yet.”

  Before he could ask if she was kidding, the elevator came to an abrupt stop. Jimmie’s stomach capsized. Its contents catapulted up his esophagus with violent speed. The doors slid open, and Jimmie Bernwood showered the president of the United States of America with half-digested rice and beans.

  President Trump looked down at the former burrito dripping off his shirt and then glared at Jimmie. His lips were pursed in deliberation. After what seemed like an eternity, he spoke.

  “I love Hispanics, but this is freaking ridiculous.”

  Chapter Eight

  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

  The president stood tall and proud, as if expecting
the vomit to apologize and leave on its own. Donald J. Trump wasn’t one to faze easily. Most presidents’ hair turned gray after eighteen months in office. If Trump’s hair had changed at all, Jimmie would have to say it hadn’t grayed but bronzed.

  Dueling scents reached Jimmie’s nose. The smell of his own stomach acid was being forced into submission by the president’s cologne, which was unmistakably Success by Trump.

  Jimmie took a rapid assessment of the situation to determine if things were really as bad as they seemed.

  The good news was that President Trump could shower, change, and be back at work with only a minimal interruption to his day. That was one of the benefits of working in one’s own home.

  The bad news, at least for Jimmie, was that his status as a fly on the wall had been blown. Big time.

  During the primary campaign, a female reporter had gotten a little too aggressive with her questioning of Trump and was manhandled by Lewandowski. There was video of the incident online, which showed the reporter wielding a pen—a “potentially dangerous weapon,” according to Trump. As if a reporter could ever be a threat to somebody’s welfare using just a pen. Years of sitting hunched over computer keyboards meant that it was usually a pain just to bend over and look into a fridge, let alone have the range of motion and athletic dexterity necessary to ram a ballpoint pen into somebody’s throat.

  If a reporter simply asking questions of a presidential candidate could be manhandled for being a threat, what was about to happen to a reporter who threw up on the president?

  Jimmie Bernwood was about to find out.

  Trump, who stood six foot three, towered over Jimmie as if he were twice that. The white circles under Trump’s glaring eyes made Jimmie feel like he was pinned in a prison searchlight. Jimmie’s shame was only seconds old, and already its weight was unbearable. He thought he’d reached the bottom of his shame spiral in Mexico, but clearly he was still circling the drain.