Excerpt From the Trump/Dorset Sessions
June 1, 2018, 10:16 AM
Dorset: Before you decided to run for president, you were a larger-than-life presence in Manhattan and Atlantic City real estate, as well as on television screens with The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice.
Trump: And let’s not forget Trump Resorts all over the world. I had my own magazine, my own water. I had my own steaks, sold through the Sharper Image catalog. Who did that before Donald Trump? Nobody. They all told me it was a stupid idea. Now, everybody orders meat through the mail. If you go into a grocery store to buy steak, they’ll look at you like you’re a dummy. You buy it through Amazon now, and a drone drops it off thirty minutes later directly onto your grill.
Dorset: It’s interesting that you would bring up Amazon, what with all the animosity in the past between you and Jeff Bezos’s newspaper, the Washington Post-though they’ve been surprisingly gentle on you during your first term in office.
Trump: He’s a businessman, I’m a businessman. If there’s a deal to be made, I’ll make it. Bezos asked me to loosen the restrictions on commercial drone usage, and I asked him to call off the Post. So we made a deal.
Dorset: A lot of people would consider it unethical for the president of the United States to be trading favors for relaxing government regulations.
Trump: Unethical? Who’s using that word? I’ve never taken a dime from anyone in exchange for influence. I don’t need their money. I’m very wealthy. This is two consenting adults agreeing to a mutually beneficial situation. That’s never unethical.
Dorset: Surely you’ve seen tweets to this effect. Twitter seems to be rife with critics of the administration. There are entire parody accounts-
Trump: Illegal parody accounts. I’ve had many of them shut down. You can’t impersonate a sitting president. Can’t do it. So I have my lawyers get on them.
Dorset: There’s actually a Supreme Court precedent that says it’s legaclass="underline" Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. If a reasonable person wouldn’t interpret a parody to be true-if it’s clearly a mockery, in other words-then it’s covered by the First Amendment.
Trump: Who’s reasonable? You? Most people aren’t logical. I’m talking mostly about women, but I know plenty of men who can be really bitchy.
Dorset: Fair enough. But you have to admit that nobody would mistake @WriteinTrump for the real thing. Here’s a sample tweet-again, clearly not something you’ve ever said: “I’m not willing to say that I’m one hundred percent sure O. J. Simpson committed those murders until I know where Obama was that night.”
Trump: Well, where was Obama that night?
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Say Cheese!
The first thing Jimmie did when he arrived at his office the next morning was push his desk up against the door and open the ceiling tile. He breathed a sigh of relief-temporary relief, but relief nonetheless. Lester’s recorder was still there.
Too bad he couldn’t just smuggle it out of the White House. Not with the insane, paranoid security in place. He could, however, listen to the taped interviews when he had the opportunity.
Not now, however. He’d just received an e-mail that an emergency meeting had been called for nine o’clock. No dessert this time, from the sound of things.
Jimmie slipped through the door at the top of the stairs and into the Reagan Library. A group of tourists stared at him, bewildered expressions on their faces. A couple of them raised their phones, snapping photos. They probably thought he was somebody important. Let ’em. It wasn’t every day you saw a sharp-dressed man slip out from behind a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Jimmie straightened his tie. He raised an eyebrow-slowly, slyly. Take all the pictures you want. If anyone posted pics of him online, it might drive some chatter in certain circles. There were probably shots from the State Dinner floating around, too. Although he wasn’t allowed to discuss his project with others, anyone with half a brain would figure out shortly that he was back-in a big way. And working on something bigger than anything he’d ever worked on before. Maybe something even bigger than a ghostwriting project, if this Lester Dorset situation yielded a juicy story.
“Is this great or what?” Trump whispered in his ear. He was standing behind Jimmie, smiling and waving to the tourists. They’d been trying to snap the president’s photograph. Jimmie, primping and preening for their cameras, was nothing more than a photobomb.
“Good morning, Mr. Trump,” Jimmie said. He tried not to think about his face going fifty shades of red. He wanted to ask how the president and the Secret Service agent just behind him had slipped so silently into the room. He hadn’t heard them clanging on the ancient staircase. Presidential teleporter, maybe? Naw-teleportation was an impossibility, even according to the nuttiest professors.
After Trump signed a couple of babies, they moved through the long hallway and into the West Wing.
Jimmie said, “About your offer last night…”
“I knew it wouldn’t be long. I’ll set you up in the best place-one of my favorite properties. Close to here, too. The Watergate. Ever hear of it?”
“Yeah. There was break-in there. Years ago. It was made into a movie.”
“Haven’t seen it,” Trump said. “The hotel is beautiful now. Amazing place. Luxurious. You’ll love what I’ve done with it.”
Trump didn’t seem able to leave anything well enough alone. Once he got his hands on something, he remade it in his own image.
Jimmie wondered if he was getting a Trump makeover. He was already wearing a suit and tie to work. In college, he’d told his roommate that if he ever got a job that required a tie, to strangle him with it and drag his body to the curb to be taken out with the trash.
Now Jimmie was going to be living in a Trump building. How long before he started tanning and turned the color of Cheetos dust? How long before he grew his thinning hair long enough to comb it over his receding hairline in the Trumpster’s signature style?
He looked at himself in a passing mirror and tried to smile, but all he could do was smirk.
It was already happening.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Boomtown
Trump swaggered into the Tyson Room and headed straight to his seat. Jimmie headed for the corner, where he tried to look invisible by sucking his gut in.
“All right, guys, what is it?” Trump said. “This better be important. I was midbronzing all the way down in the subbasement.”
The cabinet members looked around anxiously. Finally, it was Secretary of State Omarosa who spoke.
“The United Kingdom seems to be preparing for an escalation.”
Trump snorted. “What are we talking about? Another insult? These guys are terrible at insults.”
“No-this time they’ve taken actual action.”
“What, like recalling their ambassador or something?”
Omarosa shook her head. “They’ve recalled Patrick Stewart. Also Emily Blunt and Andrew Lincoln.”
“Aw, crap,” interjected the secretary of transportation, Clint Eastwood. “That means no more Walking Dead. I gotta find out what happens to Daryl!”
“Just read the comic books,” grumbled Corey Lewandowski.
“Why don’t you read the comic books?” snarled Eastwood with such a menacing tone that Lewandowski paled and became very interested in his glass of water. Jimmie made a mental note to bring that moment up the next time Lewandowski got in his face (not that Jimmie would do any better if he got a full blast of Eastwood).