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.