Washington, DC
Thirty minutes later Rosie and Billy are checking in at the front desk in the lobby of the elegant Hay Adams Hotel, just a short walk across Lafayette Park from the White House. Billy instructs Rosie to request a suite of two rooms, connected by an adjoining door. The young female clerk behind the desk replies that there is a suite of first-class rooms available for $1,500 per day.
Rosie looks at Billy. He nods for her to go ahead.
“And how do you want this billed?” the girl politely asks. Again, Rosie turns to Billy.
Billy smiles back at the girl. “We’ll do three days to start,” he says to the clerk. Then he turns again to Rosie. “Put it on your credit card—Fred.”
Rosie’s face makes a little grimace as she hesitantly hands the girl her new credit card.
The girl processes the card. “Thank you, Ms. Davis.” She looks up at Rosie. “If you don’t mind my saying, you look just like that MSNBC reporter on TV. What’s her name—Rosario Brown?”
Rosie looks again at Billy, and then turns back and smiles at the girl. “No problem,” Rosie graciously replies. “I hear that all the time.”
The White House
The Bad King has just come down from his private quarters in the White House to start his busy day. It is 11:00 AM. His first official act of the morning is to take a pass on the morning PDB (presidential daily brief) on intelligence. The President does not believe the intelligence assessment produced by the nation’s intelligence professionals—the CIA, the FBI, and the DIA, (the Defense Intelligence Agency). As he has said now on multiple occasions, he believes Tsar Peter. In his much ballyhooed second summit with the dictator of North Korea in 2019, the president invited the Russian foreign minister to Hanoi to advise him in his consultations on nuclear disarmament with the North Korean dictator. To any normal person this might seem like an invocation to treason, but the president does not trust the professionals in the nation’s intelligence community. He trusts his gut, as he likes to say, and takes his foreign policy advice from the President of Russia.
The president has an 11:30 meeting with a veteran’s group. These are the comical old men in the soldiers’ caps with ersatz military insignia. They are—despite all the evidence of the president’s criminality testified to by Michael Cohen—hard-core supporters of the president. They are what the president refers to as his base, like the soccer moms in the so-called heartland of America—the Midwest, states like Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa—who The Bad King has convinced that they will be attacked by ISIS or raped by Mexican immigrants on their way to the pizza parlor.
At noon, the president has—what is noted on his schedule as a “working luncheon”—a lunch with his vice-president, known in the White House environs as, The Stooge. The rest of his day—from 12:30 to 6:00 PM—is devoted to “executive time.” This is a time during which the president of the United States has no official duties. The president retires again to his private quarters. By 7:00 o’clock he is in bed with a bag of cheeseburgers and his cell phone. He spends the evening talking to supporters, wealthy Republican donors, and media personalities—like Sean Hannity, the conservative Fox News op-ed TV personality— who echoes back to The Bad King, in his every utterance, what is now called the MAGA gospel.
Though the election is still months away, the incumbent President of the United States is—in every sense of the expression—a lame-duck. The powerful California Speaker of the House has essentially emasculated him. The Congress in 2019 voted out a resolution to block his declaration of a national emergency, stopping the funding for his border wall. After The Bad King vetoed the resolution, the issue wound up in federal court before eventually coming to the Star Court. Not surprisingly—with The Judge, The Bad King’s controversial Court appointment as the conservative place holder—the Star Court upheld, in a 5/4 decision, the constitutionality of the president’s act. The Democrats in the House though refuse the funding. This causes a huge rift between the White House and the Dems in the Congress—lead by the determined Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, on one side and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, The Devil, on the other side.
Whatever else remains of the president’s political agenda—after the divisive border wall initiative—is now stalled in Congress. The Democrats though are aggressively pursuing their own agenda. In the last year, after taking back control of the House, they have pushed for tougher gun control legislation with expanded background checks, more money for education, advocated for a Green New Deal to fight climate change and promote stronger economic growth, encouraged new infrastructure spending, and fought hard against Republican opposition to get Medicare for all.
The always truculent Bad King is in a difficult situation—both politically and personally. Unlike their Republican counterparts, the Democrats in the House have taken their oversight responsibility seriously, and the president and his administration (not to mention his kids) are under piercing investigations by House Oversight committees. His son, The Clown Prince, is being investigated by the New York attorney general for complicity in a host of his father’s tax and financial crimes. The Bad King has lost the backing of a small handful of suddenly conscience-stricken Republicans who can no longer support or countenance his rampant public corruption, his coziness with the Russian president, his brazen abuses of power, obstruction of justice, and politically calculated racist tropes, his disgraceful and ethically immoral behavior, and his total and unconscionable debasement of the office of the president. A small majority in the country now believe that The Bad King is single handedly destroying the credibility and moral legitimacy of the presidency.
The economy has slowed over the last four quarters. The almost 4.0 trillion dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy did not deliver the promised business expansion, and growth is now barely 1%. The unemployment rate is back over 5%. The jobs he promised to bring back to rust belt America never returned. And the fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal is catching up with him as the media keeps producing video of The Bad King and Epstein partying together in the 90’s, video that raises questions about the president himself (birds of a feather) and puts the lie to his oft repeated assertion that he “hardly knew the guy.” The quest for a nuclear deal with North Korea is The Bad King’s elusive unicorn. His negotiations with the North Korean dictator never—following a series of “love letters”—got back on track after their disastrous second summit. Despite the favorable Star Court decision, his beloved wall (the one he promised America the Mexicans would pay for) is never going to be built, and even the most devout of his heartland followers—his much lauded “base”—are losing their faith in the “apostle” of greed.
The Bad King has more riding on the election than just another term in office. His New York real estate company is now the subject of a massive RICO-style investigation as an on-going criminal enterprise. The New York attorney general is investigating his charitable foundation for fraud and tax evasion. The inspector general’s office is looking into the finances of his inaugural committee. A DOJ (Department of Justice, known colloquially as The Crime Council) memo says that—as a matter of policy—a sitting president cannot be indicted for crimes while in office. But he knows that as soon as he leaves office he will be indicted, convicted, and likely go to prison for the rest of his natural life. The only way The Bad King can stay out of prison is to stay in the Oval Office. So, it is imperative that he wins the next election. At seventy-plus-years-old, he knows, however, that he cannot trust his fate—his very liberty in the twilight years of his life—to the perfidy of the American electorate.
Thus, it is that the incumbent president already has a plan in place should he lose the upcoming election—a plot called Project: Red Dragon to void the election, renounce the constitution, dissolve the Congress, and with the power of the military, local police, and radical right-wing white nationalist militias install himself as president for life with all the authoritarian powers of a dictator—in effect a coup. This would, of course, eliminate a lot of the president’s problems. He could shut down unfriendly news outlets. This is the kind of thing that strongmen in despotic regimes usually do. He could investigate, imprison, or murder his political enemies. Tsar Peter, his role model, has employed these same tactics in Russia. Also, and not insignificant, he could continue enriching himself and his family at the public’s expense.
The president of the United States is, by most psychological standards, criminally insane. Republicans in the Congress though still support him. In a 2019 CPAC speech, he carried on in a rambling, more than two-hour Hitler-like rant—with all the overly affected hand gestures and facial grimaces—against enemies both real and imagined. In the summer of 2019, he vilified newly elected House freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar as Un-American, claiming during his campaign rallies that she hates America, that she is anti-Semitic and hates Israel, and that she should go back to her country of origin. The rally chant then became:
“Send her back!”
It seems now that the president of the United States has—with his constant race-baiting—normalized racism, hate, and xenophobia in America.
Political pundits are now openly speculating that it is entirely likely that if The Bad King loses the coming 2020 election there will be no peaceful transfer of power. Rather, there is a real prospect that he will claim voter fraud, declare the election was rigged, and exhort his angriest supporters—radical right-wing, nativist nationalists, and racist white supremacists, augmented by the Russian foreign agents and provocateurs deployed by Russia—to take to the streets in violent protests, against anti-Bad King demonstrators in cities around the country.
Again in 2019, after both houses of the Congress voted in support of a resolution condemning his declaration of a national emergency to secure funding for a wall on the Southern border, The Bad King in an Oval Office press briefing issued this alarm: “I have tough people, but they don’t play it tough until it gets to a certain point . . . and then it is very bad, and I can tell you, I have the support of the military, the bikers, and the police . . . and we’ll see what happens.”
This was issued as a veiled threat, a call to action intended for his base, inciting his followers to murder and violence, and open rebellion against the system. The president of the United States now has, it seems, a cachet with racist, anti-Semites, and white supremacists world-wide. A terrorist, white-nationalist in New Zealand—who killed 50 people in shooting incidents at two separate mosques—called the U.S. president “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”