Make Russia Great Again by Christopher Buckley

Author:Christopher Buckley [Buckley, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781982157487
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

23

When those of the Cosa Nostra persuasion wish to send a message, it comes in the form of a fish wrapped in newspaper, or a horse head in your bed. (For the record, the latter would qualify as “obviously soiled,” per my Farrago-sur-Mer directive.)

When Oleg Pishinsky wishes to send a message that he’s impatient with the pace with which you’re repealing the law freezing his US assets and banning him from entering the country, it arrives in the form of a video on Facebook. The message showed in high resolution the future president of the United States performing due diligence on a Miss Universe contestant. It went very, very viral.

Fortunately, we now lived—thanks in no small part to Mr. Trump—in the age of fake news, where, as they say in Moscow, “Nothing is real and everything is possible.” Still.

It’s not exaggerating to say that Mr. Trump’s anger was about as volcanic as Mt. Vesuvius, circa AD 79. I was not the only one in the Oval that morning who felt like a resident of unhappy Pompeii as hot ash descended and toxic gases filled the lungs.

After ten or fifteen minutes of violent excoriation, Mr. Trump finally slumped his great shoulders, his voice hoarse from bellowing.

No one wanted to be the first to say something. Doing so risked triggering aftershocks and new issuance of scalding lava. I remained silent, knowing that my abasement would take place in private, after the staff meeting.

Katie—brave, valiant Katie—was the first to speak.

“I just think it’s disgusting that the Democrats would resort to something like this. They probably got their Hollywood friends to help with the CGI.” (That is, computer generated imaging. Katie was boldly asserting that the film shown of Mr. Trump ravishing Miss Sri Lanka was fake.)

I could have kissed her. It was as if fresh oxygen was being pumped into the room. People breathed. Color returned to cheeks.

Picking up her cue, Greta said, “And we’re asking the FBI to look into it.”

“No!” Mr. Trump said. “No FBI! They’ll say it’s real. Which it isn’t.”

“Right,” Greta self-corrected. “Normally we would ask the FBI. But as we learned during the impeachment hoax and the farce Senate trial, the FBI has tried again and again to mount a coup against the president. So—”

“We can no longer rely on the FBI,” Jored said. “And how sad is that?” Jored loved to finish other people’s sentences so their ideas would appear to be his.

Mr. Trump nodded, hunched forward in his chair, his little thumbs tapping a tweet fandango on the keys of his iPhone. I could almost see the words flying up into the ethersphere or whatever it’s called: DISGUSTING! SAD! DESPERATE! DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE, AUTHOR OF THIS HORRIBLE FRAUD, OWES AMERICA AN APOLOGY!!!!

The TV, sound muted, showed the hosts of Fox and Fiends shaking their heads in collective revulsion. The crawl at the bottom of the screen was a conveyor belt:

FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM REFUSE TO REMOVE OFFENSIVE POST… WHITE HOUSE: VIDEO ORIGINATED IN UKRAINE… GIULIANI COMPLAINING OF “WAY

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