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The Last Trump
(A Farce Of Politics)
Contents:
Act I
Act II
Act III
Connect with S.A. Barton
By S.A. Barton
Copyright 2015 S.A. Barton
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
1 Corinthians 15:26
King James Bible
The candidate, after looking back, forth, back to ensure no cameras were pointed in his direction (here, there never were, but he always looked even so), fidgeted. With a sterling fork he pushed an uneaten bite of his midnight snack around the plate. The plate was plain white, catering standard. He frowned at it. Too plain. With a jerk of his fingers, he shoved the blob of lobster he'd been torturing over. Fat black caviar grains and an autumnal cascade of gold flake spilled from the top. He set the fork down on the table, click, and crushed a salty fish egg into a smear of oil with a fingertip, which he licked.
“She should have seceded by now,” he misspoke. Nobody corrected him. “She's a loser, a weak baby loser feee-male. Should have given up the second I was nominated. Ha. Ha.” His head glided side to side like the eye of an old-school Cylon, sweeping the campaign war room full of red eyes, half-unknotted ties, crumpled napkins, and five o'clock shadow. Where his gaze fell, heads nodded, lips smiled, throats pushed up a boil of plastic laughs.
He went back to torturing the lobster bite. His team went back to paying attention to the bank of televisions on the far wall, each displaying a different news channel. At the front of the room, a couple of interns clicked mice, refreshing news sites over and over. Trump's fork clicked his plate. Click. The interns clicked mice. Click-click---clickclick. Somewhere a toe tapped a scuffed vibram sole on the leg of a folding table. Tap, tap. A round generic clock high up on the wall counted seconds. Tick-tick-tick. Time passed.
“CNN!” one of the mouseclicking interns shouted, and the clicking-tapping-ticking disappeared. Someone cranked the volume on the CNN TV.
“...again, calling California for Donald Trump, who we project will be the 45th President of the United States of America...”
Whoops and applause drowned out the audio. Smiling, nodding, not speaking, knowing he couldn't be heard over the celebration, Trump retreated to his quiet room, a refurbished walk-in supply closet. He flicked the lights-fan switch, closed the heavy steel door, ignored the overstuffed chair and facepalmed.
“You've got to be fucking kidding me,” he mumbled. Fished in his pocket, pulled out a bottle of tumeric capsules, cracked one open on the table. He made a thin yellowy-brown line of it on the little laptop table beside the chair with a black AmEx and tooted it in one fell snort through a rolled Benjamin. “Whuhh,” he said, shaking his head as the—for him—drug opened his eyes and detached his reality from the world just enough for him to set his shaken persona firmly back in place.
“The show must go on,” he mouthed to himself, and opened the door. The cheers had died down to backslaps and energized chatter. On CNN a pair of announcers, now ignored, were finding out how many different ways they could re-hash “Trump won.”
“What did I tell you? I'm YUUGE! President Trump! America! Did someone order the letters? I want my name right dead up the middle of the Washington Monument the second I get my hands on a pen. Gold! With lights! Rename it. George Washington is old news, I like my monuments to be about TODAY'S President. I got some executive orders to write, starting with that one. Maybe the second one will be that wall around Mexico I promised. Trump keeps his promises! But first—I promised everyone champagne, who's got the bubbles?”
After making the rounds for a couple of hours shaking hands, knowing the party, once started, would persist on its own inertia until the sun was well and truly up on Trump's USA, Trump chose his moment and retreated to his quiet room again. He bolted it, dimmed the lights, loosened his tie, kicked off his shoes, and reclined in the baby-soft leather recliner.
“What a bunch of idiots there are on this podunk rock,” he said to the ceiling, closed his eyes, and was asleep in seconds.
#
“Election night 2020... never thought it would come to this,” Trump said behind his hand, not realizing he'd spoken aloud until the aides on either side of him turned their heads a notch, caught themselves, and swiveled their heads back to look as far from him as possible.
He'd been slipping out of character more often in the last year. The White House chef had asked him after New Years' just what on earth one man could be doing with half a pound of powdered tumeric a week. “Mind your goddamn business and don't run out,” Trump had snapped, and the chef had looked at him... looked at him...
...like his supporters looked at him at rallies. Wide eyes. Half-open mouth. High color on the cheeks—the chef's of puzzlement and embarrassment, the supporters of excitement, the smell of blood. How they'd looked at him after Tehran, after the bombing run, long-range stealth bombers in the night raining bunker busters and incendiaries on the head of their Supreme Leader and President. Gnashing teeth, howling mouths, demanding the same for Mexico City who still hadn't coughed up a single thin peso for the tall cinderblock and razor wire wall that stretched from Gulf to Pacific or for the maintenance of the army divisions patrolling it.
Nobody on the right had dared to challenge his nomination for a second term except for a handful of real far-outers, flat-earth-conspiracy-theorists and fluoride-chemtrail-Illuminatists and people who thought Ayn Rand was a bleeding heart leftist lib. Out of that handful, three had been found dead, two in rivers tied to heavy objects and one in a swampy ditch with a skunk stuffed down his pants and the pants held shut with zip ties.
The skunk would have gotten out if the paranoid hadn't been in the habit of wearing kevlar clothes. The left—the Democrats floated a throwaway candidate, angling for 2024, if it came. And the rest of that wing, well, after Bernie nobody quite had the heart to give it a real try again. At least his followers kept the hate verbal to that side of the political fence; old habits die hard; the worst violence usually comes from inside the house. Nobody on the left had their nether regions clawed off by a skunk, thank goodness.
The non-emergency secure line rang. Trump nodded at the aide on his right, who got up and answered.
“Comedy Central is calling it,” the aide said after listening for a moment.
“Yeah? Sun's not even down. Not surprised, not with the polls,” Trump said, voice flat and slow. Because of that flatness, rumors had been going around for months: the President is fighting chronic fatigue, maybe it's cancer and it's being kept secret, Trump's old and pushing too hard, not delegating enough. The rumors hadn't scared off any votes.
“Sixty-three percent of the popular vote, they're projecting. Bigger even than FDR and LBJ. Biggest win in the history of the country, sir,” the aide said, awe creeping into her voice.
Trump was dead tired of awe. “Thanks, Ysabel,” he said. “Why don't you two hand off and go downstairs, grab a bite? I'll call down to the chef, tell him to give you my surf and turf.”
“You okay, Mister President?” Ysabel asked, hesitating.
“Just not hungry. Tired. Knew this would happen anyway, it's no surprise. Gonna get a full night if I can, have to be up for the cameras tomorrow. You know. Night,” he said, and turned his back, lock
ed himself in his private bedroom, crawled into bed shoes and all.
“Don't know what the hell I'm going to do now,” he whispered to the ceiling, and closed his eyes.
#
But in the cold, glassy sunlight filtering through wispy gray drizzle clouds on Inauguration Day, he knew. Moments before stepping out on the stage, standing head bowed behind heavy navy curtains blazoned with the eagle of the Seal, he knew. A moment later, his cue, and he stepped out into sudden applause. The applause died quickly, leaving behind a confused coda of isolated claps, then a hush.
He shuffled. His back was bent. He looked old. Intricate combover abandoned limp on one shoulder like a dying cotton candy stole, shiny pink skullcap skin stretched tight to the chilly gusty wind, he shuffled. Old.
Election night, he'd been twenty years younger. And he'd been old and dark-baggy-eyed then.
“Is the President going to die?” a little girl in the front row asked her mommy, loud, into the silence. Mommy shushed her. The news cameras zeroed in, producers hissed did we get it? Did we get it? Into earbuds. But it didn't make the news. Trump took the podium and the crowd tensed so viewers at home could feel it in their bones. Waiting for him to stumble on the step behind the high podium, fall, break a hip, end the term before it was begun. But he stepped up. Bent the mike. Leaned his head in. Pursed lips. Brushed rotten cotton candy hair off his shoulder into the wind's cold. Spoke.
“THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?” he thundered, back straightening, shoulders broadening, wrinkles filling in, years falling off, eyes raking the crowd. The crowd recoiled, a step back, stomping toes and bumping shoulders, catching balance, milling in shock like ducks frozen in the bellow of a hunting dog.
Blazing copper hair like Trump had never had spilled out of his scalp like Play-doh out of a Fun Factory, defying the wind to lay itself in a defiant sweep. His wrinkles filled in flat and vanished. The bags under his eyes sucked up and smoothed over. Muscle swelled the arms and shoulders of his jacket. His gut sucked in and stayed sucked.
Like plucking a daisy, Trump plucked the microphone from its stand and ripped it from its wood mount, the cable tearing the wood open in an abrupt line down the front of the podium like a root ripped out of clay soil by the lever of a falling tree. His other hand, of its own accord, popped a tiny rhizome of raw tumeric into his mouth and he chewed it in jagged crimson teeth. His eyes lit baleful blue, the color of the hidden sky.
“Go, they said,” Trump said to the crowd as it surged and stamped like a half-panicked beast, its million heads locked to the stage unwilling, captured on the tether of his amplified voice. “Go and see what they are. And I went. I went. I went among the rubes forty years, stepped into the shoes of this gilded Narcissus and played carnival barker to you until—I thought it could never happen and you proved me wrong—you made me your leader. You cheered as I spit on your institutions. Ruled by fiat, ignored your rules, declared wars, bombed the brothers you called others, played your prejudices and emotions, watched you tear down opposition by force and declaration, watched those who knew better fall quiet and cringe back and the few who dared stand torn down by your hands without a word of encouragement from my lips.”
“Mommy? What's the President?” the little girl asked mommy, but nobody heard. Nobody but Trump, growing taller, ears unfurling and spreading wide, sliding higher on his head. Sudden claws bit bright lines into the microphone in his hand.
“They've learned, I said. They've passed through their crisis in the last century. But over the last four years, even on the lands most ravaged by that crisis, the other-hate has risen yet higher, emboldened. By me. By you. Still ready to hate your other-brothers, back and forth, both sides of your politics, all the multitudinous sides, fighting, slouching into violence.”
He stepped to the edge of the stage. The microphone finally gave up with a low wail of feedback; crumpled in his inky claws it fell to the stage decapitated. The little girl, mommy now fled, stood in a half-circle of trampled sod. The crowd behind her compressed backward, wide eyes flashing white fear, gazes still held. Broad silky wings, gold and copper, unfolded and shredded Trump's jacket. The slabs of his chest and abdomen, covered in copper velvet with the nap of the short dense fur of a cat's nose, heaved in deep breaths. Trump knelt at the edge of the timbers, down, down, chest laid almost on his knees, wings thrust upward like blooming flowers.
“Little girl, you know the truth. You are afraid, yes?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. Her knees quivered slightly, but she held her spine straight and her eyes full open.
“Bravery is doing right in the face of fear. It is seeing what is truly there when fear tells you to see threat. It is seeing threat only where threat is real.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
Trump spread his wings and leapt. In moments, the clouds swallowed him. The frantic milling of the crowd stilled and the people began to pull deep breaths and blink, as if waking. Only the claw-torn shreds of his shoes fell back, scattered wide by the twisting wind.
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