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Epub ISBN: 9781473554504

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Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,

20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

Ebury Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Copyright © Lucien Young 2017
Cover illustration by Ollie Mann
Cover designed by Two Associates

Lucien Young has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Ebury Press in 2017

Edited by Anna Mrowiec

www.eburypublishing.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781785037863

CONTENTS

STAVE I

Nixon’s Ghost

Trump was president: of that there could be no doubt. President of the United States, no less! And not just any United States — the United States of America! Read it again, for familiarity can dull even the strangest of facts: Trump was president. If I awoke tomorrow to find a face growing out of my abdomen, which then introduced itself as Mr Lionel Caruthers, I daresay I might eventually come to accept his friends stooping before me and bellowing: ‘Yo, Lionel, whassup?!’ That said, I do not think I shall ever be free of a shuddering disbelief when reading any article that deploys the words ‘President Trump’. Such incredulity notwithstanding, the fact remains that an election had been called and Trump had won.

Mind! I do not mean to say that he won in the sense of securing the greatest number of votes.

No, Trump had failed to achieve a majority of popular support, losing by a margin of some three million. Myself, I might have deemed this an insuperable obstacle to victory, but the framers of the U.S. constitution thought otherwise, and who am I to doubt the wisdom of those syphilitic slave-owners? The ballots had been cast, the arms of the voting machines tugged, and the chads left to hang. As that grim night had unfolded, the electoral college had proved as worthless an educational establishment as Trump University. The preening orange monster was elevated and his opponent — that pantsuit-wearing elitist! — laid low. Through his fame and fortune, and possibly a little help from an army of Russian hackers, he had — more or less fairly — been elected. To the venerable roster that bore the names George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the name of Ebenezer Trump was now irrevocably added.

Trump! The implausibly coiffed game-show host! The butt of easy jokes on late night television! The remorseless braggart, the deplorable racist, the inveterate and self-confessed grabber of pussy! This was the man who now commanded the world’s last superpower, the man whose stubby forefinger hovered over the nuclear button. Dear reader, at the risk of sounding like a broken record (or, to be more modern, a faulty MP3), I must repeat: Trump was president. This was the case when he was inaugurated — twentieth of January, year of our Lord two thousand and seventeen — and it was still the case on the twenty-fourth of December, the date our story takes place.

Christmas Eve, and the town of Washington D.C. was beset with a cruel and unyielding winter. Did it snow? My friend, there was snow in abundance: a surfeit of snow, an excess of snow, a great, greedy glut of snow! Snow fell on the Capitol Building, which was empty, for the senators and congressmen had each gone home to at least one of their families. Snow blanketed the National Mall, where previously some two billion souls had gathered to watch Trump’s swearing in (that was, according to Trump). Snow settled on the brows of the shivering homeless, who merited no discussion in the corridors of power, for they could not afford to hire lobbyists. And amid all this whirling whiteness stood the White House, in whose Oval Office sat President Trump. Old Trump took no notice of the winter waltz being conducted outside; men of his sort have no time for snowflakes. Anyway, he was occupied with a matter far weightier than Yuletide precipitation. The president, as you may have guessed, was tweeting.

No sooner had he pressed ‘send’ than his mentions were flooded with a thousand eager voices. Yes, there were the usual cries of ‘LIAR!’ and ‘RESIGN!’, but also a great deal of approbation — mostly from Moldovan robots and teenagers whose profile picture was a frog. This was all the same to Trump, for he did not care what kind of response he got, so long as it was huge. Magnitude was the only thing Trump valued. Indeed, the word ‘huge’ was insufficiently huge for him, and so he built several storeys upon the adjective, elongating it to ‘yoooooooooooge’. Soon Trump felt the itch of self-expression once more. He did not necessarily have anything to say, but he would be damned if that stopped him.

It was a spirited effort, though perhaps not up there with his finest (recent successes had included ‘Nobody in the history of the universe has been treated more unfairly than Trump’ and ‘Penguins. Gay? We have a right to know’). Nonetheless, he seemed satisfied, leaning back in his chair and placing his feet upon the desk where JFK once sat.

But, oh, he was a wretched specimen of greed, was Trump! A grasping, clutching, conniving, bellicose, venal, vile, insensible old sinner! In him, nature had combined the body of a seventy-one-year-old with the mind of a toddler, misplacing in the process that innocence and joy one might have expected of the latter party. Trump’s genius was to make the ludicrous lucrative, and thus he sold himself. For ludicrous he was: a gaudy, grandiloquent clown of a man! His hair was incredible, in the sense that no sane person would credit it: a helmet of hardened candy floss, drawn across his scalp in contravention of Nature’s will; the corpse of an abandoned poodle; a strenuously engineered monument to vanity!

His face, curdled long ago into an expression of pugnacious stupidity, was a shade of bronze not to be found anywhere else on his milk-white physique. Indeed, it was as if he were a latter-day Achilles, whose mother, dipping her infant into a Styx of fake-tan, had not bothered to proceed beyond the neckline. His constant squint and puckered mouth seemed an attempt to shut out the world, to guard against any light or goodness that might have entered therein. Oh, how he scrunched himself up, like an ancient child, forever trapped in his initial tantrum!

Moving down, one found a pair of tiny, twitching hands, which yearned to defy their limited dimensions by grabbing anything and everything that life had to offer. I shall not speculate as to the dimensions of any other appendage, but suffice it to say that Trump wore a long, blood-red tie, which hung between his legs, and grazed the floor in a manner that might have caused Dr Freud to choke on his cigar.

Alas this clownish anatomy was but an overture to the interminable opera of his deficiencies! However deranged his appearance, Trump’s personality surpassed it quite. His heart was as cold as the wind outside, and his words as false as his hair. Did Trump lie? My good fellow, to call Trump a liar would be to call Mike Tyson a bloke who could hold his own in a fight. He was the Mozart of mendacity and the Hogarth of hogwash; the Shakespeare of slander and the Liberace of libel; the Fibonacci of fibs and the Picasso of the porky pie. Lies escaped his lips like convicts from a sundered jail. He would tell you that up was down and black was white; that every Muslim was a terrorist and every Mexican a rapist; that the sun set in the East and that Trump steaks were edible. Most frequently of all, he would tell you that he was the smartest, the strongest, the richest, the classiest, and the most beloved of anyone, anywhere. So confident was Trump in his contradictions, so bullish in his bullshit, that it was an enduring mystery whether he himself believed the nonsense he spouted.