The White House. The home of the President of the United
States. The heart of the world. And I was travelling through the countries veins like the broken tip of a dirty needle.
That morning I drive from Baltimore to Washington, eating a bag of candy I got from a gas station. After an hour I realise I have eaten a full bag of edibles, the cannabis concentrate coursing through my blood, making me panic and vomit as I drive the car wildly down the highway. It was funny to me that they had decriminalised a drug that was a thousand times worse than LSD or mushrooms when taken at high doses. As I laugh, I crash into a truck, accelerate the car faster, swerving onto an off-ramp, across grass, driving at 150 miles per hour into the city of Washington. The streets whizz past, cars honk, I ram through a crate filled with watermelons, onto the sidewalk and through the front window of a bakery that specialises in wedding cakes you could rent. I stagger from the car, blood pouring down my face and violently vomit a black liquid on the broken glass and pieces of cake that are scattered on the floor.
“Don’t worry, this is performance art. I’m actually-“ I begin, before dry heaving again. The person behind the counter is filming everything on two phones they held in each hand, uploaded onto a special multi-angle social video platform called BwOzling. I leave the destruction behind, desperate for a glass of lemonade. A delicious glass of ice-cold lemonade with a slice of lemon in it, that is the cure for any drug overdose. Instead I collapse on the street and wake up later in a dumpster.
Concussion, blood loss, a fractured eye socket, a ripped fingernail. I had been mugged whilst unconscious, they had even taken my shoes. I crawl out from the nest of trash, lap water from a puddle and try to compose myself. I had a meeting with the President lined up. Staggering from the alley, I see crime scene tape across the smashed-up bakery. My rental was gone, all my luggage would be sitting in some police evidence locker until the end of the world. As I walk barefoot down the street, I try looking for a payphone, a bar where I could make a call, something. Instead the road is deserted. I catch a reflection in a window, confused at the spectre that matched my movements before realising it was me. I didn’t have time to get money wired to me, buy new clothes, I couldn’t even call the President and let him know I was going to be late. It began to rain.
By the time I arrived at the White House, most of the blood and vomit and dumpster juice had washed away. The guard at the gate questioned my lack of shoes, but I convinced him it was a lifestyle choice.
“It’s actually better for you not to wear shoes.” I explained as he moved a magnetic wand over me. We got in a little golf cart and drove up to the White House front door.
Donald Joseph Trump. The 45th and 47th President. Billionaire. Social media personality. Comedian. Predator. He was all these things and more. The guard had given me a MAGA hat that I wore backwards, flipping a peace sign as we arrived.
“You’re late.”
“Hello Mr. President. Is your name Donald President or what? Heh.” I say, going to shake his hand. He looked at it and shook his head.
“Follow me.” He said, and so we entered the hallowed grounds of America’s political brain nexus.
As we walk the sacred halls, I start to think of other Presidents doing the same thing, plodding down the corridors of power, saving the world with their hearts and brains. Eisenhower. Obama. And the rest.
“Who’s your favourite President?”
“Besides me? That would have to be George Washington.”
“Ah yes, the rapping slave owner in Hamilton. Me, I’m more of a Zachary Taylor guy.”
We enter the Oval Office, although its name is slightly misleading. It is actually a Octacontagon, an eighty sided two dimensional polygon, although that only accounts for the floorspace. As it happened the office was in fact the volume between the Octacontagonal floor and ceiling, and the negative space formed by the walls and features between was actually an inverse polytope simplex. I explained all this to Trump and that he should rename his office to be more descriptive, which also brought me to define the particular colour of the White House (spoiler alert, it’s not White), but he waved his hand in front of my face to shush me. We sat down.
“Do you have a cigarette?” I ask him.
“Don’t smoke. Never smoked.”
“Really? If this was my office I’d be smoking all the time. You should get some ashtrays in here, maybe a cigarette machine in the corner. You could price it yourself, generate some extra revenue, you know?” I explain. He nods. Now we were speaking his lingo.
“When you phoned me I was thinking to myself, wow. This guy knows what he’s talking about. And it’d be a shame, one of the worst shames of this country’s history, that we wouldn’t have time to talk.” He said. I nodded. I had posed as a British diplomat sent over to discuss a trade deal for various English products, such as football or cheese that tasted of something, but the elaborate ruse was just to get me through the door.
“Mr. President, I’m not here to discuss exports of artisan dairy products. I’m here to ask you about the fall of the American Empire.” I say. Trump looks taken aback.
“Huh?”
“The reason why I’m in this shit hole is that I’m charting its demise. Just as one might hop in a time machine and watch the collapse of the Roman Empire, I actually flew here to watch this one, as its happening right now.”
“No, no, no, America isn’t falling. Its getting stronger every day.” He says, his body tensing up. I shake my head.
“Yeah, yeah, look. Power is passed like a baton throughout history. It was our shared colonial past, the Boston Tea Party, the military-industrial complex formed during World War 2, that shifted power from the British Empire to the American one. Who do you think will be next to seize the power of world domination?” I ask. He shakes his head again, holds his mouth open. There’s a row of perfectly straight fake teeth on his bottom jaw that I always focus on when I see him have that expression. Disdain.
“Get out of here. You’re being rude. I’ve never in all my life met someone as rude as you.” He says.
“Donald. Bubby. All these people you surround yourself with just want to lick your asshole. Now do you want a proper conversation like two men or are you going to go crying to your mommy because I’m being mean?” I say in a high-pitched New York accent. His body relaxes. This was the kind of stuff he was used to. He even cracks a smile.
“C’mon then. Let’s shoot the shit.” He says, ringing a little bell. A servant arrives with a plate of steaming hot McDonald’s. And so we begin our conversation, a modern day Frost v Nixon, or an episode of West Wing without the fawning sentimentality.
ME: You’re a decisive figure in politics. I don’t think you’re the cause of America’s downfall, but rather a symptom of a wider malaise that has taken over this country for the last forty years. Do you think America is dying?
TRUMP: That’s why I say, Make America Great Again. We were once a great, a very great and very powerful country, the most powerful country the world has ever seen. Its thanks to Biden, Sleepy Joe we call him, Sleepy Joe ruined this country and I’ll never forgive him for it.
M: What you’re saying is, you inherited dogshit?
T: You’re right, absolutely right, this country was turning into dogshit in front of our very eyes. That’s why I’m bringing jobs back. You get a job, you get money, right? You can buy a house, have a family, you can buy a few acres, anything you want. That’s the American dream.
M: Some people say, it’s too late. By focusing all the wealth into the hands of a few billionaires, you’ve actually taken money from the workers and directed it to the bosses.
T: No, no, no, that’s not right. What I’m doing-
M: Shut the fuck up for a second. You don’t need to get me to vote for you. Tell me the truth. This country’s circling the drain and you’re trying to slurp up the last bits of it.
T: Look. Let me be straight with you. People ask me, they say, Mr. President. Are you still a businessman? You were so good at business, will you ever go back to it? You know, it makes me laugh. I never stopped being a businessman. I was very successful, I still am very successful. My business is being President of America.
M: To you, this country is a business?
T: Yeah. It’s a franchise. We got businesses all over the world. You can walk a mile in any country, look at the floor, you’ll find a can of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola. Its fun to say isn’t it? Co-ca co-la. Anywhere you go, people will speak to you in English. We should rename that actually. If you’re born in America and learn the language, what is it? You’re speaking American. People all over the world speak American, they buy American, they want to be American. The greatest country in the world.
M: Which is more important, the concept of America or the reality of America?
T: Both are connected. How can you have one without the other? If you look at Saussure’s bilateral sign model, every object has two sides. Two, wonderful signs, can you believe it? The signifier and the signified. Take this burger for instance. Its delicious, its tasty, it’s a McDonald’s. It means all of that, but the burger is not that, but it is that, right?
M: But we aren’t talking about a burger, we’re talking about a country. America refers to the ground and the rocks and the lakes and the cities that are within the countries borders, but this collection of objects isn’t America. The interconnected forms define a country, not the other way round. America is a non-existent object.
T: You’re confusing signifier with signified. Very sad. If I say to you ‘America’, then we both know we are talking about this country. The nature of language relies on our shared understanding of words and what they represent. A word can relate to an abstract idea or even a metaphysical thing which may or may not exist, but its our shared understanding that means we can communicate about them or think about them, you can do all sorts of things once you know what a thing is called.
M: For you there is no separation between the object and the concept?
T: How is that possible? A concept can refer to an object that might not exist, but there isn’t an object that exists that has no concept, or what it signifies, attached to it. The idea and reality of America are inseparable. So if you ask me which is more important, that is like asking me which side of a coin is more important. You cannot have one without the other.
M: But aren’t you falling into a linguistic trap of assuming that our ideas about America will be the same? It is likely we have wildly different ideas of what America means to us, as regardless of how close an object is defined through language, it isn’t the actual thing.
T: It doesn’t matter if it is the actual thing or not, that is how we understand the world around us. Sure, America might have different meanings, or what I see as blue you might see as red. So what? We are inherently bound to an anthropocentric view of the world as we are human. You can’t escape that. We’ll never truly know what somebody else is thinking as we will always translate what they say or how they act through our own lens of understanding.
M: I disagree. I think we can gain a better understanding of the inner world of another person through things like conversation, arts, culture. We will never be exactly right, but its worth trying.
T: Well that’s up to you buddy. I perceive our existence as shared but ultimately alone. You’ll never be able to really touch another person, you know? We have a shell of atoms that cover our bodies. We never touch anything. We are lighthouses on an endless sea, able to see one another, but never meet.
M: Maybe. But if there was a chance you could get nearer,
even just a little bit, wouldn’t you try? If you truly believe that, would you
be here, talking with me?
Trump goes quiet for a while, turning away from me. It has stopped raining and there is quiet in the Octacontagonal Office. When he turns round, I can see he’s been crying.
“You really think America is going to die?” he says.
“It’s dead, Donny. The head has been cut off. What’s left are the last trembling movements of its limbs, its organs are shutting down, the ghost is leaving the body. It’s over.” I say. My nose begins to bleed. I stand up, going to the door, though the President calls behind me.
“It’s not over yet. Tell me how I can save it. I need to save America.” He says, over and over, fading into the distance as I stalk away. I leave the White House, never to be seen again. At the White House anyway. Overhead the moon is a yellow crescent. My bare feet walk on the wet grass and I become clean.
