You Can't Spell America Without Me

by Alec Baldwin

  THE ACTUAL LEGAL TAKEOVER OF THE GOVERNMENT

  My inauguration, the actual legal takeover of the government with the Bible and then the speech, felt totally fantastic. Everybody watching, everybody listening, not just the two or three million there on the Mall but like a billion people all over America and all over the world, on TV and online—probably on radio in Africa and India—so many watching, so many listening, no laughing, no talking (just me talking), total respect, even the haters terrified into a kind of respect, everyone focused on President Donald J. Trump. It would’ve been perfect if I hadn’t had to read the speech, because reading always brings down my mood, both in public out loud and by myself. But they wouldn’t let me wing it. Still, incredible, amazing, phenomenal.

  But that was, what, seventeen minutes? My Inauguration Day lasted seventeen hours, and I must tell you, most of it was a waste of time and fake. That lunch with all the supposed Washington VIPs and “leaders” in the Capitol Rotunda? Terrible acoustics, acoustics from 1776 or whenever, acoustics that wouldn’t even be allowed in construction today. That event was a great example of why, until I came along, the American people were completely bored by politicians and government. Went on forever, with the president, me, just sitting there listening to other people say all their phony things, so dull—except when I told Hillary to stand and get a round of applause. Although I didn’t mean for everyone else to stand, like an ovation, but fine, whatever, nice moment, presidential, I’m a gentleman, she lost so badly and surprisingly everybody knows she’s permanently humiliated; I didn’t need to rub it in right then.

  One thing I’ve always known is that the great ups in life never last very long. Usually not even a minute, often just a few seconds. It’s “Oh, yeah!”—and then, gone, bye-bye, not happy anymore. It’s true after you put out a great tweet. It’s true after you have that great moment with someone you love. It’s true after you eat a great dessert, like the superb three-layer Trump chocolate cake at the Mar-a-Lago Club. I guess I was lucky to learn this lesson young. In fact, learning it is my earliest memory, and it also involves cake. My third birthday party, fantastic time, leaning over the Carvel cake to blow out the candles, my hair catches on fire. Mom yells “Fred, no” just as Dad pushes my face into the cake to put it out and starts laughing like a maniac, one of the only times I remember him laughing. The other thing I know is that you always remember the downs much, much more clearly and much, much longer than the ups, like each one is one of those video jiffies from Twitter playing over and over and over in your mind, and you can’t delete them.

  Now I’m president. I won. I won. I won. My first morning at the White House. Day One.

  VOICE MEMO: Presidential to-do list

  Song, “I WON / I WON / DAY ONE,” © 2017 by Donald J. Trump.

  Sorry. I’ve been president since yesterday, so I guess this is Day Two. But it’s a Saturday, so we’ll say Monday is Day One. This weekend is the warm-up, like hitting a few balls before you actually tee off. (Funny story: Before we were married, I’d said that as a “figure of speech” many times privately to the First Lady before she was First Lady, when we were alone, in the dark—and then when she heard me use it literally for the first time at a Trump golf course, with other people around, she didn’t understand what I meant and got very embarrassed.) Anyhow, it’s Day One Minus Two of the President Trump Administration, and what do I wake up to? All of the disgusting, dishonest media lying about the size of the crowd at my inauguration, every channel, every so-called expert. It was like bringing a beautiful supermodel home at night: You’re so happy, but then the next morning there’s a rotting corpse in bed. (Another figure of speech. Although that did also actually happen to a friend of mine.)

  Why did I care so much about the totally wrong and fake crowd estimates? I didn’t care for myself, I’m used to that, I’ve had thirty years of that kind of rude treatment by the vicious media. What I really cared about, as Kellyanne explained to me, were the feelings of the millions of people who traveled from all over America and stood for hours to experience the most sacred moment of their lives. I was angry, as Bannon explained to me, on behalf of the forgotten men and women the elite media wanted to keep forgotten, to erase them from the historical record with their Big Lie. Reince said we could maybe create a federal Office of Crowd Size Measurement in the Commerce Department, because they’re already in charge of the atomic clock that controls time. Which, by the way, I’m pretty sure my brilliant MIT engineer uncle, Dr. John Trump, invented.

  IN THE LIMO THIS MORNING on the way out to the CIA, Kellyanne gave me a neck rub, the way Ivanka used to love doing when she was little, and then I felt even better when I delivered a great speech to the staff there. They gave me several amazing standing ovations. If I were the type of guy who cried, I think I would have felt like crying. But then afterward, on the way out, somebody told me CIA headquarters is now officially called the George Bush Center for Intelligence. At first I thought that was some kind of Washington insider joke, but it turns out they mean the old Bush, Grandpa Bush, who it turns out ran the CIA for a year. Which suddenly made me put two and two together and realize why all the intelligence big shots are against me since I destroyed Jeb Bush, knocked him out of the race a week after the first primary even though he spent $150 million against me. I get it now, I thought to myself as we sat down in the limo for the ride back to D.C., it’s why Billy Bush secretly taped me a decade ago. It’s Hillary and Obama and the media and intelligence and the Bushes all in a giant circle jerk, and I’m tied down on the ground in the middle, and it’s disgusting. But when Reince and Kellyanne both looked at me funny, I realized I’d said all that out loud. But I didn’t apologize, or refer to it, just looked straight ahead. Which is Leadership 101.

  BUT WHEN REINCE AND KELLYANNE BOTH LOOKED AT ME FUNNY, I REALIZED I’D SAID ALL THAT OUT LOUD. BUT I DIDN’T APOLOGIZE, OR REFER TO IT, JUST LOOKED STRAIGHT AHEAD. WHICH IS LEADERSHIP 101.

  “You know,” I said, “out here we’re already halfway to Trump National.” That’s my luxurious world-class club in Virginia, two beautiful courses. “We can stop in McLean for Big Macs, Oreo McFlurries, whatever you guys want, on me. Hey, Anthony, Kanye told me McDonald’s is his favorite brand! We grab a bite, then we hit a few balls to work it off.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “What? There’s no snow on the ground. What?”

  “Mr. President,” Kellyanne said, “the media would kill us if you played golf the first day.”

  “What if I played with Anthony? And let them take pictures? It’d be great, special commemoration of Martin Luther King month. You play, Anthony? Maybe caddied when you were young?”

  “I do play, Mr. President, but we aren’t allowed to on duty.”

  “They let you jog with the joggers and bike with the bicyclists but not golf with the golfers? So elitist. Reince, have Jeffy Sessions look into that.”

  “The Secret Service has never been in Justice, Mr. President, and it’s part of Homeland Security now.”

  “I know, of course I know that, but I think it’s very stupid and disorganized and it should be with the FBI. But okay, fine, better, we don’t need to talk to Comey about golfing. Anthony, you know you’re probably lucky you don’t work for Comey at the FBI. Such a loose cannon.”

  As Ivanka discusses important things with her fellow top West Wing aides, I practice my special new Olympus Has Fallen White House Down Code Red Commander in Chief Escape Plan.

  I let Reince try the neck rub, but it didn’t help at all—turns out he’s a pincher, way too fast and nervous and hard. “He’s harming the president,” I said to Anthony. “Stop him.” Everybody chuckled, which didn’t please me. Then the video jiffy of liars on the news shows laughing about my inauguration crowd started playing in my head again. I told Kellyanne that Sean Spicer needed to round up the reporters at the White House—I didn’t care if it was late Saturday
afternoon, none of them do the “Shabbat”—and tell them yesterday’s inauguration crowd was the largest outdoor audience of any kind in the history of America, maybe in the world, and probably visible from the moon. She said, “How about ‘biggest inauguration crowd ever’?” and I okayed that. Trump isn’t unreasonable.

  When I got back to the White House, I didn’t want to watch them lie on CNN, and during the day between Fox & Friends and prime-time, TV is pretty boring, especially on Saturdays, so I used the time to really inspect the place. I don’t want to complain or criticize. It’s the White House. Historic, Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy, Marilyn, et cetera. Ultraexclusive. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but it’s not what I would do, in terms of furnishings, fixtures, and finishes. It’s elegant, but it’s not twenty-first-century superdeluxe. The limestones, the marbles—there’s actually not much stone in the White House, and it’s all white or off-white or gray or black, very bland. The building is 217 years old, which is older than I personally prefer in a residential facility. My personal taste is luxurious and Continental, what Ivanka calls “more Abu Dhabi, less Alabama”—no offense, Jeffy Sessions, you Alabama pixie. I’ve heard people say the White House style is kind of stodgy and somewhat rustic, not very fun, because it’s the kind of house a lot of WASP snobs have, horsey people with the fake English accents whose great-grandfather maybe had a lot of money but now it’s all gone. Although to be fair, on the floor above the ground floor there’s a nice big hallway—double-high ceiling, big columns, good chandeliers, almost Trump.

  My actual private living area in the White House is much, much smaller than I’m used to—20,000 square feet, which I know sounds big, but my penthouse in Trump Tower is 30,000, okay? The entire White House, including all the servant barracks or whatever that I haven’t even seen yet, is half as big as Mar-a-Lago. I’m not even exaggerating. The Oval Office is very special, great branding, iconic. Nice high ceiling. But I literally have bigger bathrooms in my homes. At least they’ve already put up the new gold drapes I picked in the Oval, which look so much more strong and sophisticated than the cheap red ones Obama had in there. Everybody tells me I can’t be the first president to install a TV in the Oval. “Why can’t I?” I said when we first walked in on Friday. “The American people would love me for it. We could hang a pair of small screens, thirty inches, forty inches, either side of the big window there, behind the desk, where those paintings are. TVs are just the better, modern version of paintings, right?” They said maybe later, after the first hundred days.

  For views you’ve got the lawns and the Washington Monument, which are okay, but in Trump Tower you’re next to Central Park, which is about a hundred times as big, with lakes, and we don’t even need to pay a cent for the gardening. And at Mar-a-Lago, exactly the same size grounds as the White House but you’ve got views of both the mar, which is the Spanish for “ocean,” and the lago, which means “Intracoastal Waterway.”

  CALL ME SENTIMENTAL, BUT IT MAKES ME SAD THAT I’LL NEVER OWN THE WHITE HOUSE.

  I already know the White House will never really feel like home. Not because it’s temporary, but because I don’t own it. The Southern White House, Mar-a-Lago, I own. I own Trump Tower. The people who work at my homes work for me, not for the government. I could tear down Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago if I wanted, I could fire anyone on the staffs for no reason at all, and they’d be out on their ass, not just transferred to a new job in some government cafeteria somewhere. (At least I have my old friend Keith right next to me, my bodyguard for twenty years, ex-NYPD detective, now director of Oval Office operations, which means he’s with me forty hours a week but off my personal payroll, so win-win.) Call me sentimental, but it makes me sad that I’ll never own the White House. I’ve been told that my sons Donald Junior and Eric, who now operate our company independently, offered to pay $430 million in cash for the entire White House complex. It would be an unofficial property in the award-winning Trump Hotel Collection™, with the East Wing refitted for four or eight years as a members-only White House Club, and the White House and West Wing practically donated to the government for four or eight years with a buyback option at the end. All of which was not my sons’ idea originally, by the way, although they realize it’s brilliant. We—by that I mean The Trump Organization, which I do not currently control at all—had an amazing guy in Kyrgyzstan, great country, totally ready to make the purchase loan, but the deal was too sophisticated for the government lawyers and bean counters to understand. In fact, it was their obsolete approach on that amazing opportunity that made me agree that we should create the White House Office of American Innovation, run by Jared Kushner, my young, innovative, et cetera, son-in-law.

  Not that Don Junior and Eric and The Trump Organization need the White House, because I’ve heard they’re now doing a major hotel expansion all over America, and although I don’t know any of the details whatsoever or the local regulatory or loan situations or anything like that, people are saying that one of the hotel deals they’re doing is in Valley Forge, which would be so perfect, so special—Washington slept here then, Trump sleeps here now, the one who made America, the one who made America great again, et cetera. The ads would write themselves.

  I NEED A TV IN THE OVAL

  Reince reminds me of the nice kid in high school who manages the sports team but the players never hang out with. He actually trots around the White House, runs down the halls, I guess to make it look like he’s dealing with important emergency situations as my chief of staff. Somewhat cute, somewhat sad. “With Reince around,” Bannon says, “you really don’t need a dog here.” Yesterday when Steve and Kellyanne and I walked out of the Oval, Reince suddenly popped out of one of the boardrooms and ran up right behind us. Steve barked like a dog and said, “See Reince run! Run, Reince, run!” and we all cracked up.

  By the way? No dogs in the Trump White House. The breath, the drool, the funguses, the parasites, the disease, the feces, the claws, the barking. Never. I haven’t touched a live animal since I was eleven years old. For me it’s what they call a core principle.

  Anyway, this morning, on Day . . . one-two-three-four, Day Four of my administration, at 8-something, almost 9—I know the time because I’d just switched from Fox & Friends during the final ad break to Morning Joe—Reince ran into the little private “dining room” next to the Oval Office, which has a television, tiny, unbelievably small, but at least it means I don’t have to go all the way upstairs to watch. Ordered a 65-inch this morning, also getting a big, big, big crystal chandelier. A president needs a TV in the Oval, he really does.

  Multitasking in the Oval Office: watching fantastic Steve Doocy and the other guy and the blonde on Fox & Friends while my aides and “experts” brief me.

  “Mr. President,” Reince said, “one of . . . those calls just came into the switchboard.”

  On the first Sunday, the president of Belarus had tried to call me directly at the White House but didn’t go through the State Department, so the operator refused to put him through. Very bad. Belarus is actually an important little nation, which most people don’t know, right between Germany and Russia, now independent, very independent, strategic. Bigger than England. According to Mike Flynn, who knows Mr. Lukashenko, he felt very disrespected. So I told Reince: Always let me know whenever a call like that comes through.

  “Who is it? Presidente Piñata calling back to say he’s coming after all?” Jared arranged to bring the Mexican president up to talk about the Wall he’s paying for, but he just canceled. It reminds me of what a lot of people in the construction and hospitality industries say about workers of certain backgrounds who call in at the last minute and say “Sorry, boss, mañana.” (By the way, Piñata is actually the president’s name, so I’m not being “racist.”)

  “No,” Reince told me, “it’s a guy who is supposedly Kim Jong-un and his translator from the UN. The call did originate on the Korean peninsula, translator on a
second line in New York, but the duty officer in the Situation Room thinks it’s almost certainly not the Supreme Leader of North Korea.”

  “‘Almost certainly,’ huh?” It was Presidential Decision Time. This could be my chance for the most important peace deal ever: Trump saves the world on Day Four. “I was ‘almost certainly’ gonna lose to Hillary, remember? Put him through! But go get Steve, I want a grown-up in here.”

  I’ve done business with the Koreans, and right away I really thought I was hitting it off with the guy. Warmed him up at first, told him getting rid of his uncle, brother, and some of the disloyal generals—boom—that was very smart, very necessary, showed everybody he was boss. I said it’s great he’s young, at his age I built my first hotel and started Trump Tower, and I also told him my first movie star crush as a kid was a Kim—Kim Novak. Then I turned a little tough. “None of us want the nuclear, right, Kim, Mr. Kim, Supreme Leader?” I said. And he agreed. “You’ve got, what, twenty nukes?” I asked. “And can shoot one all the way to Japan, maybe, on a good day? And I’ve got like six thousand—” Bannon held up four fingers. “Four thousand warheads, the finest missiles, all aimed at you if I want—kaboom, sayonara! Not that I do want that. At all. So let’s talk, let’s figure out what makes us both happy campers.”