Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why

by Alexandra Petri

  You are alone, at peace, with no eyes to see you but your own, and they will not disturb you again.

  And, of course, your family is there, too.

  December 8, 2017

  The Day Donald Trump First Became a Stable Genius

  Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star . . . to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius . . . and a very stable genius at that!

  —PRESIDENT TRUMP

  WHEN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE VOTED unanimously to declare Donald Trump a genius (this is what it means to be elected president on your first try), at first, he did not feel any different.

  The shape of his thoughts in his head felt roughly the same, and when the sentences formed they did not appear to weigh any more than they had weighed before.

  He was sitting in Trump Tower idly looking over at the bookcase when he suddenly noticed that some of the words on it were not “TRUMP.” He did not remember having noticed that before. Curious, he stepped closer and began to read. One of the books was in German. He loved reading German, he discovered. He loved reading, full stop.

  He read all the books, ravenously, so quickly he could scarcely believe it. By 4:00 a.m. he had read everything there was to read in Trump Tower (in fairness, there was not much to read in Trump Tower) and had to call out for more books. Encyclopedias. Histories. Memoirs.

  He read them all until his eyes watered and his head ached.

  Before, he had felt vaguely confident that if he ever sat down and thought about it, he would probably be able to grasp the concept of special relativity. Now, finally, he sat down and thought about it. He did not immediately grasp it, which surprised him, until he realized that he had to learn the mathematics in which it was grounded first.

  By lunch he had it figured out.

  He built several ant farms, each with a different model of government, to see which would run the most efficiently. He learned the word “syzygy.” He read Ulysses and the entire critical apparatus.

  “Did you know,” he said to Ivanka, when she joined him for lunch, “that the heartbeat of a mouse is 650 beats per minute?”

  “No,” she said.

  “That must be so fast,” he went on. “Like a buzz, almost.”

  “Yeah,” Ivanka said, looking a little worried.

  No one around him noticed the change immediately.

  His team came in and said that he had lots of great ideas and the best brain, but then one of them tried to distract him with what was clearly a maze for a child.

  “You have a lot of letters praising your performance yesterday,” someone said.

  He looked at what she was handing him.

  “Those aren’t letters,” he said, faintly. “Those are—you just printed out some stuff from the website for Fox & Friends.”

  Everyone exchanged a concerned glance, which he picked up on, and he quickly found an excuse to leave the room.

  Had the people around him always been so . . . distinctly underwhelming? Trump wondered. He went to the window and looked down. There were several protesters with signs that contained obvious solecisms. This was a word he understood now.

  At least he had Steve Bannon, who was definitely an intellectual. Or he always looked rumpled, which seemed like much the same thing.

  “Send in Steve,” he said.

  Bannon came in, and Trump was excited to finally be sitting there, head to head, with a fellow genius.

  But when Bannon opened his mouth, none of the things that came out made any sense.

  “Steve,” Trump said, “talk like you usually talk.”

  “I am,” Bannon said.

  Trump blinked repeatedly. “No,” he said. “Usually you sound smart, and now you sound like someone dumped out the contents of some rejected Wikipedia pages onto the floor at random. Speak like Thomas Cromwell, although, ha ha, before the beheading.”

  “Thomas Cromwell was beheaded?” Bannon asked.

  Trump blinked levelly at him, and soon Bannon thought up a reason to go away.

  Trump looked over his speeches again.

  “Have they always been so . . . racist?” he asked, quietly.

  “What?” Stephen Miller said.

  Jared Kushner pushed the door open.

  “I am going to solve the conflict in the Middle East,” he said.

  Trump sighed loudly.

  He called for a hot towel and put it on his forehead and went to bed early.

  The next morning was distinctly unpleasant. An aide came in and turned on his shows, as usual.

  A few minutes in, he became agitated. “What is this?” he kept saying. “This is for imbeciles. Why have you taken away the intellectually stimulating show I usually watch and replaced it with this?”

  “You love this show,” Hope Hicks said reassuringly. “You watch it every day.”

  “I can’t possibly watch this every day,” Trump said. “This is tripe. Also, why does everyone keep sending me steaks that are cooked to the consistency of vulcanized rubber? Only an idiot would order steak cooked that way.”

  No one made eye contact with him, but that night, for what they claimed was no particular reason, his entire family showed up.

  “Ha,” Trump said, “look, it’s a community production of The Lion in Winter.” He laughed long and hard. Don Jr. laughed immediately and Eric did not laugh at all. Ivanka and Jared looked nervous and exchanged a glance.

  “Lion?” Eric said. “Where?”

  “It’s not about actual lions,” Trump said. “Obviously, it’s symbolism.”

  “SIMBA-lism,” Melania said.

  Trump looked at her and they shared a brief smile.

  His daily routine began to grate on him. All the television and the sitting. There were no books in most of his rooms, and all information presented to him was in the form of pictures. This newfound genius and stability just made him worried and indignant all the time, and none of the food he felt he ought to eat tasted good at all. His people were not what he had hoped. His agenda seemed haphazard at best and misguided at worst.

  His head ached all the time. Once he used his excess mental energy to tip over a glass with his mind, but nobody gave him any credit for it. Just for kicks, he raised and lowered the flag on the Interior Department so that it appeared Ryan Zinke was there when in fact he was NOT, but that was not as much fun as anticipated. Everything began to wear on him. He could not sit through international summits. Everyone spoke too slowly.

  Gradually he tried to move things that were bigger and bigger. By the end of the first week he was able to knock rockets out of the sky. He sent a tweet about it, but nobody understood that this was what he was trying to say. All the TV ever seemed to show was people closely misreading his tweets. It was miserable. It was a nightmare.

  Maybe, he thought, he would wake up and everything would be back to the way it was, and he would still know he was smart without having to see the people who said so. Maybe, if he just used all his brainpower, he could restore the world to the way it was before. Maybe all he had to do was concentrate.

  No, concentrate harder. No, harder.

  January 12, 2018

  Welcome to the Normal,Low-End Furniture Store for Trump Cabinet Members

  $5,000: The amount then–acting Housing and Urban Development Secretary Craig Clemmensen said to HUD colleague Helen Foster “will not even buy a decent chair”

  $31,000: Custom-order dining table and chairs HUD Secretary Ben Carson has been attempting to cancel

  $139,000: Door upgrade at Secretary Ryan Zinke’s Department of the Interior

  $43,000: Very secure phone installed in Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s office

  $70,000: Two replacement desks, also in Scott Pruitt’
s office

  WHERE ARE THESE PEOPLE SHOPPING FOR FURNITURE???

  HI, AND WELCOME TO a definitely normal, inexpensive retailer of normal furniture at reasonable prices. Thanks for coming in, Mr. Secretary!

  First, do you need office supplies? Be sure to check out our pens, which are $800 apiece and made of the shinbones of a saint. We also have cheap, low-end pens (ballpoint, with one color of ink) for $100, if you want to save.

  Obviously, we offer a range of very affordable tables and chairs. These really run the gamut! On the high end, we have a saber-tooth tiger leather piece stuffed with an actual member of the middle class. Or you’ll probably want one like this—made from that same cheap and reasonable material, but it swivels! Or, if you’re desperate to save, on the low end, we have a barely acceptable chair for a mere $5,000. This hideous chair is made from the pelt of only a single snow leopard, and no effort was made to give the snow leopard a classical education.

  Over there you can see our range of affordable tables. Our best seller comes directly from Versailles and was briefly used as a guillotine to punish the excesses of the aristocracy. In the midrange, we have one constructed from the trunk of a redwood that grew unmolested in California for hundreds of years, predating the arrival of Lewis and Clark.

  Ooh, I see you looking at that conference table. It LOOKS like a normal conference table, but before we put the finish on, we took the entire paycheck of a family of four and burned it in front of them. That’s what those streak marks are. Tears, and the residue from the burning. If you spread a cloth on this table and speak the magic words, it will be set with all manner of good dishes and you can feed almost a million people, but that carries an added markup of $150,000.

  But if you don’t need the cloth or additional features, you can get it for $31,000.

  What other items can I help you with?

  A phone? We have a range of those, starting around $20,000, pretty much your standard phone price. Our cheapest one is a member of an improv team holding his hand like a phone, and our next cheapest is a different member of the same improv team holding his hand AS THOUGH IT CONTAINS AN INVISIBLE PHONE. Next cheapest is a novelty phone shaped like a banana that does not actually make calls, but it looks so much like a banana you forgive it. Our most expensive phone is a carrier pigeon, but he’s very reliable and has a PhD. Or you can get the Very Secure model, which tends to run about $43,000, but it’s worth it if your calls are full of SECRETS.

  Okay, I see you need a desk. Again, we have a range. At the top of the line, we have the Ramses II, made of rare stone hewed from the tomb of a pharaoh, and if you sit at it long enough, you are guaranteed to achieve work-life balance. Any secretary seated at this desk will obey your demands without question, and their stenography will be perfect. Those who use this desk long enough don’t have to spend time in purgatory after they die. The soul of Thomas Jefferson is trapped in this desk. (We can also remove it, but that costs an added $40,000.) On the low end, you can get a desk that is just a white-collar worker with a firm, flat back, braced on all fours. If you get a set of two ($70,000), you’ll save $800,000 (the cost of a lifetime of regret incurred by knowing your desk was lonely).

  What else? A door? Okay, we have a series of doors. Our cheapest is $100,000. It’s not actually a door, just a picture of a door, but the picture was painted by Pablo Picasso. That’s expensive for a door, but cheap for a Picasso! Our next cheapest is $102,000. It is a Georgia O’Keeffe painting we think might be a door, but it might also be something different. You need a working door? We have one door that can work if pressed, but it was educated for a life of leisure, and sometimes it will just decide not to work for no real reason. It is a very classy door, though, and a charming addition to cocktail parties.

  We have a normal door that opens fine, but it’s $120,000, and sometimes when you open it, it leads to Narnia and you have to spend decades of your life in a magical kingdom resolving disputes among mythical creatures. For $139,000, we can make sure that won’t happen.

  Is that everything you needed? Great. I can start ringing you up over here. I’m so glad you came. Don’t worry, these prices are all very reasonable—according to Louise Linton. Why, it’s barely a single chartered flight!

  April 6, 2018

  Keep Scott Pruitt Moist

  Every good president has a cabinet that reflects his priorities. George Washington had Hamilton and Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln had his team of rivals. Donald Trump has a cabinet comprised of only the best people, including EPA head Scott Pruitt, a man whose repeated demands for his staff to drive from hotel to hotel seizing bottles of expensive lotion for him, among other things, was in absolute keeping with this administration’s general ethos and should have raised no further questions.

  SCOTT PRUITT MUST HAVE HIS moisturizing lotion.

  Why?

  Do not ask why.

  Scott Pruitt appears to be a man with gray hair. He appears to be a man like other men, though he is charged, unlike other men, with the protection of the environment.

  But he is letting the environment change, just slightly. Just enough for another creature to be quite comfortable—one with a hardy exoskeleton that thrives in warmth and darkness.

  And Scott Pruitt must have his moisturizing lotion.

  NOT THAT ONE! That is an ordinary lotion. The lotion Scott Pruitt requires is quite rare and available only at Ritz-Carlton hotels, and not even all Ritz-Carlton hotels. Hurry, we must drive. We must find the lotion. It must be absorbed into Scott Pruitt’s pores. Its scent must travel around him. He must be entirely shrouded in its scent, like Earth by carbon dioxide.

  Is it urgent? What will happen if Scott Pruitt is not given his moisturizing lotion?

  Have you seen what happens when you leave an earthworm in the sun on hot asphalt? Have you seen what happens to the things that live in a wetland when that swamp dries up? Have you seen a salamander left too long in a hot car? Have you seen a lobster without its shell?

  Unrelatedly, we must find Scott Pruitt his lotion.

  Scott Pruitt must be seated at the front of the plane, behind the little curtain. Perhaps a private jet would be better, all things considered. It would be safer. None must see what happens when he reaches 30,000 feet.

  What will happen?

  Nothing, nothing! Naturally.

  But it might be good, all the same, if he had a secure door at his office, with a biometric seal. A door that only he may open, that will recognize him, even if—

  Do not ask, “If what?” Drive! We must find the lotion. Scott Pruitt must be kept moist.

  It is not that Scott Pruitt is beginning to assume a new and monstrous shape. It is of course nothing like that.

  Scott Pruitt is trying to keep Earth warm. As it becomes warmer, he will need more ointment and another mattress. In fact, he needs the mattress now. It is a very particular mattress. It could accommodate an enormous exoskeleton made entirely of cartilage. Scott Pruitt is certainly not terraforming Earth to be warmer and stormier and filling the air with smog.

  On an entirely different topic, Scott Pruitt must have a secure door that responds only to his touch.

  The rectangular bottle in which the lotion is kept is dangerously low. And if Scott Pruitt does not have sufficient moisturizer—

  And we must find Scott Pruitt a mattress. Not any mattress. One mattress in particular.

  What is it that he needs them for? What will happen if he is not kept moist and his back is not properly supported?

  Do not ask. Drive, drive!

  He must have a soundproof phone booth in his office. No sound must escape this booth, not even the cracking of a hideous and enormous exoskeleton. Not even the sound of moisturizing lotion being frantically slathered on the creature within! Not even its bellowing—a bellowing too loathsome for human ears. We must keep him secure.

  Drive, drive! Get the lotion!

  And aides must pay for these hotel rooms. That much is clear. The taxpayer must not questi
on. The taxpayer must understand that this is worthwhile. The taxpayer must know that some things are too terrible to behold.

  Are you saying that if, for a single night, Scott Pruitt were not kept properly moist, with access to a mattress that meets certain exacting specifications, something terrible would befall us?

  Think if they did not meet these specifications. Think what might emerge from that $43,000 soundproof booth. Think what might escape that $5,700 biometric lock. No, never mind, do not think of it. You must not think of it. You would go mad.

  Drive, drive! Put on the flashing light on the motorcade, if you must! Drive, drive! Scott Pruitt must be kept moist. We must keep him moist at any cost.

  July 5, 2018

  I’m Beginning to Suspect These Were Not, in Fact, the Best People

  WELL, GOSH. THIS IS EMBARRASSING. I promised my team would be the “best people,” and, wow, it looks like maybe that was not the case. It is turning out, that, in fact, the people surrounding me and filling this White House were not at all as advertised! Or maybe exactly as advertised! I am starting to notice this from all the trials that keep happening.

  I thought I had the best team ever to be assembled, but I had a big coat full of skunks, six rejected concepts for Batman villains, and a disembodied voice that yells rude things in the Quiet Car.

  I thought I had the finest cadre of advisers and lawyers the earth had ever seen, but now that I look I see that all I had was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, an aardvark in a Model UN sweater, a hairpiece on top of a novelty skeleton with lightup eyes, a Mr. Monopoly Man, a paid advertisement for unscientific vitamin supplements, and a cursed Oscar statuette brought to life until someone speaks the single phrase that will allow him to sleep once more.