This is what I need from you. I need you on the phone to my people at the Port Authority. I need a spot on the next season of “Biggest Loser.” I need a picture of the Governor and his family stuck in traffic. I need an unstained tie. I need a lot of concealer. And I need a coffee with six sugars. NOW.
This looks bad. I know this looks bad. You have the entire greater New York press corps outside your door, and they’re not going to accept “Oh, sorry, the buzzer’s acting weird.” And all of them—every one—they only have one question, and it’s the same question, and it isn’t about you doing a duet with a popular New Jersey rock star. Because right now your best-case scenario is you were incompetent. And your worst-case scenario is Hillary Clinton getting a rabbit.
I need everything you’ve got on Bridget Anne Kelly. Parking tickets. Does she use family events as free child care? Does she ever “reply all” to e-mails? Has she cut off her own ear and sent it to her father so he would think that she had been kidnapped? The more we can make this woman look like someone in a movie who is only pretending to be human but is actually a robot or an alien, the more you can think about the chairs in the Oval Office.
I know we’re here, and we’re in the battle, and it looks like the only way out is to admit you are a crazy, vindictive political bully, but I need you to snap out of it. I need you to hear me right now: this is nothing.
This is nothing. This is a political victory for you. This is storming Normandy. This is you and the Constitution and the Stars and Stripes waving behind you. You murdered no one. You tortured no one, although you thought about it. You didn’t have sex with the President of the United States in a closet at his Chief of Staff’s baby’s christening. You didn’t rig a national election—yet.
You are this nation. You are self-reliance, and the ghosts of the Union dead. You carry this country on your size-80-suited back. America doesn’t know it’s ready for you; America doesn’t know it needs you. Did you smother a Supreme Court Justice to death in her hospital room? No. Did you conspire to have both of your parents killed in a narrative span of two hours? Did you stab your husband and then make it look like he had a heart attack? You are golden. You’re a political poster boy. You’re a role model.
You made a couple of kids late for school, and maybe a couple of people didn’t get an ambulance when they needed one. Potential clients come to me with problems like this and I tell them, “Go on Facebook and make your status ‘Monday’s always hard :/,’ and don’t waste my time.”
Because if your father isn’t the head of a secret organization of assassins that is somehow above any government oversight or national law, then you don’t know political problems. And if one of your boyfriends isn’t the President of the United States and your other boyfriend isn’t an assassin who spies on you in your apartment and then hurts you and then saves you by shooting another assassin in the head, don’t come to me with “These e-mails look bad.” Yeah? These e-mails look bad? Sorry, one second—I need to go back into my safe house to make sure no members of my staff are pulling out the teeth of any other members of my staff with pliers.
But I’ll take you as a client, Governor. I always listen to my gut. And my gut says, “This man probably didn’t shoot down a plane of civilians, thinking there was a bomb on the plane, only to later learn that his wife had tricked him into thinking there was a bomb on the plane.”
Has someone framed the chairman of the Transportation Committee yet?
Photograph by Eric Thayer-Pool/Getty.