TRIPLE REVERSE

 Year-end bonus!  Herewith an outline for my novella: First draft written 1/17/2017, three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump!

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July 1: Billionaire presidential candidate Bullworth refuses to publish his tax returns in his campaign opposing President Albright’s bid for a second term. The press criticizes Bullworth, and publicly speculates what his tax returns would reveal. The principal suspicion is it that he i) pays little or no tax, and ii) has foreign investments, especially in Russia, that would embarrass him. 

July 15: The press speculation about Bullworth’s connection to Russia is heightened by i) his repeated positive statements about the Russian leader Boris Nyetski, and ii) Bullworth’s choice of campaign manager -- an unpaid volunteer, who, it was later discovered, received $12 million in cash from a Russian-supported Ukrainian leader who was overthrown by his Ukrainian constituents and is now hiding in Moscow.

July 20: Bullworth deflects the criticism by accusing the press of bias. No, more than bias, he accused the press of wilful dishonesty. The press defends itself with justifiable vigor and intensity, and insists it is impartial. The press defensiveness becomes the new shiny object, the new front page story, and the tax return story and Russian connection slip to page three.

August 1: Wikileaks starts dribbling out emails stolen from President Albright’s political party. The content is embarrassing. No corruption, treason, or criminality is reported, but the press feasts on the internecine backbiting and gossip -- stuff probably similar to that which would be found on the email servers of many local school boards. The leaks are serially released, and the press, eager to demonstrate its journalistic even handedness, pays exhaustive and exhausting attention to them. The  print-inches are right up there with the Kardashian jewel theft in Italy. The result? The Bullworth tax return story and his affinity for Russia’s leadership are buried ever deeper the bowels of Section One of the newspaper, and in the last 60 seconds of TV newscasts.

August 15: U.S. intelligence agencies reveal it was Russia that hacked the Albright email account.  Bullworth calls the claim “ridiculous,” and says he has  information the hacker was a 300 pound teenager from Tenafly, New Jersey.  The unsupported teenager story gets as much press coverage as the report of the Intel agencies. The tax return issue is now mentioned only rarely -- in section two of the paper, along with movie schedules, and only one cable news show even mentions it, and then only occasionally.

September 12: Reporters learned that the CIA has an unconfirmed report that while visiting Moscow two years earlier, Bullworth was involved in a “Golden Showers” episode in a Moscow hotel. It was not revealed which role he played. The press goes ballistic.

September 29: Hold the front page! A tape of Bullworth confessing to his pussy grabbing propensities hits all the news channels. The media devote all-out coverage to the story.  Russian interference in the election, and Bullworth tax return issues are no longer mentioned in the press at all.. 

October 11: An investigative reporter finds a deep-throated whistleblower on the Bullworth campaign who produces incontrovertible proof that the pussy grabbing “confession” was totally false. The campaign created the lie as a brilliant shiny object to keep the press from focusing on Russia’s interference in the election.. As a by-product, a Bullworth poll showed that a segment of Bullworth’s base -- blue collar males -- admired a man so bold that he would grab the pussies of strange women. 

October 13: Additional distraction was provided by report from MediaBattles -- a conspiracy-centric internet site known for its manufacture of false news. It reported that its own recent poll showed that 53% of white women wanted their pussies to be grabbed by Bullworth. When Bullworth’s press secretary, Marianne Smiley, was asked about that report at a press conference, she sickened three reporters with her effort at a coy smile, and said, “Well, it must be true, it was on the internet.” 

November 16:  Bullworth wins the election.

November 17: Smiley announces that President-elect Bullworth has been advised by his legal staff that it would be a disservice to future Presidents to publish his tax returns and as President he will issue an Executive Order barring himself from doing so. 

Ahh, It does not matter. This is the post-truth era, and “ alternate facts” prevail. What’s important is what attracts the attention of the public this instant. The tax return issue is, as the millennials tell us, “so over.” Now the only tax returns in the forefront of the public consciousness are the penalty letters received from the IRS when it finds $21.46 of checking account interest not reported as income on last year’s tax return. 

And the Russians hack-interference with the election? When asked about that at her press conference, Ms. Smiley dismissed the question with the sneer: “It would be unpatriotic to suggest Bullworth will not be a legitimate President.”

December 2: The Brighton Beach Ledger, a small Brooklyn neighborhood newspaper that normally focuses on issues that affect its predominantly Russian subscribers, vaults to national attention by publishing irrefutable documentary proof that the whole Golden Showers shtick was the result of an ingenious Bullworth/Nyetski plan: reverse false news, i.e,. it was false, masquerading as real, but designed to encourage a vigorous public debate and leading to a denunciation of the story as false. The only purpose of the scheme, the Russian documents revealed, was to shift public attention away from Russia’s involvement in the email hack that helped Bullworth win the election. 

December 10: The CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and Homeland Security revealed that after a brief but intensive inquiry, they found the Brighton Beach Ledger story to be accurate: i.e, the Golden Showers story was phony. Moreover, so was the Bullworth pussy grabbing confession. And, the authorities also found the well-publicized October Kardashian jewel theft was effected by a team of former KGB associates of the Russian Leader. The robbery was real, but perpetrated for fake reasons! The only motive for creating the fake Golden Showers and pussy grabbing stories, and stealing the  Kardashian gems, had been to capture the news cycle, bury the story of the Russian interference in the United States electoral processes, and thereby assure a Bullworth victory.  And the evidence established beyond doubt that the Bullworth campaign had worked hand in glove with the Russians on every aspect of this elaborate (and very successful) scheme to interfere with the election.

December 11: Bullworth immediately denied everything, tweeting that the intelligence agencies’ joint report was a “deep state coastal elite witch hunt scumbag treasonous hoax.”  

December 12: And when Ynetski chimed in with his denial, Bullworth tweeted, “I am persuaded by his denial. Why would he lie?”

December 13: Mrs. Mulva Seleznev, the wife of a Russian emigre, confessed to the desk sergeant at the Brighton Beach precinct of the New York City police department, that it was her husband Dmitri, a former KGB agent, who had revealed the Bullworth/Nyetski plot to the Brighton Beach Ledger. She said that he had helped the Russians execute the plot, but then betrayed the land of his birth by giving the incriminating documents to the Ledger because he suffered pangs of conscience -- he loved his new home in America and his daughter had just been admitted to Harvard. 

But that was not the reason Mrs. Zeleznev was talking to the police that day. She was frantic because her husband had disappeared! 

December 26: The New York State police announced that on Christmas 

Day, a Montauk fisherman, Skip Munder, trolling a black and silver rubber snake in the rips under the Light, caught a 42-pound bluefish that had apparently encountered a food source so plentiful that it had delayed its fall migration to Chesapeake Bay. Back at the dock, after filleting the fish, Munder was eager to see what kept the big fish so far north, and cut open its stomach. He was not surprised at seeing the partly decomposed squid, 3 porgies, and a small bluefish. But the half of a human finger prompted him instantly to get on his cell to the East Hampton Town Police, who called the State Police, who called the FBI.

December 28: The FBI announced that DNA evidence conclusively established that the now famous “blue fish digit” had once been attached to the missing Russian emigre Dmitri Seleznev.

December 29: This was now the most covered news story since Hitler invaded Poland. Bullworth was inundated with press inquiries. Congress demanded answers. Marianne Smiley said the whole furor was just an attack by known opponents, i.e., the press, the progressives, the immigrants, and the “lefties and snowflakes” in both parties. In response to the substantial evidence of his complicity in the Russian interference, Bullworth tweeted: “I know how to win. They are just sore losers. Sad.”

December 30: The House of Representatives was recalled into emergency session. The apparent innocence of the devout Vice President-elect Christian O’Malley added impetus to the first-ever pre-inaugural impeachment inquiry. So while Bullworth was planning his inaugural address, the House was planning his impeachment. The public demonstrated in the streets and vowed to boycott the inauguration, Sean Hannity declared he always had secret doubts about Bullworth, Rush Limbaugh went on an extended vacation, and Fox News joined in the demand for Bullworth’s impeachment. 

December 31: In her annual New Year’s Eve roundup column, New York Times op-ed columnist Collin Brooksman wrote of her extreme skepticism. Under the headline “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” she wrote that while she believed i) the FBI and CIA had clearly come to the correct conclusion about the conspiracy between the Bullworth campaign and the Russians, and ii) the Bullworth/ Ynetksy denials, were not credible, her gut told her something was missing here:

 How could the brilliant Russian Leader Ynetski, who excelled at the political long game, have successfully maneuvered to have his pawn elected, but then suffered to see his maneuvers result in his pawn’s impeachment and removal  immediately after his taking his oath of office? What had Ynetski accomplished? In short, she thought there was a piece of the puzzle that was missing. but she was unable to be more specific than that. Because her column appeared in that “old folks” medium, a newspaper, it wasn’t tweeted, snapchatted, instagrammed, Facebooked, or tick-tocked, and so it quickly disappeared from view.

January 13: The out-going Albright cabinet had consisted of fourteen men and women of varied talents and sophistication. The more important posts, State, Treasury, Defense, and Homeland Security were occupied by intelligent professionals. Other appointments tended to be more political in nature. Some cabinet Secretaries were people with political clout, others had raised money for the Albright campaign. That is not to say that the Secretaries of Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Labor, HHS, Education, etc., were not smart and patriotic, but only that some of them had been appointed for a reason other than their skill sets.  

The disposition of these people that week was important because Article II, Section 1.6 of the United States Constitution provides:

In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.

In The Presidential Succession Act of 1947, the Congress did what the Constitution authorized it to do, and provided for succession in case both the President and Vice President were dead or disabled. It legislated the following sequence: Speaker of the House, President Pro-tem of the Senate, and then the cabinet members in the order in which their positions had been created. Thus, the first cabinet officer in the line of succession was the Secretary of State, and the fourteenth was the Secretary of Homeland Security.  Obviously, the likelihood of any of those people succeeding to the Presidency was remote. In 228 years, succession had never descended beyond the Vice President.

In the week before the inauguration, President Albright’s cabinet members did what their predecessors had done. They followed tradition and submitted resignations effective 12:01 PM on January 20th, the day and time the new President was to take his oath of office. 

But security officials pay attention to details no one else thinks about. While the three elected successors to the presidency had always been forbidden to travel together on the same airplane, the passing of the torch to a new administration was such an important symbol of our great democracy, the three were to sit, cheek by jowl, with the new President at the swearing in ceremony. This was a politically important symbol, but nevertheless troublesome to the security nerds. What would happen if all were killed by a device launched at (or planted under) the reviewing stand? If the new President and his three elected successors were killed, and all fourteen cabinet members had already resigned, the United States would have NO EXECUTIVE BRANCH, no civilian Commander in Chief, no person authorized to launch defenses against nuclear attack, no person to sign laws passed by Congress. Anarchy? Probably not, but a period of frightening weakness and uncertainty, for sure.

In a process not publicly known, security officials took steps to avoid that remotest of possibilities. The outgoing cabinet members were required to meet and decide amongst themselves which one of them would not resign until at least one new cabinet officer had been appointed by the new President and confirmed by the Senate. The big cheeses in the Albright cabinet were all were eager to flee D.C. and be on their way home, to vacations, family outings, business ventures. So and they readily accepted the gracious offer of a cabinet officer who volunteered to postpone her resignation for a week or two -- the 12th on the cabinet succession list, Education Secretary Sonia Ross, a significant contributor to the Albright campaign. The agreeable lady had acquired her fortune upon the unexpected death of her husband, casino mogul Stephen James. The couple had been on the brink of divorce when James was killed in a mysterious boating accident on Lake Mead. The now-wealthy widow Ross resumed her maiden name. 

January 20: As planned, Secretary Ross stayed home on Inauguration Day, guarded by the Secret Service. The “Designated Survivor” watched the proceedings on television while she went about her business packing her belongings for her move back to Nevada. The rest of her former cabinet colleagues had already fled the city. 

 Bullworth and O’Malley were sworn in without untoward event. The sparse crowd cheered, and the officials sitting on the reviewing stand applauded, though most did so while grinding their teeth.

While Bullworth was reading his nine-minute inaugural address from the teleprompters, he raised his arm for emphasis, in a move so familiar from his campaign speeches, and found himself pointing at a distant raisin in the otherwise blue sky. He hesitated for only a moment, but continued reading his speech. When he looked up seconds later, the tiny raisin had become a fat grape and was on its way to watermelon size.

(Subsequent investigations revealed that the missile had been launched from a fishing trawler off the coast of Virginia. That vessel had immediately thereafter disappeared from coastal radar. Eight days later, the U.S.  Navy found her sitting on the bottom in 1,275 feet of water. The vessel was raised, and investigators found that two bilge valves were in the full-open position.There could be no doubt the ship had been scuttled. No crew members, or remains of crew members, had been found.)

The missile had exploded right on target. Ninety seven people were killed and 113 injured. Among the dead were President Bullworth, Vice President O’Malley, the Speaker of the House, the President Pro-tem of the Senate, four Justices of the Supreme Court, assorted spouses, and 61 members of Congress.

DHS Deputy Secretary Tom Abernathy, who was in charge of inauguration security had been observing the scene from his aerie atop the Washington Monument. He immediately put “Operation DS” into effect, and a platoon of heavily armed U.S Marines from Joint Base Andrews rushed to the home of Secretary Ross. Abernathy breathed a sigh of relief when he learned she was safe, and he ordered that she be immediately hustled to a secure location in the bowels of DHS headquarters, where a television crew was waiting to record a surviving member of the Supreme Court administer the oath of office. Though hardly via means anybody had anticipated, the country now had its first female President. 

February 12: To assure the anxious American public that our federal government was intact and returning to normal, there was a ceremonial public swearing-in at the White House. Also participating was the new Vice President, former New York City Congressman Alex Barber, who had earlier been appointed by President Ross and confirmed by the 72 surviving members of the U.S.Senate. 

The new Speaker of the House, and President Pro-tem of the Senate watched on television. Physically present were honored guests and numerous family members, including President Ross’s beaming widowed father, Mr. Victor Ross, nee Vladimir Roskovitch.

Also present was Vice President Alex Barber's father, Alexi Barbrovski, a Brighton Beach Uber driver.

February 13: Russian Leader Boris “Long Game” Ynetski was among the scores of international leaders who sent congratulatory messages. His message was in the form of a video showing him sitting behind his desk, wearing a cat-who-ate-the-canary smile, offering to travel to the United States to meet with the new President and Vice President at their earliest convenience.

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Want the rights to make a motion picture or TV special based on this treatment? No problem, openings still available. Write to mlondon34@Gmail.com

And a Happy New Year to all my emailees, even those who deservedly received only a lump of coal in their Christmas stockings