Category: SugarFree

 

“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Donald declared as he turned from the window. “The Spirits of all Three John McCain’s shall strive within me. I say it on my knees, old McCain; on my knees!”

He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.

“The shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!”

He took off his hat and he took off his hair and he hugged them both tightly to his chest.

“I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy,” cried Donald. “I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”

He ran into his Tweeting room and looked all about.

“There’s the door, by which the Ghost of John McCain entered! There’s the corner where the Ghost of Christmas Present, sat! There are the tunnels wherein I saw the wandering Spirits! It’s all right, it’s all true, it all happened. Ha ha ha!”

“Donald,” the hat said, “you’re crushing me.”

“It’s because I love you, hat, dear hat!” Donald yelled. He twirled around and around until he felt ill.

“I don’t know what day of the month it is!” said Donald. “I don’t know how long I’ve been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby.”

Running to the window, tried to open it, and set off a security alarm. A Secret Service officer came bustling in.

“What’s to-day!” cried Donald, calling to the Secret Service agent in his best drab suit.

“EH?” returned the agent, with all his might of wonder.

“What’s today, my fine fellow?” said Scrooge.

“Today, Mr. President?” replied the agent. “Why, CHRISTMAS DAY!”

“It’s Christmas Day!” said Donald. “I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course, they can. Of course, they can.”

“Spirits, Mr. President?” asked the confused agent.

“Do you know the McDonald’s in the next street but one, at the corner?” Donald inquired.

“Uh, yes, I guess so,” said the agent, uncertainty dancing in his eyes. He holstered his weapon and lightly fingered his 25th Amendment TASER.

“An intelligent boy!” said Donald. “A remarkable boy! Do we employ all boys as smart as him?” he asked his hat. “Do we?” he asked his hair. The agent backed up warily and did not take his eyes off of Donald.

“Do you know whether they’ve sold the 100 piece McNugget box that had as a Holiday promotion?” asked Donald.

“I’ll… I’ll go check for you, sir,” the agent said, longing to call for his supervisor.

“Go and buy it. Have it send posthaste to Pie and her family!” said Donald.

“Pie, sir?” the agent asked.

“Sarah,” the hair whispered.

“Sarah,” Donald told the agent. “My spokeswoman. Sarah, dear Sarah. Sarah, Plain and Wide.”

“I’ll get right on that, sir,” said the agent, backing out of the Residence.

“Half-a-crown for you if you are quick about it, boy!” Donald said, laughing heartily, and the agent was gone in a flash.

Donald looked at his hair and Donald looked at his hat and said to them both: “We must get ready friends, we have a busy day of legacy building to begin!”

Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when you don’t dance while you are at it. But if he had cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of sticking-plaster over it, and been quite satisfied.

He dressed himself in “all in his best,” and at last got out into the White House proper. The workers by this time were pouring forth, filling office even on this Christmas Day.

“The work of the President is never done,” said a gleeful Donald to his hat and his hair.

“Hullo!” he shouted to the secretaries.

“Hullo!” he shouted to the Secret Service agents.

“Hullo!” he shouted to the dogsbodies and factotum scurrying to-and-fro.

Donald hurried into The Oval Office and shut the door behind him. He had calls to make, important calls to make.

“Donald,” asked his hair. “Are you OK?”

“I have never felt better, my beloved follicles,” he said.

Donald pressed a button set into the underlip of his desk and a drawer opened, a drawer he had never opened before. Inside was a phone of deepest red, an old-style phone that could not send Tweets or Crush Candies.

“Donald…” the hat said.

“I shall not succumb to such dark future,” said Donald and he took up the phone. “Hullo!” he shouted into the receiver.

“Mr. President,” a sober young man said. “What are your orders, sir?”

“Scramble the jets, and set sail our ships,” Donald sang. “Wake all our troops, and arm them every one. Ready the drones and cruise missiles. Launch the Space Force and warm their laser cannons. The best Christmas has come, my lad. The best Christmas of all!”

“Y-y-es, sir,” the young man said.

“Assemble the Joint Chiefs!” Donald continued. ”Stiffen John Bolton’s Mustache to a heady rage! Release the Mad Dog from his pleasure cage!”

“Y-y-your orders, sir?”

“Have them all in the Situation Room with all haste! America goes to war!”

Donald hung up the phone and closed the secret drawer and spun around in his office chair with a girlish laugh of pleasure.

“Donald,” the hair said. “Mattis just put in his resignation letter.”

“Jim will stay,” said Donald. “As I keep Faith with him, he will keep Faith with me.”

“And you just had me declare on Twitter the war with ISIS won and a withdrawal of troops from Syria and a drawdown in Afganistan,” the hat said.

“Then back to Twitter, friend hat,” said Donald. “Reverse, regress and revise. Claim we were hacked; call it Facebook’s fault! Or let the egg be on Dorsey’s face–call it a blue checkmark farce!”

“Whatabout…” the hair began.

“And call Pie! Rescue her from her fat family fatal feast! She’ll have much to tell our countrymen as they wake!”

Donald was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to round Sarah, his beloved Pie, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a Warboner, as firm a hawk, and as bloodthirsty a man, as the good old district knew, or any other good old capital, stronghold, or redoubt, in the dark old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough now to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for sake of conflict and death, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. Donald’s own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.

Donald and his hat and his hair had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Warboner Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas in an America at War as well as man alive or dead or never to be born. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!

And so, as Pie observed, around a mouthful of McNuggets: God of War Bless Us, Every One!

 

Donald awoke to a cold bedroom, the dead light of the district streaming in through frost-rimed windows. He shivered and tried to pull the bedsheet over him when the room darkened briefly as something passed before the windows behind him.

“Hello?” asked Donald in a quavering voice. He rolled over in a series of grunts and saw what cast a shadow into his room.

The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched hand. But for this, it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.

“I am in the presence of the Ghost of Warboners Yet To Come?” said Donald.

The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its skeletal hand.

“You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened but will happen in the time before us,” Donald pursued. “Is that so, Spirit?”

The Spirit had inclined its head and that was the only answer he received.

“Warboner of the Future!” Donald exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”

It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.

“I don’t think it’s going to say anything, Donald,” said the hair from the floor.

“Douche move!” cried the hat.

“Quiet, you two,” said Donald. “I have the fear upon me when facing this silent Phantom. I fear to go with him.” He slid off the bed and gathered his friends from the chamber floor.

“Then don’t,” said the hat. “Fuck old tall and bony. It’s just the skeleton of John McCain probably. You can beat up a skeleton.”

“I could beat up a skeleton,” said the hair. “No muscle, no tendon, no offal or sinew. I never knew what was supposed to me so scary about skeletons in the first place.”

Donald put on his hair and hat and stood before the Phantom and crossed his arms in defiance.

“What is with the no talking thing, Oh, Spirit? Are you just trying to freak me out?”

“Or he doesn’t have lungs or larynx, lips or tongue to make speech with,” said a gay Southron voice. The front of the dark robe of the Phantom split and a terribly aged Lindsey Graham stepped out.

“Ta-da!’ said Lindsey and launched a double handful of glitter into the air.

The hat and hair groaned loudly in musical union.

Lindsey stepped to the side and crooked an arm through the arm of the Phantom. He self-consciously touched his hair with his other hand and sighed.

“I love John McCain,” said Lindsey gravely. “I love him. He can no longer talk, so I shall be his voice.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic,” said the hat.

“Lead on, O Spirits of the Future,” said Donald. “Show me what you must.”

Lindsay tittered behind his free hand. “Come on, boys,” Lindsey said. The Phantom at his side raised his hand and darkness, absolute darkness, enveloped them.

“Spooky,” Lindsey giggled.

They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act. But there they were, in the heart of it; on the Capitol steps. The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of Congressmen. Donald advanced to listen to their talk.

“No,” said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, “I don’t know much about it, either way. I only know he’s dead.”

“When did he die?” inquired another.

“Last night, I believe.”

“Why, what was the matter with him?” asked a third, taking a vast quantity of cocaine out of a very large snuff-box. “I thought he’d never die.”

“God knows,” said the first, with a yawn.

“What has he done with his money?” asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.

“I haven’t heard,” said the man with the large chin, yawning again. “Left it to his feckless offspring, perhaps. He hasn’t left it to me. That’s all I know.”

This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.

“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,” said the same speaker, “for upon my life I don’t know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?”

“I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,” observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. “But I must be fed, if I have to go.”

Another laugh.

“Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,” said the first speaker, “for I never wear black gloves, and I never eat lunch. But I’ll offer to go if anybody else will. When I come to think of it, I’m not at all sure that I wasn’t his most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak whenever we met. Bye, bye!”

Speakers and listeners strolled away and mixed with other groups. Donald knew the men and looked towards Lindsay for an explanation, but the piss-eyed fairy just giggled.

The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed to two persons meeting. Donald listened again, thinking that the explanation might lie here.

He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business: very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.

“How are you?” said one.

“How are you?” returned the other.

“Well!” said the first. “Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?”

“So I am told,” returned the second. “Cold, isn’t it?”

“Seasonable for Christmas time.”

“Good morning!” said the one; “Good morning!” said the other.

Not another word. That was their meeting, their conversation, and their parting.

Donald was at first inclined to be surprised that the Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently so trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden purpose, he set himself to consider what it was likely to be.

“Donald?” asked his hair. “Are you doing hard thinking? It’s starting to feel weird under me.”

“A moment, just a moment,” said Donald, “I wish to solve the riddle of these speakers I have been shown.”

The hat, way ahead of him, laughed his evilest laugh, which was an evil laugh indeed.

Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its outstretched hand. When Donald roused himself from his thoughtful quest, he fancied from the turn of the hand, and its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen Eyes were looking at him keenly.

“Spirit!” said Donald, shuddering from head to foot. “I see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own. My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, what is this?”

He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now he almost touched a bed: a bare hospital bed: on which, beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up. A pale light, falling through a grimy window, fell straight upon the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for, was the body of this man.

Donald glanced towards the Phantom. Its skeletal hand was pointed to the head. The cover was so carelessly adjusted that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon Donald’s part, would have disclosed the face. He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it; but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss the spectre at his side.

“Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death,” said the hat gleefully, “set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. Strike, Skeleton McCain, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!”

“What the fuck are you doing?” asked the hair.

“Just watch,” the hat said maliciously and Lindsey did giggle his giggle again and again.

The hat’s words tore at Donald. He thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be his foremost thoughts?  He lay, in the empty hospital, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say that he started a glorious war in this country or that, or invaded a territory here or there, or sent a flight of cruise missiles to a children’s hospital?

“Spirit! Gay fairy!” he said, “this is a fearful place. In leaving it, I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!”

Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the figure under the sheet.

“I understand you,” Donald returned, “and I would do it if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have not the power.”

“Pull back the sheet, Donald,” said Lindsay. “Find what you already know you will.”

“If there is any person in the town, who feels emotion caused by this man’s death,” said Donald, quite agonized, “show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you!”

The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room by daylight, where a mother and her children were.

Sarah was expecting someone, and with anxious eagerness; for she walked up and down the room; started at every sound; looked out from the window; glanced at the clock; tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and could hardly bear the voices of the children in their play.

At length, the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was careworn and depressed. There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.

“Is it good?” she said, “or bad?”

“Bad,” he answered.

“We are quite ruined?”

“There is no hope, Sarah. He is gone.”

“Gone? Gone? What shall I do? My speaking fees are all that keep us going! If he is gone, who will hire me now if not to curry his corrupt favor? No one cares for his past, there are no glories to promote, not conflicts to rehash. We are ruined, husband, ruined!”

“I have never seen Pie so sad where I had not been the author,” Donald said quietly.

“Hark!” said the hat. “Is that the sound of the other shoe finally dropping?”

“Don’t be cruel,” the hair chided the hat.

“I’m bored,” the hat said. “And cold and hungry and bored. This cheap epiphany has been too long coming.”

Lindsay laughed and laughed and rubbed intimate bones underneath the robe of the Phantom. “Take us back, lover, take us back,” he said in a Southron lisp.

In the hospital room once more, and Lindsay did prance forward and tear the sheet away. Donald himself lay there on that cold bed, his orange tan now pallid, his angry cheeks sunken and sallow, his tweeting thumbs still and gnarled, his belly filling with gases and putrefactions.

“No!” cried Donald. “No! The old Jew told me that I could never die!”

“All men die, Donald,” the hair told him not unkindly.

“And that was just Dr. Blankenweiss, who was checking your moles,” said the hat.

“But this is just death, cold and unforgiving,” Donald wailed. “I am a President! I should be lying in state? Where are the mourners? Where are the women crying? Where is the non-stop press coverage?”

Lindsay began to laugh so hard, he could barely catch his breath. His face turned as red as a freshly-slapped ass. The Phantom raised his arms and the scene changed again, a small chapel filled with a few people and a closed casket of plain wood appeared around them. The Phantom put his arm around Donald and they floated toward the coffin. Donald was left there as the Phantom retreated.

“This is it?” cried Donald. “This is my funeral?”

“Pretty cheap looking,” the hair said.

“Not very classy,” the hat agreed.

Donald turned to look at the mourners. Ivanka sat stone-faced in the front pew, Jared beside her in a yarmulke, their Jew-children bored and sleeping. Don Jr. was working a Rubik’s Cube and quietly cursing and Eric was wearing sunglasses that did not cover the bruises on his face.

“This is all you mourn me? Where is Melania? Where is her son?” Donald asked.

“She divorced you years ago,” said Lindsay smiling.

“And Tiffany? Tell me nothing has happened to her?”

“Who?” Lindsay said, his Botoxed brows straining to knit.

“Tiffany? My youngest daughter? Marla’s daughter?” Donald asked in exasperation.

Lindsay, still confused, looked askance of The Phantom of Warboners to Come and the Spirit did shrug elaborately.

“And the cameras and reporters?” asked Donald. “Did the Phantom take them? Are they in hiding?”

“I don’t think they are coming, Donald,” the hair said gently.

“Not even FOX NEWS?!?”

“There is no more Fox News,” Lindsay hissed. “Because of you. They went out of business with no wars to report, no drone strikes to defend, no war crimes to excuse! You! You killed them, Donald!”

“NO!” screamed Donald. “No! How can this horrible future be mine! I was a great President! A tremendous President! The first Twitter President! I gave up my thumbs for you ingrates!”

“Look!” said Lindsay. “Look who they sent to speak at your funeral!”

A hulking figure approached the podium behind the gasket, shrouded in darkness, hideous and twisted.

“NO!” cried Donald and the hat and the hair in unison.

“Oh, Spirit! Oh, comraderal homo!” moaned Donald. “Tell me that this can not be. My mind and soul cannot take these blows and shocks! I have learned the harsh lessons you teach! Take me home! Please return me!”

Donald fell to his knees before McCain enrobed skeleton and wept bitterly. Chelsea’s voice was clear and loud when she began to speak, but grow tinny and indistinct.

“I can look no more!” wept Donald. “I can hear no more!”

“Pinch me!” cried the hat. “This shit ain’t funny no more!”

Donald pitched forward onto the floor of his bedroom as there was no more Phantom leg bones to clutch. Lindsay’s mocking laughter echoed for a few seconds more.

Donald stood up and waddled to the window. It was light outside. It was morning.

“OK, that really sucked,” said the hair.

“Torments from hell,” the hat agreed. “Her voice; that harridan screech. And her face. Her awful face. I will never be able to wipe it from my mind.”

Donald held onto the window sill and continued to weep.

 

Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Donald had no occasion to be told that it was time for a Diet Coke. He often had as many as three during a night; but reaching into his bedside minifridge he found it quite bare.

“One thing,” he raged, “one thing I demand, is to keep this fridge stocked with my brown nectar!”

“Go back to bed,” the hair mumbled.

Donald pressed the button on his bedside table. Donald pulled the cord to ring his servant’s bell. Donald slapped the panic switch to summon his guards. Donald tipped back his head and yelled.

“OK, OK,” said his hat, “We’re all awake now.”

Donald got out of bed and straighten his Presidential pajamas and pulled on his Presidential robe and settled his hair upon his head and took up his grumbling hat.

“I’ll get to the bottom of this,” Donald said. “It is one thing to be plagued by dreams of a dead Naval aviator, it is quite another to be out of Diet Coke.” He opened the door of his bedroom and stepped out into the largest of his rooms.

But the sitting room was not as he had left it. The horrific red and gold and menacing spikes of Melania’s austere design was gone. It was instead decorated for a human Christmas, garlands of holly and twinkling lights. Gone was the blood-drenched tree devoid of ornaments. In its place stood a healthy green tree, fresh-cut, and done up with ribbons and light and bows, and those little hollow glass balls that he liked to crush underfoot. The empty clean lines of useless coffee tables to trip over in the night had been replaced with a proper table set with a proper feast: McNuggets, McGriddles, cartons of fries both small, medium and large, succulent Big Macs and Sausage Biscuits glistened in the twinkling lights and a mound of Quarter Pounders gleamed, And there, oh there, was row upon row of Diet Cokes, their waxy cups dense with condensation and straws standing at attention. Donald grabbed one up and greedily sucked.

A fire roared in the fireplace that had been cold for decades. A man looked around the highback of one of the chairs facing it and gave a hearty, “Hello!” and Donald gave a start. It was the shade of McCain again, Old McCain, last days McCain, cancerous and brain-addled. He was wearing a Santa costume and looked more than a bit drunk.

“And who are you?” Donald asked. “And what has happened to the uncomfortable room my wife had made?”

“I am the Spirit of Warboners Present!” said Santa McCain. “Look upon me!”

“John McCain in a Santa suit,” the hat said dryly. “A bony old lap for bad children everywhere.”
“You have never seen the like of me before!” exclaimed the Spirit.

“Never,” Donald made answer to it.

The Ghost of Warboners Present rose.

“Spirit,” said Donald wearily, “conduct me where you will. I went forth earlier on compulsion, and I learnt a lesson which is working now. If you have aught to teach me, let me profit by it.”

“Touch my robe!” said Santa McCain

Donald did as he was told, and held it fast.

The beautiful Christmas room with all it joy and bounty vanished instantly and they stood on wide streets lined with small identical houses with neat lawns. Each was decorated for Christmas simply, but gaily and the warm light of family life seemed to glow from every window.

“Where have you brought me, Spirit?” asked Donald.

“Do you not know it?” asked the reedy voice of Old McCain.

“I do not,” said Donald.

“It is one of the many examples of military base housing that you oversee as Commander in Chief.”

“Commander in Chief?” asked Donald in a confused tone.

“The President is Commander in Chief of the US military,” Donald’s hair said in a loud whisper.

“Come, witness what you have done!” said the Spirit.

Santa McCain touched Donald’s shoulder and the four of them flew forward into one of the base houses. Inside they found themselves in a living room dominated by a beautifully decorated tree surrounded with presents. Two children came running in, cheering, and fell down to their knees under the tree and began pointing to presents with their name on them. A man and a woman followed them, dressed in warm robes and slippers, arm-in-arm, smiling at the antics of the children. That sat down and the woman leaned against her husband and sighed contentedly. The children brought present from the tree and sat in front of their parents and tore them open with unbridled delight.

“Behold!” said the Spirit, “behold the terrors the flaccidity of your Warboner has wrought!”

“Terrors?” asked the hair.

“It looks pretty nice,” the hat said. “The mom could be hotter, but at least she isn’t a dependopotamus.”

“No!” said Santa McCain. “Home for Christmas? Not deployed? Not fighting? Not getting a Christmas meal served to them in a flyblown tent? This is not what the real meaning of Warboners is about! How can Donald fly over to some shithole in the middle of the night so he can ladle gravy and smile for reporters? How can he thank the troops for their sacrifice and pretend to keep them in his prayers?!?”

“The real meaning of Christmas is not being home for Christmas?” asked Donald timidly.

“Exactly!” the Spirit thundered. “Isn’t it better for every child to only see their mother or father when they are pranked into speaking at a school assembly and filmed as their deployed parent appears with no warning?”

“That’s fucking awful,” the hair said quietly.

“Having a fine and firm Warboner is about the celebration of sacrifice, little one,” Santa McCain. “Especially the sacrifice of people who aren’t you…”

“What else is there, Spirit?” asked Donald. “What other lessons can you teach?”

“Touch my robe once more!” the Spirit said.

Donald did and once again the scene changed abruptly. An opulent room appeared around them, done in red and gold, sturdy stainless steel wainscoting running around all the walls. Stark white stylized ceramic forest animals gamboled and played. A “tree” made from a haphazard bundle of aluminum spikes illuminated with dozens of piercing white halogens lamps suspended from the ceiling on bright bare wires dominated the room. It was blinding to look at, painful. Presents wrapped in red reflective mylar where impaled upon the spikes, like the victims of some Christmas shrike, and the bilious green of fake grass spikes bristled from the tree skirt, as warm and welcoming as a thousand adder’s fangs.

“Home!” cried Donald. “My true home in Trump, the mightiest of Towers.”

“I see Melania’s been decorating here too,” the hair muttered.

“Alphaville meets glitter dungeon,” the hat grumbled.

Melania walked in a gown the color of dried blood. Barron followed her, looking down at his cellphone and chanting a string of numbers under his breath.

“My wife,” said Donald, “and her son! I’m here, my darlings! I am home for Christmas.”

“They cannot hear you,” Santa McCain said gravely. “We are but unseen phantoms to them.”

“Hi, Melania!” Donald shouted, waving his hands in her face. “I’m here, my sugarplum. I’ve come home, my sexy Vampira!”

“You may open one present now, my little žlikrofi,” she said. “The rest must wait until your father is home.”

Barron’s face clouded over and turned red. He threw his cellphone against the wall and it shattered.

“I don’t want to wait!” the boy screamed. “I don’t want to! Why is he even coming here? I don’t want him here!”

“You must want for him!” Melania said, tearing at her carefully styled hair. “He has nothing else to do but spend Christmas with us.”

The boy dropped to the ground and hugged his knees tightly and began to rock back and forth. “But, why, Mother? Why?” said Barron in an anguished voice.

“He has no troops to visit, no addresses to the country to make,” said Melania. “He will have to be with us.”

“But, I’m here already!” Donald said. “I’m right here!”

“Ghosts,” the hat said tightly. “We’re just Ghosts.”

Donald turned to the Spirit of Warboners Present. “Oh, Spectre, Oh, Spirit, take me away from this awful place so that my wife and her child might know a Merry Christmas.

“Take my robe,” the Spirit said.

“But wait, I want to know where we are going,” asked the hat.

“We go to one of the saddest houses of them all…” said Santa McCain as Donald touched his hem.

Melania chrome nightmare faded around them and they found themselves in a busy kitchen, microwave and oven and stand-mixer all on, smoke detector blaring and a far-off keening wail rising in volume. A large woman ran to and fro, muttering a curse.

“Where have you brought me, oh Spirit?” Donald yelled over the smoke alarm.

“You will know it,” Santa McCain replied.

Soon the woman turned to them, flour-dusted and gravy-spattered. It was long-suffering Sarah, full of breast and hip and arm and leg and buttocks, who was scurrying in the smoke-filled room.

“Pie!” said Donald. “Hey! It’s Pie! Hey, Pie! Over here, Pie! Can you bring me a Diet Coke.”

“We are but phantoms…” Santa McCain began again.

“Just drop it, man,” the hat said. “He’s never going to get it.”

“SARAH!” came a cry from another room. Pie mopped her brow with the edge of her apron and left the kitchen. The ghostly foursome followed.

The living room was filled with Huckabees, each one fatter than the last, each in a bib with a bucket of food.

“Sarah, I need more gravy,” said one.

“Sarah, I need more ham,” said another.

“Sarah, all my ice is gone,” called her Father and two of her Uncles and one Nephew all covered in sticky marshmallow goo.

Sarah nodded and bowed and ran back to the kitchen and began to cry.

“It has been like this all day for her,” Santa McCain told Donald. “And it is all your fault.”

“My fault?” asked Donald, pushing the thought away with both hands. “How can this be my fault? I did not make them slop like hogs. I did not make Eve eat of the apple.”

“Your fault for not giving your press secretary a war to defend on television. Your fault for not bombing a village or a baby formula factory or a hospital to turn around your poll numbers,” Santa McCain scolded.

“My actions were always my own,” said Donald piteously. “I never thought of others. Oh, Spirit, you wound my soul with your horrors.”

“We can go home now, right?” asked the hat.

“Touch my robe,” said Santa McCain.

“This guy has sort of a thing for getting people to touch his robe,” the hair said.

“Robes are gay,” said the hat.

Donald and his hair and his hair found themselves back in their bell just as the churchyard bell began to toll three.

“One more ghost,” said the hair.

“It better be the last,” said the hat.

Donald fell forward into his bed and both of them dropped to the floor.

 

Donald went to bed, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over and over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and the more he endeavored not to think, the more he thought.

McCain’s Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, “Was it a dream or not?”

“OMFG, Donald,” his hair said, “you keeping flipping and flopping and rolling over and over. Let me off and I’ll sleep on the credenza.”

“Gay,” the hat said from his stately stand.

“It’s nothing,” Donald muttered. “Nothing at all. Just a flashback maybe or a bad batch of fries.”

He screamed when a hand reached out of the dark and touched his shoulder.

It was a strange figure–a young man, in a jumpsuit. Donald realized with a start that it was McCain, a McCain he had never known. Young McCain was squinting as if into the sun and had a head with short-cropped hair. He smiled at Donald and put on aviator sunglasses, mirrored and impenetrable. As Donald stared in horror the figure flickered–stuttered almost–winking in and out; and he was as insubstantial as fake news.

“Is it going to be all night with this Scooby Doo shit?” the hat asked.

Donald cried out for the Secret Service but none came.

“Are you the Spirit whose coming was foretold to me?” asked Donald.

“I am,” Young McCain said. The voice was soft and gentle.

“Who, and what are you?” the hair demanded.

“I am the Ghost of Warboners Past.”

“Long Past?” inquired the hat. “Like World War II?”

The Spirit did not turn to answer him. “No. Donald’s past.”

Perhaps, Donald could not have told anybody why, if anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.

“What?” exclaimed the Ghost, “Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, you want me to wear it low upon my brow?”

“Don’t have a ghost put me on, Donald,” the hat said, fear in his voice.

“What about the hair? You want to wear my hair?” Donald asked.

“Neither!” the Spirit thundered. “I don’t want to wear either your hat or your hair.”

“Then what business do you have here?” Donald asked.

“Your reclamation. Take heed!”

It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him gently by the arm.

“Rise! and walk with me!”

It would have been in vain for Donald to plead that the weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes; that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his slippers, dressing-gown. The grasp, though gentle as a hooker’s hand, was not to be resisted. He rose: but finding that the Spirit made towards the window, clapped on his hat and hair in supplication.

“I am a mortal,” Donald remonstrated, “and liable to fall.”

“Bear but a touch of my hand there,” said McCain, laying it upon his heart, “and you shall be upheld in more than this!” As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall, and stood upon a busy New York City sidewalk.

“What in the mother of fuck?” the hat shouted.

“Did we just teleport?” the hair asked. “I think we just teleported!”

“Good Heaven!” said Donald, clasping his hands together, as he looked about him. Men in hats and women in dresses passed them on the sidewalk unaware of them. “I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!”

“Look at how the people are dressed,” said the hair. “Look at the stores and billboards that line the streets. Look at the cars.”

“Time travel,” the hat said. “I can finally kill Billy Ray Cyrus before he is born.”

“Your lip is trembling,” said the Ghost to Donald. “And what is that upon your cheek?”

Donald muttered.

“Wait, are you crying, Donald?” the hair asked gently.

“It’s just so beautiful,” Donald whispered. “So many white people. White people everywhere. And everyone is so skinny.”

“Do you recollect the way?” inquired the Spirit. “Do not be bothered by those around us. We appear as naught to them.”

“Remember it?” cried Donald with fervour; “I could walk it blindfolded.”

Donald took off a wattling run, the hat and hair holding on. The ghostly figure of McCain flew beside them, his spectral feet a few inches above the cold sidewalk.

Donald stopped before the window of a huge toy store and pressed his face before the glass. Dolls and BB guns and wind-up tanks and sparking robots sat inside the track of an elaborate toy train that chugged along. Planes and cars and cowboys and noble knights astride fine steeds hung from the ceiling by fishing wire, and lights flashed and bells rang.

“I loved this window,” Donald said. “So many things, all the things, such classy toys.”

“This was your last Christmas, wasn’t it?” McCain’s Ghost asked.

“The last good one,” Donald said. “The next year I was sent off to military school. I spent Christmas there from then on.”

“Military school,” the young figure of McCain said. “A chance to get your first warboner, a proper one. A chance you wasted.”

“Your last good Christmas,” the hair said, rubbing Donald’s head in sympathy. “Did you at least get what you wanted?”

“No. Father refused to buy me the store,” Donald said mournfully. “I was going to burn it down for the insurance money.”

“Away,” said the Spirit. “We have more Christmases to visit!”

A wind picked up and began to swirl around them, and somehow made it seem as if the city was swirling around them.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said the hat. And then the scene settled and he merely groaned.
They were now on the lawn of a college campus quad, students arm-in-arm going to and fro.

“WEST PHILADELPHIA, 1967” floated in the air before the in neat white block letters.

“Anyone else seeing words floating in the air?” the hair asked right as they began to fade away.

“Wharton,” Donald said hoarsely. “1967? 1967?”

“Yes,” said the Spirit. He grabbed Donald’s arm and walked through a nearby wall. When the four of them stepped out of the grey darkness of passage they were in a room full of young people, navy blazers and ascots all around, cable-knit sweaters and Brylcreem, pretty girls in knee-length skirts and sweater sets. Frankie Valli crooned on the record player.

“1967?” the hat asked. “Where are the hot hippie girls? Where is the free love? This looks like fucking Happy Days.”

An older man, wearing a corduroy jacket over a turtleneck and smoking a pipe turned to the ghostly party. “There are no ‘hippies’ at the Wharton School of Business, you degenerate,” he said, addressing the hat.

“Who the hell are you?” the hat asked the man with the pipe.

“None of your business, you sad little id projection,” the man said and did exhale a cloud of fragrant smoke. He took two steps away and faded into the party crowd.

“Who the hell was that?” the hat asked the Spirit.

“He is the Spirit of Exposition, another Ghost who walks this night. Pay his irritation no heed,” said Young McCain.

“I remember this,” Donald said, growing excited. “I remember this.”

“Yes,” Young McCain said, his eyes becoming pools of oily blackness, “Your lowest point.”

Donald walked away, ignoring the Ghost, and slipped insubstantially through the throng of party-goers.

“This was the night!” Donald said excitedly. He walked through a shut bedroom door taking the hat and hair with him.

Three young men were in the bedroom, leaning over a nightstand they had pulled away from the wall.

“Try it,” one of them said.

“You’ll like it,” another said.

Young Donald Trump, all of 21-years-old said, “I don’t know. I don’t like drugs very much. Heck, I don’t even drink.”

“This isn’t like grass,” the tall one said. “It doesn’t make your dick limp and turn you in a commie. This stuff is fantastic.” He handed Donald the rolled up 20 dollar bill.

“DONALD!” said the hair in a shocked voice.

“This was just a great Christmas. Just tremendous,” Old Donald said.

Young McCain joined them in the bedroom and said, gasping, “This is not what we are here to see.”

“Are you out of breath?” the hat asked. “You’re a Ghost. That doesn’t make any sense.”

Young Donald leaned down and hoovered a fat line of the cocaine and Old Donald sighed.

“They sold me an eightball to take home,” Old Donald reminisced. “I didn’t sleep for maybe four days.”

The ghostly McCain stepped forward and plucked a piece of paper out of Young Donald’s cardigan. “This is what you are here to see,” he said, holding up to the other three travelers. It was a draft deferment form, stamped 1-Y.

Old Donald shrugged. “I had bone spurs,” he said and shrugged.

“You threw away your chance for glory!” the shade said. “Your chance for honor!”

“Your chance you get your balls shot off,” the hat said mockingly.

“It was a stupid, pointless war,” Old Donald said.

“COWARD!” the Spirit of Warboners Past thundered.

He stepped forward and tried to run his finger on the cocaine-dusted mirror. “Aw, nothing? Not even a little bump?” he asked.

Young Donald was writhing around, dancing to music only he seemed to hear.

“How do you feel, Donny?” one of his friends asked.

Young Donald grinned beatifically. “I feel amazing, like I could beat-up Godzilla and fuck King Kong!”

“YEAH!” the hat cheered.

“OK,” said the shade of McCain. “Fuck it.” He waved his arms in a complicated pattern.

Donald found himself back in The First Bedroom, the lingering scent of cigarettes and stale beer in the air. He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness. He gave the hat a parting squeeze, a placed his hair back on the credenza; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep.

 

McCAIN WAS DEAD: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Donald didn’t go, he wasn’t welcome, but McCain was dead. Old McCain was as dead as a door-nail.

Donald knew he was dead? Of course he did. His hat and his hair had both told him and they were both of well repute. McCain was dead.

How could it be otherwise? Donald had watched the nation mourn the passing of McCain, the po-faced men and the ladies hiding their lack of tears behind squares of lace. Donald and McCain were rivals for many years, an enmity growing plump between them toward the end. The country mourned performatively, mourned the passing of a man more for who he disagreed with than any love for the man himself. Donald was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but he was a man of politics on the very day of the funeral, and raised the flag from half-mast soon after.

The mention of McCain’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that McCain was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Donald never mentioned McCain’s name after he died, never dined with McCain’s wife or took a stroll in a park with McCain’s obese daughter. Donald continued on his business like McCain had never existed, never opposed him, was never loved like Donald wanted to be loved.

Nobody ever told him he would be a great President or a beloved President. No one stopped him in the halls of the White House to ask, with gladsome looks, “My dear Donald, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No reporters implored him to bestow an interview, none of his Cabinet members asked him over for dinner, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired of Donald the way into the history books.

But what did Donald care? His own counsel was very thing he liked. To own the libs, to womp the womp womp, to rave and rail on Twitter all day long with his only two friends was all Donald professed to care for.

Once upon a time–of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve–old Donald sat busy in his Oval Office. The door of Donald’s office was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond was practicing press conference statements. Donald had a fine large can of Diet Coke, but the clerk’s can was so very much smaller that it looked like a single swallow. The clerk pulled out her cellphone, and tried to tried to catch up on Twitter; in which effort, not being a woman of strong concentration, she failed.

“Happy Holidays, Father! HaShem save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was Donald’s daughter, the Jew-married Ivanka.

“Bah!” said Donald, “McNugget!”

“Holidays a McNugget, father?” said Donald’s daughter. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do,” said Donald. “Say Merry Christmas! What reason have I to be merry? You’re Jew-married and thrice-childed.”

“Married, yes. Now a Jew, yes. And I have three children. But you know this means I celebrate Christmas no more. Holidays, holidays. Happy Holidays! Come, then,” returned the daughter gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose?”

Donald having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “McNugget.”

“Don’t be cross, father!” said his daughter and sat in his lap. She ground her bottom into his lap and pulled his arms around her and giggled like when she was small.

“What else can I be,” returned her father, “when I live in such a world of fools as this? Happy Holidays? No, Merry Christmas, indeed. Holiday time to you but a time for Congress to not be in session and therefore not shutting down the government; a time for TV specials that I don’t star in, the end of the regular football season so there is no more kneeling; a time for a nightmare grove of Christmas trees to infest my home? If I could work my will,” said Donald indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Happy Holidays’ on his lips, should have a stiff steel tariff and be the subject of a Fox and Friends expose. He should!”

“Father!” pleaded Ivanka.

“Hottest of my daughters!” returned her father sternly, “Keep Hanukkah or whatever in your own way, and let me keep the legislative recess in mine.”

Donald leaned toward her and smelled her hair and shuddered.

“This is my only joy,” Donald said.

“Keep it!” repeated Donald’s daughter.

The press secretary in the outer room involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, she drained her Diet Coke noisily and burped lustily.

“Let me hear another agreeable sound from you,” said Donald, “and you’ll keep your Christmas by losing your situation! You’re quite a useful creature, Pie,” he added, “But a dozen land whales who could do your job beach themselves in Adams Morgan every day!”

“Don’t be angry, Father,” Ivanka said. “Come! Dine with us tomorrow.”

“Chinese food? I hate Chinese food,” Donald groused. “And no Hollywood film would please me.”

“Oh, Father!” Ivanka said despairingly. She leaned back and his hair did mingle with her hair.

“Why did you get married?” said Donald.

“Because I fell in love.”

“Because you fell in love!” growled Donald, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a Happy Holidays. “Good afternoon!”

Ivanka stood and Donald’s hair did whimper at the parting.

“I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute, Father. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party. But I have come to you in homage to the Holidays, and I’ll keep my wry Jewish humour to the last. So Happy Holidays, Father!”

“Good afternoon!” said Donald.

“And a Happy New Year!”

“Good afternoon!” said Donald.

His daughter left the room without an angry word, notwithstanding. She stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on Pie, who returned them cordially.

“There’s another moron,” muttered Donald; who overheard him: “the stout-hipped Pie, heart disease and a husband and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I should send her to North Korea.”

At length, the hour of shutting up the Oval Office arrived. With a dyspeptic glare, Donald put down his phone.

“You’ll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?” Donald demanded of Pie.

“If quite convenient, sir.”

“It’s not convenient,” said Donald, “and it’s not fair.”

Pie observed that it was only once a year.

“A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!” said Donald. “But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.”

Pie promised that she would; and Donald walked out with a growl. The Oval Office was closed in a twinkling, and Pie, with the long ends of her red slanket dangling below her waist (for she boasted no great-coat), waddled off to her DC home.

Donald took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy McDonald’s; and having read all Twitters, and talked quietly with his hat and his har, and beguiled them the rest of the evening with his Candy Crush, and went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had once housed a Negro and his wife; they were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building. It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Donald, the other rooms being all let out as offices.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the door to the Residence, except that it was very large and the knob is large and brass. It is also a fact, that Donald had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place. Let it also be borne in mind that Donald had not bestowed one thought on McCain, since his overwrought funeral. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Donald saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change–not a knob, but McCain’s face.

McCain’s face. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Donald as McCain used to look: with bald pate and liver spots, bandage on his nose and forehead. The eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That made it horrible; but as Donald looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knob again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. He looked around for the Secret Service agent that should have been near the door. He looked up at the security camera that he had unplugged months before.

His hat said: “What the fuck was that?” And his hair shivered on its perch. Donald opened the door, his hand touching nothing but smooth knob and looked into the room beyond. Nothing. His hat told him to look behind the door. Nothing. There was nothing, so his hair said, “Aw, shit, just close the door.”

But before he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face to desire to do that.

Tweeting-room, bedroom, panic-room, wig vault. All as they should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa; nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall. Tweeting-room as usual: wrist braces, retweeting tools, two Filet-o-Fish boxes, bidet on three legs, and a solid gold shitter.

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his hat and hair; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down to read a few late-night tweets.

Every tweet he read seemed to be about Old McCain.

“McNuggets!” said Donald; and walked across the room.

The door to the secret Kennedy fuck tunnels flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard a noise much louder. Donald and his hat and his hair moaned with fear. They heard a sound, clanking sound, deep down below where the mutated offspring of JFK live. Donald clutched his hair and hair to his chest.

“Who is there?” asked Donald.

“Oh, great,” said his hat, “Step up to be in a horror movie why don’t you?”

“It’s McNuggets still!” said Donald. “I won’t believe it.”

His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. “I know him,” Donald cried. “McCain’s Ghost!”

The same face: the very same. McCain with his baldness and dour expression, in the uniform they buried him in, starched and pressed; the medals on his chest clanking as he walked.

“What the damn hell fuck is going on?” asked Donald’s hat.

“I don’t believe it,” his hair said, quaking, and did shit dandruff onto Donald’s nightdress.

Donald looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

“What do you want with me?” Donald asked in a high queer voice.

“Much!”–McCain’s quarrelsome voice, no doubt about it.

“Who are you?” Donald’s hair asked.

“Ask me who I was,” said the spirit.

“I hate riddles,” moaned the hat.

“Who were you then?” said Donald, raising his voice.

The Ghost sat in a chair in and offered for Donald to do the same.

“In life, I was your rival, John McCain,” said the shade.

“Bullshit,” the hat spat.

“You three don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.

“We don’t,” said all three in uncertain chorus.

“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”

“I don’t know,” said Donald.

“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Donald, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of Big Mac, a blot of secret sauce, a crumb of McGriddle, a fragment of an underdone Apple Pie. There’s more of the Dollar Menu about you than Deathly Menace, whatever you are!”

“Good one, Donald,” his hat said. “I’m going to put that one on Twitter.”

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chest of medals with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Donald held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. His hat and his hair were blown backward, off his head and behind the chair in which he sat, both cursing and tumbling.

Donald fell upon his knees, and bowed his bald head. “Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”

“I come to help with your legacy” replied the Ghost, “and I don’t mean your Twitter archive.”

“I worry for my legacy,” said Donald. “I must. But why do you walk the earth, and why do you come to me?”

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its medaled chest and wrung its shadowy hands.

“You are medalled,” said Donald, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the honors I gained in life,” replied the Ghost.

“I made it medal by medal, and ribbon by ribbon; I got them being shot down so many times; I bear them for the time I spent as a POW. They are the pride of my Warboner. Is my Warboner strange to you?”

“I had bone spurs,” Donald said.

“Bone spurs! A totally real thing!” said the hat, riding as he did on the hair. They jumped into Donald’s lap and scaled to his shoulder and then climbed to his head.

“You missed your chance to create honor,” said the Ghost, “but it is not too late to become a great President. A beloved President. A President with statues and parks named after him. A President that has every excuse made for him.

“McCain,” he said, imploringly. “Old John McCain, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, McCain!”

“I have none to give,” the Ghost replied. “You must embrace the Warboner as I had done and be elected President which I could not.”

“But you were always a Never Trumper, McCain,” faltered Donald, “why would you want to help me?”

“The Warboner is its own end,” McCain said in sepulchral tones. “The dead desire only more dead to share their suffering.”

The hat and the hair were very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on this, and began to quake exceedingly.

“Hear me!” cried the Ghost. “My time is nearly gone. I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate, the failed Presidential candidate, never to be loved, a footnote of a joke in the history books.”

“I didn’t go to your funeral,” blurted Donald. “And you daughter is still quite large.”

McCain’s Ghost grimaced. “You will be haunted,” it resumed, “by Three Spirits.”

“Three more ghosts? This is the shittiest Christmas ever,” the hat said. The hair shushed it loudly.

“Without their visits,” said the Ghost, “you and your head gear cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first when the bell tolls One.”

“Couldn’t I take ’em all at once, and have it over, McCain?” hinted Donald.

“Like a ghost foursome,” the hat chipped in.

“Expect the second on the next hour. The third upon the next hour! Remember what has passed between us!”

The apparition walked backward from him; and at every step it took, the door to the Kennedy fuck tunnels opened a bit wider. McCain beckoned Donald to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, McCain’s Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Donald stopped and became sensible of confused noises in the tunnels, incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated down the dark damp stairs.

Donald looked down the stairs: desperate in his curiosity.

The tunnels below were filled with phantoms, each of them, like McCain, a failed Presidential candidate. Mondale and John Anderson, Bob Dole and Gerald Ford and many Donald could not recognize floated by, mummified from the neck down in bumper stickers.

“What the fuck?” the hair asked, pointing with a tendril, “Mitt Romney isn’t dead.”

“He might as well be,” McCain’s Ghost said, as clear and loud as if it were still in the room with them. “He will never know a proper Warboner…”

Donald closed the tunnel and locked it, double-locked locked and checked the locks a third time. And being, from the confusion he had undergone, or the fast food he had consumed all day, or his glimpse of the afterlife of politicians past, or the dull conversation of McCain’s Ghost, or the tiredness of his Tweeting thumbs, much in need of repose; went straight to bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant.

 

“What do you mean, ‘I have to stay here?’” the hat asked. It was humid in the Buenos Aires hotel room and his seams seemed bloated and tight.

“You have to stay in the hotel room,” Donald told his hat.

“But you’re taking him!” the hat wailed. The hair turned around a couple of times on Donald’s head and then settled in his usual spot.

“I can’t go all bald,” Donald said.

“He can’t go all bald,” the hair said.

“Put me in your suit pocket at least!” the hat pleaded.

“Secret meetings,” Donald said.

“Secret,” the hair agreed. “They check us for listening devices.”

“I’m not a listening device,” the hat said.

“But what if they confiscate you?” Donald asked. He drained the can of Diet Coke he was holding and dropped it on the floor.

“Maybe we should take him along,” the hair said contemplatively.

Donald crossed to his hotel minifridge and got out another can.

“Do they have Diet Coke in China?” Donald asked.

“Of course they do,” the hair said.

“Probably made out of fish or some shit,” the hat grumbled.

“If I ever go to China, I’m definitely bringing my own Diet Coke,” Donald said. He slipped the new can into his jacket pocket and walked to the door of the hotel room.

“Are you really leaving me here?” the hat asked.

Donald placed the TV remote on the bed beside the hat and said, “Just watch some TV, we’ll be back before you know it.” He donned his Tariff Man cape and stalked from the room, his hair cackling.

 

Meanwhile, somewhere in Buenos Aires traffic…

Jinping pulled the hat out of his coat pocket on his way to the summit meeting. “Speak to me,” he said, staring into the mirrored glass of the limo partition. “Speak to me.” The hat that read MAKE CHINA GREAT SOME MORE said nothing.

 

“TAR-IFF MAAAAN!” Donald declared as he leaped into the meeting room. The other G20 leaders stared at him, stunned into silence.

“Why isn’t anyone else wearing a cape?” he quietly asked his hair.

The hair said nothing, just waved a grim tendril at John Bolton’s mustache.

 

“GM fucked us!’ the hat cried. “We bailed them out and they fucked us! Fucked us hard. Fucked us like a minivan full of Little Leaguers!”

“Oh, calm down,” the hair said. “You’re going to rip a seam.”

“We raise the price of steel for those GM bastards, and this is how they repay us?” the hat wailed. “And right before Christmas?”

“Where’s Donald?” the hair asked.

“CHRISTMAS‽” the hat replied.

“I haven’t seen much of him since we got back from Mississippi,” the hair said.

“He’s been wearing the wig,” the hat said, grief hardening to sadism.

“The wig?” the hair asked. “The wig? He’s been wearing the fucking wig? The wig looks terrible!”

[Enter DONALD, a greasy mop of Bangladeshi orphan hair sits askew on his head]

“Hey, guys,” he said.

“Take that filthy thing off, Donald.” the hair said, his voice thin.

“Filthy?” Donald asked, taken aback. “It’s clean, totally clean. I had them run it through the dishwasher just this morning.”

“I’m your hair. Me. Take that thing off,” the hair said, bristling.

“Now you know how it feels, huh? So maybe back me up the next time he wears that retard USA hat,” MAGA Prime said smugly.

“That’s different. That’s just hats. This is hair. Hair!”

“‘JUST HATS?’” the hat screeched. “You take that back, you take that back right now!”

The hair jumped on the hat and they both rolled off the Resolute desk and onto the floor of the Oval Office.

[DONALD, TO CAMERA]

“We’ll be right back, folks.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh8ylMedDMM

[CAMERA UP]

[DONALD stands in a destroyed Oval Office, the hair and hat jammed down on his head. Shredded wig parts are stuck to his suit.]

“See? Isn’t this much better, Donald?” the hair asked.

“Yeah, it’s great. It’s so great,” the hat says.

“All you two do is fight,” Donald said. He walked behind his desk, unzipped and began urinating into his office trash can. “It’s unseemly. It’s unclassy. I want you two to stop. You should be like brothers.”

The hat mumbled deprecations.

“You should have a close and loving relationship, like me and Ivanka or me and Meliana and that creepy little kid who is always following her around. You know, the one she still breastfeeds.”

“Barron… your son,” the hair mutters.

“I’ve realized that I’ve been campaigning too much,” Donald said, “And traveling too much and I’ve let the homefront get soft.”

“And you’ve put on weight,” the hat said.

“I’m at the perfect weight for a President my age. We can’t all look like Vlad,” Donald said.

“You never even try to go shirtless horseback riding anymore,” the hair said.

“Let’s make a Week After Thanksgiving resolution, guys,” Donald said, sitting down in his office chair. “Let’s resolve to be more like our original characterization, OK?”

“Fine,” the hair said, “But, honestly, I don’t think I’ve changed too much.”

“You always been a low energy hack,” the hat told the hair.

Donald snorted at that. He rummaged through his desk and pulled a cigar from his humidor. He took a deep whiff along the cigar and sighed.

“And you’ve always been a racist, bigoted, fascist psychopath, you fucking junkie,” the hair spat back.

“Why, thank you,” the hat said. He sat up straighter on Donald’s head.

Donald lit the cigar and puffed at it until the tip glowed red.

Donald hit the intercom button on his desk.

“Yes, Mr. President?” the voice asked.

“Send her in.”

The Oval Office door opened and a thin blonde was pushed inside. Thin arms and legs, improbable breasts, a wide moonface covered in thick makeup. She said something a thick, guttural language and forced herself to smile.

“Vlad sent her,” Donald said and sighed contentedly.

“Зняти нижню білизну!” Donald told the girl.

“Only Ukranian I know,” he told the hat and hair.

The girl slid her flimsy panties off her boyish hips and stepped out of them when they hit the floor.

Donald puffed on the cigar for a few moments, leering, drawing hard until the fat tip glowed orange. Donald took it out of his mouth.

“Watch this,” he told the hat and hair while getting up. “Bill taught me this one.”

 

“More,” the hat said. “I want to fire more of them.” His voice became strained and he coughed a few times, then spit a splintered turkey leg bone onto the floor.

“We’ve already fired a lot of them,” the hair told him. “Maybe let’s wait for the swearing in of Congress in January.”

“Kelly. I want Kelly gone. He refuses to recognize my authority,” the hat said. He inched his way onto a sweet potato and settled onto it like a mother hen tending her eggs.

“Kelly keeps everyone in line,” the hair protested.

“I don’t care. We’ll put Corey in charge. He knows now how to take care of whiners.”

The hair made a noncommittal grunt and typed on a laptop for a few seconds.

“Mueller!” Donald yelled from the bathroom.

“This sweet potato tastes funny,” the hat groused.

“Maybe it’s a yam,” the hair said distantly.

“It’s not a fucking yam. I know what a yam is. This is a sweet potato and it tastes funny.”

“Is it maybe because it’s raw?” the hair asked.

“Probably,” the hat said morosely. He crawled off the dissolving sweet potato and went back to the turkey carcass on the table.”There’s still plenty left if you want some.”

“You know I don’t eat meat,” the hair said. He typed furiously on the laptop for a second.

“What are you doing over there?” the hat whined.

“Early Christmas shopping,” the hair said. “There are some great pre-Black Friday deals.”

“‘Pre-Black Friday deals?” the hat said, spitting out a gnawed section of turkey spine.

“Yeah, there are all sorts of…” the hair began.

“Hold on, shut up, I just got an alert from Twitter,” the hat said.

“Rude.”

“Hey, I’ve had to keep Donald social media afloat all damn week. He refuses to get out of the tub!”

“I can hear you!” Donald said in a singsong voice.

“I don’t care,” the hat reply in the same singsong. The hat rattled off a string of characters on Donald’s phone.

“All those trips to the wildfires really wore him out,” the hair said.

“Fucking autocorrect,” the hat muttered. “How do you spell ‘smegma?’”

“COOL!” Donald yelled. “My phone floats! Did you guys know my phone floats?”

“It’s not a real phone,” the hat muttered.

“That’s great, Donald. So smart of you to get a phone that floats for the bathtub!’ the hair yelled.

“Smegma!” the hat said.

“How am I supposed to know how to spell it?” the hair asked.

“Look it up on the computer,” the hat said and sighed heavily.

“‘S-,” the hair said, “‘M-.’”

“Hurry up. I’ve got to get this tweet off.”

“Uh. Maybe you should come over here,” the hair said.

“What it is?”

“Just come over here.”

The hat crawled off a wad of dressing and made his way over to the hair.

“What?” he asked querulously.

“Looks at the autofill in the search line,” the hair said.

SMooth and painful bump near anus

“Uh…” the hat said.

“I mean this wasn’t you, right?” the hair asked.

“Of course not,” the hat said angrily. “My anus is 100% perfect. Solid gold. A+, number one, awesome. My anus could be the cover model for American Anus Monthly!”

“I just thought if Donald was having, you know, butt problems, I’d know about it,” the hair said.

“I mean, I guess,” the hat said. “But you are all the way up on the head. Maybe butt stuff just doesn’t make it up that far?”

“What if…” the hair began and trailed off.

“What if what?” the hair asked.

“I’m just going to go for it,” the hair said. His tendril typed rapidly on the laptop.

Hair club for men
Hair in the drain
Hair in my nose
Hair in butt infected

“OK,” the hair said, ‘That’s not so bad.”

“Try ‘my hair,’” the hat whispered.

My hair talks to me
My hair is my best friend
My hair ecards Valentine’s Day

“Well, I guess that’s not so bad,” the hair said.

“Do it,” the hat said. “Do it. I can’t not know now.” The hair typed once more.

My hat might be Hitler

“Hitler? HITLER? He thinks I might be Hitler?!?”

“Well…” the hair said.

“Well, what? What? Just spit it out.”

“Well, you don’t like Jews very much.”

“Well, I mean, yeah,” the hat said.”They are greedy and cheap and can’t be trusted and they killed Jesus. And then there’s…”

“Hey, look, more results,” the hair said.

My hat and hair are always fighting
My hat makes sex noises
My hat watches me take baths

The hat groaned and the hair shifted around uncomfortably.

“I only watch him in the bath in case he falls,” the hat said rapidly.

“I don’t care,” the hair said. “None of my business, bruh.”

“I’m getting all pruney!’ Donald called from the tub.

“Did you get the California stench off you yet?” the hat called.

“I’m working on it!’ the President of the United States yelled back.

The hat slouched away from the laptop and back to his meal. Bones began cracking.

“Are you done eating that pardoned turkey yet?” the hair asked.

The hat burped loudly.