The anonymous instructions on a folded piece of pink paper pushed beneath my condo door specified a one a.m. rendezvous at a parking garage on K Street. If I agreed, I was to move a pot of geraniums from one side of my balcony to the other. Intrigued, I did so.
The deserted garage was bathed in a neon gloom, and I was beginning to regret my decision to come when I noticed a glowing cigarette and two inches of amber holder protruding from behind a concrete pillar. As I moved toward it, a muffled command rang out to stop where I was! The speaker was attempting to disguise his voice. Unfortunately for him, that voice—high, piping and infused with a syrupy prep school drawl—was impervious to disguise, so I wasn’t surprised when my old Choate classmate and rising White House star, Pumphrett, emerged from behind the pillar. “I had you going there for a moment, didn’t I, Cushy?” he chuckled. (For the benefit of new readers, I should mention that “Cushy” had been my school name at Choate for reasons my lawyer has forbidden me to discuss.)
“I was hornswoggled, Pumphrett,” I told him, my voice oozing with sarcasm. “But what on earth are you doing? Why all the mystery?”
“I wanted to tell someone the truth in case anything happens to me. I’ve been frightened to death ever since I got Comey fired.” It astonished me to think that the Comey business was Pumphett’s doing. And what was this about something happening to him. Did he fear violence? I told him my credulity was painfully strained.
“Don’t be so sure,” he objected. “Have you gotten a load of this Schiller fellow?” I summoned a mental picture of the President’s hulking enforcer and hatchet man, Keith Schiller. Perhaps Pumphrett had a point. “I’m convinced he carries a truncheon,” Pumphrett gabbled, “you know, from his days on the NYPD. And people say he isn’t afraid to use it. He took Spicer to the basement for a little ‘talk’, and Spicer was walking on tiptoe for a week afterwards.” A shiver ran through my friend. “That was for some minor mistake. My sin is much greater. I am the man who knows too much.”
I decided to chivy him along: “And just what do you know?”
“Before I tell, Cushy, can I count on your friendship and discretion, old school ties and so forth?” Pumphrett was calling on the binding hoops of steel forged at Choate, where we had not only been school chums but also, briefly, fellow members of the Publius Decius Mus Society (see footnote). I assured my friend that, barring his death and/or dismemberment, he could rely on me never to disclose what he was about to say—and as token offered the Choate handshake. This—to the uninitiated—seems quite a normal handshake, but is in fact a great deal more self-assured. He was convinced, and began to unspool a truly astonishing skein of circumstances.
“As you know, Cushy, the President is obsessed with loyalty. This is just one element in a swirl of psychoses, but with a firmer foundation than most. In fact, it’s eminently rational: He simply can’t bring himself to believe that anyone would be foolish enough to be loyal to someone like him.”
“Doesn’t he realize that loyalty is reciprocal?”
“Realize’ might be a trifle strong. He senses it in some elemental way. That’s exactly the problem. Since he bestows no loyalty, he expects none, and no amount of groveling will convince him otherwise. The more abject you are, the more he’s convinced you must be sneaking something by him.”
“You were always a champion groveler.”
“I thought so, too, until I attended my first senior staff meeting. I tell you, Cushy, Uriah Heep himself would have trouble keeping pace. Trump despises the toadies and distrusts the rare exception, like McMaster. That leaves him with Ivanka. But she goes home in the evening. I, on the other hand, have been sleeping in my office since the eviction, so one night Trump sent Schiller down to goose step me up to the quarters.”
“Just a moment, there, Pumphrett.” I was incredulous. “Surely you can’t mean Trump has taken to confiding in you. But you’ve always been a speck, a mote, hardly a perturbance in the space-time continuum.”
“It’s because of my obscurity. As Schiller growled in my ear on the way up: ‘I wouldn’t be missed.’ At any rate, there I was. Trump got straight to the point. He was surrounded by enemies, he said, who were trying to destroy him. I was thinking that whoever these enemies were, they were making an excellent job of it, but I kept my face blank. He went on to say that precisely because I was a nonentity and no one was sure what I actually did, and also because he could crush me like a grape (‘and it would be so easy, believe me’) he valued my opinion. Then he asked about members of the staff.
“Did he ask about Spicer?”
“He started to, but then he said he knew about Spicer. Spicer was making him look bad. Of course, he was too quick for Spicer. He was too quick for all of them.
At that juncture he cackled maniacally and rubbed his absurdly small hands together. I thought this might be a good time to make my excuses, but Schiller tapped me on the shoulder with something that felt heavy and wooden so I sank back in my chair. Trump wasn’t through with me.
‘Well, how about Cohen-Whatsis?’ he inquired.
‘You don’t to worry about him, Mr. President. Without you he’d be flipping burgers at Denny’s.’
‘And Miller?’ he wanted to know
He’d be working the counter.
‘OK, how about Cohn?’
“No problem there. You’re money in the bank to him, literally.
“‘Well then, how about Comey at the FBI?’ Here, Cushy, I hesitated. I had heard that Comey had a childish preoccupation with the law, and, of course, the pesky FBI was hot on the trail of Flynn, Manafort, Stone, and the rest of that odious crowd. But, on the other hand, we were in the President’s private quarters. Who knew who might be listening in? So I was about to vouch for Comey, but I had hesitated a beat too long.
’Aha! Just as I thought,’ he ejaculated, slapping a Federal period side table so hard it cracked. My mind was racing. I could see where he was going with this and wanted to head it off. An idea struck. Why not have Comey to dinner, just the two of them, and ask him if he’d be loyal? Trump could make some kind of record of the conversation—perhaps a tape—just to keep Comey honest. Of course, he’d want to keep that part strictly secret.
‘That’s just what I’ll do,’ he shouted. ‘That’s brilliant, Pomfritts. I’ll say he asked for the dinner. Maybe if he thinks he’s keeping his job, I can get him off Flynn’s back, and stop the G men breathing down my neck on this Russia business.”
“Well, Mr. President, I wouldn’t…,”
‘I’ll get that on tape. Then I’ll can him.’ At this point he stood and paced back and forth, rubbing his chins. ‘But how to explain it?’ Finally it was if a bulb had gone off and he turned his gaze to me. ‘Pomfrites, I’ve got it!’ He was all enthusiasm. ‘You write a memo to me and recommend Comey be fired.’ I asked what reason I could give. He said it could be some legal thing—maybe how Comey screwed up the Clinton email business. Well this struck me as purest fantasy, and I tried to tell him that nobody would swallow something as ham-fisted as that, but he was seized with the idea. ‘Just don’t say anything about the Russians. No Moscow! No Collusion! Got it?’”
Well, Cushy, all I know about the law I’ve learned from conversations in various holding cells over the years, and I told Trump so. He was forced to agree. I suggested Sessions, but he waved that away saying he needed somebody with a reputation for integrity. I racked my brain. Didn’t Sessions have a deputy of some kind? Neither of us knew. Schiller was still there in the corner, cracking his knuckles and guarding his bowl. Trump sent him out to get the name, he grunted and came back after a few minutes with the name Rosenstein. ‘Good,’ said Trump.
But what if he refuses? I asked.
‘He’s new. He’ll do it,’ pronounced Trump, and that seemed to end the matter. Now, he was all smiles. ‘You know, Pomfrites,’ he told me as I went out the door. ‘You’re smarter than you look.’”
“I suppose that must be gratifying—in its way,” I commented
“Yes, I suppose,” answered my friend. “Still, I couldn’t help wishing that the same were true of him.”
Footnote: The Mus society was anonymous, so there is no record of it in Choate archives. By rumor, it was open only to those who considered participation in petty intellectual squabbling the moral equivalent of demonstrating bravery on the battlefield. Pumphrett and I resigned together when we became aware that, according to the Roman historian Livy, when the eponymous Mus fatally charged the enemy lines during a battle near Capua, he was in command of the left wing of the Roman Army.