ANG BUHLAY AY MAGANDA

I’m pretty sure they’re taking my phone away when I’m sleeping to check my drafts on Twitter, the amazing ones I haven’t beamed out yet. So I asked Rodrigo to get me extra phones, secret phones, what they call the “burners.” He needs to buy them with cash, so we came up with a great way to do that—every night I sign the tie I wore that day with a Sharpie, which he then sells in a special market on the Internet.

“ANTHONY,” I asked, “is it true your Secret Service lie detectors are the gold standard, the best there are?”

“I believe that’s correct, Mr. President.”

“Okay, great. This weekend the First Lady and I are going to play ‘Truth or Dare,’ and to make it more fun, more presidential, I want to hook her up to one of your lie detectors, with one of your expert guys running it. Okay?”

“That would be a serious breach of regulations, Mr. President.”

Rodrigo did bring up the possibility that my first and third wives might both be Russian agents, working for Putin, since they both grew up in the Communist countries back then and the First Lady’s dad, Viktor, was an actual Communist official. I really, really hope it isn’t true. But it might be. Keith, my security guy, my security guy in all the White Houses, worked for me for twenty years, is going to check it out.

My wife is almost forty-eight. I’ve literally never been with a woman that old. I stopped things with Ivana when she was forty, when we’d been together thirteen years; I stopped things with Marla when she was thirty-five. My wife and I have been married for almost thirteen years. When Rodrigo said to me “Ang buhlay ay maganda,” I was shocked, because I thought he was being funny, saying, “Angry that Melania’s getting laid” or something, because Rodrigo really never jokes around. But it was just another Tag-along proverb—it means “Get it while you can.”

HOPE HICKS, my very loyal and very beautiful director of strategic communications, Hopester, just turned twenty-nine. I just reread the statement she issued about me at the beginning of the summer completely on her own. One of Rodrigo’s relatives printed it up in that fancy art writing they use on wedding invitations, so I can refer to it whenever I want. “President Trump,” it says, “has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.”

Beautiful, right?

I think we’ll put it on our White House Christmas card this year.

HOPE AND CHANGE. That’s going to be a new Trump slogan. I thought of it.

OR A VAMPIRE. She used to talk so much about vampires. Or a robot. It could be possible the First Lady is a robot. I actually saw that on the Internet.

MITZI:

Is Melania like you? and if so, is it like in The Stepford Wives, where she’s good, or like the girl in Blade Runner?

I DON’T THINK SO. This morning she stepped on a piece of broken glass that was somehow on the floor right next to her bed and she bled a lot. Plus, Barron definitely came out of her.