Some packing tips for a president
Mr. President, you’re going to need boxes. A lot of them.
And though it’s tempting to have the Secret Service drive you around to the rear of liquor stores in search of sturdy reusable containers, I’m going to suggest you make an exception just this once and go to Costco and buy whole bunch of fresh boxes.
They’re not that expensive, and this is probably something you’re allowed to charge to the government.
In fact, see if you get can get boxes made from nonrenewable resources that are difficult to recycle. Stay on-brand, sir.
And tape! The boxes need to be taped up as you assemble them, and I would recommend buying a few more rolls of tape than you think you actually need.
Know that no matter what brand of tape you buy, it will periodically slide off the saw-toothed bar and attach itself to the mother roll, requiring you to slowly turn the roll of shiny transparent tape, looking for the phantom edge and to ask Ivanka if she would scrape at the edge with her fingernails to pry it back up. This is where you really miss Kellyanne. Those long Cruella nails!
Valuable time can trickle away while you’re fussing with the tape roll is what I’m saying.
Speaking of the clock, maybe we better have “the conversation” because it affects everything else.
Are you sticking around in the USA or, you know, hightailing it out of here? Because if it’s the latter, you should worry less about TikTok and more about tick-tock.
You should leave while you still have presidential immunity. That means you get to skip Inauguration Day, which you were dreading anyway. Everybody masked. Laura Bush passing cough drops down to the Obamas and being all chummy. Ugh.
If you stay in country, you’re going to be embroiled in so many criminal and civil court cases it’s going to feel like your whole life is produced by Dick Wolf.
Your niece Mary told the New Yorker you’d be in “serious trouble” if you didn’t hang onto the presidency. When I read this week that you’re trying to have the Justice Department bring back firing squads, I thought, “That’s a guy who’s spending Christmas 2021 beyond our borders!”
The blockbuster IRS case. The New York D.A. Cyrus Vance follow-themoney fraud case. The separate New York Attorney General civil fraud probe. The E. Jean Carroll case. (She wants a DNA sample. Ick.) The Summer Zervos case. These things are not subject to federal pardon.
And if you’re leaving, are we talking a Jason Bourne thing with new identities where Melania opens a little moped rental shop on Mykonos and you sell grilled octopus and retsina out of a sandy beach shack? That’s very romantic, but you might as well paint “EXTRADITE ME” on the roof of the moped joint.
No, I assume we’re talking about a safe haven. Ordinarily, I would suggest Montenegro. Beautiful homes overlooking the Adriatic. No extradition treaty. A largely white population. (Let’s not kid ourselves about where your comfort zone is.) Only 20 percent Muslim. Melania can practically walk to Slovenia, which she will probably try to do. Montenegro it is.
Except remember when you shoved its prime minister out of the way to get a better spot in a NATO leaders photo? Also, you and Tucker Carlson on a different occasion used Montenegro as an example of a who-cares? nation that we might be dragged into defending because of international treaties.
You: “Montenegro is a tiny country with very strong people ... they have aggressive people. They may get aggressive, and congratulations, you’re in World War III.”
Just great, Mr. President. Really swell.
OK, let’s get back to packing. You’re going to have to be ruthless about what to keep and what to purge. I really urge you to rent a dumpster. The optics will not be great, but you’ll thank me later.
Remember that gifts from foreign heads of state have to be transferred to the National Archives, which means the archives are going to get stuck will all kinds of portraits of you, because at a certain point the global community identified that as a major gift preference. I believe the prime minister of Vietnam gave you depictions of yourself in back-to-back years, the first one rendered in stone granules, the second one gold-framed.
Vice President Mike Pence has less stuff to move. For example, the expensive British clock he received from the Crown Prince of Bahrain was destroyed by the Secret Service, just in case it was a surveillance device. I would have kept it and had disinforming conversations in front of it. “Fortunately, no rival nation has penetrated the cloaking device on our Death Star.”
Of course, maybe it was just a clock.
Label everything carefully. “Items made of chocolate.” “Stuff Adam Schiff does not know about.”
There is a kind of Zen to packing for a move. A “chop wood, carry water” focus that frees the mind from other entanglements. Be present in the task and fend off stray thoughts.
Speaking of stray thoughts, you should probably double-check my claim that Montenegro does not extradite. Have one of your crack lawyers, Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell, look into it.
Or, you know what? Maybe just pick a name from the yellow pages.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.