No Proof That’s Mueller’s Nom de’Plume

Notably absent from the bestseller lists

         The world’s wealthiest man had risked death and ruination, crushed rivals, murdered enemies and miscalculated very little in his rise to Russia’s dictatorship, a black box kleptocracy that transferred to him so vast a personal fortune its difference from the Russian GNP amounted to a rounding error.
        Boredom now mostly afflicted Vladimir Putin, but in the Moscow dawn hours of November 9, 2016, as monitors alit with the US election results, a nearly forgotten sensation of pleasure stirred in him. The biggest prize in human history had just dropped in his lap.
        Vladimir watched the new oaf-colossus President elect of America lumber onstage to a frenzied reception. His hooded sea-blue eyes glinted and he removed the translation earpiece to stay the idiot babble. Several of his translators had initially been at pains to explain that the man’s impregnable gibberish was beyond any mere language barrier. Vladimir soon understood Trump’s crystalline characteristic was greed, which he knew better than any other human frailty, save fear.
    
         On one screen, America’s bolshevik masses wildly cheered their new leader while other screens showed the ashen faces of defeated Democrats and dumbstruck news anchors. Putin tossed back his vodka with a smirk. Not for a second did the eleventh-hour swing state tallies dropping in algorithmic precision like dominoes deem mentioning, of course. That timing was a special fuck you finesse he had personally conducted.
        The wealthiest man in the world hadn’t survived decades of Kremlin churn and mastered KGB psyops and global financial politics without fully understanding American hubris. A fraud need only scale itself bigger and bolder than their pitifully unwarranted self-opinion.
        Putin had made the right offer to the precisely right candidate in the perfect moment of history and needed only one final covert push. It was laughable how surgically small and obvious the push was; as laughable as this childish country’s bottomless ignorance.
        Didn’t a ragtag army of Macedonian teens scatter their so-called left and decide comical undecideds by the millions with nothing but stories made up on their computers? Didn’t Americans ignore voting machine security so pathetically porous YouTube videos clocked 10-year olds hacking them as fast as one makes a sandwich? Didn’t they predictably pretend sense and decency and vote for hate? ...if they bothered voting at all.
        Vladimir sat back with a second vodka and felt another strange emotion, a deep rising of secret envy released and replaced with cold revulsion for the United States of America.
        Which was now his bitch.