McNeal wondered what he should do now. He didn’t want this lead to go cold. “Listen, I could head down to DC the day after tomorrow. It might take five or six hours to get down there, driving. But we can meet up. I need to know more. How does that sound?”
“That sounds fine. I can meet with you in the afternoon at the Willard. I’m speaking at a conference there. How is four o’clock?”
“That works for me. I’ll see you in the lobby. How will I recognize you?”
“I’ll find you. I already know what you look like. Caroline showed me a picture. She kept it in her wallet at all times.”
Thirteen
Dawn’s first light flickered through the wooden blinds as Andrew Forbes sat at his desk in the White House, checking emails on his cell phone. He shared a small office with the personal secretary to the President, right outside the Oval Office. He was waiting for the President to stop by, as he always did. Forbes was usually the first person to greet the President in the morning and often the last to go home at night.
He leaned back in his seat, wondering what the big guy would want today. Invariably it was just a chat. It might be about baseball, Wall Street, or more small talk, filling a few minutes before a national security briefing. The President liked small talk. Andrew and the President played golf together at home and abroad. But he also liked gossip. The juicier the better.
Forbes was a constant presence for the President. He was always on call. He got along with everybody. It might be the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company or a cleaner in the White House. He had time for everyone.
Each and every time, he would be with the President at meetings, always there in case the President wanted something.
He knew the President loved movies. The President’s favorite director was John Ford. Westerns—good guy, bad guy. They often watched movies at night over a beer.
The President was fascinated by Hollywood. He lapped it all up. The big guy pretended to hate all the liberal actors with their focus on identity politics and actresses and their virtue signaling. But he was dazzled by them.
Forbes, on the other hand, like his father, loathed each and every one of them with a passion. Handing out food parcels to Syrian refugees with photographers in tow, fundraising for transgenderism in the Third World, advocating for women’s rights in Vietnam, setting up tax-deductible charitable foundations to fund outreach programs for Sub-Saharan Africa, promoting literacy programs for women wearing blue burqas in rural Afghanistan, actresses and singers with white savior complexes adopting photogenic orphans from Darfur, establishing global human rights advocacy centers, creating toy giveaways for destitute children in Cambodia, being photographed posing arm-in-arm beside rainbow-painted pedestrians outside the United Nations, building schools for orphan girls in Rwanda, flying to Davos on private jets as UN goodwill ambassadors and giving primetime speeches on global responsibility, calling for foreign intervention under the guise of UN humanitarian work, hiring ghostwriters to pen New Yorker essays calling for foreign intervention to “defend our values at home and across the Middle East,” and hosting glittering charity dinners in Beverly Hills for starving Haitians, all before they fled back to their gated communities in Pacific Palisades, Bel Air, or Malibu. Virtually none of the wretched fuckers who talked about giving back were interested in giving back to America’s poor. A handful did, to be fair. But most of Hollywood’s waxed and surgically enhanced, plastic, globally aware liberal elites didn’t give a fuck about Americans down on their luck. They were embarrassed by real Americans.
Their arrogance was astounding. Tone deaf, they just didn’t get it. They all had child-like messiah complexes, wanting to show the world how good they were.
The more he saw of them, the more Hollywood elites made him want to leave America. It was a pitiful sight, liberals wanting to ram their diluted Marxism down everyone’s throats. Global citizens. What the hell was that? What about the forgotten in their own backyard, the people who had lost their jobs and houses and had to live in their cars? The men and women, Black and white, who suffered year after year? Who endured real hardships? No actor came to their aid. Occasionally they pulled up to a South Central soup kitchen with a camera crew. The white savior to the rescue! But whatever the rights and wrongs of those narcissistic fuckers, the President was fascinated and beholden to the glitter in some ways. He enjoyed when they turned up at the White House. Column inches. Prime time minutes on chat shows. That’s how he saw it. And he was right. He leveraged whichever stars wanted to back his policies. Invariably country stars with amphetamine habits. Sometimes a whacked-out hip-hop multimillionaire who objected to paying his taxes rolled up in his new designer range of leisurewear. It was a win-win for everyone.