I wrote the post below for Your Angry Pediatrician after a recent sit down to watch “Goodfellas,” one of my favorite mob movies (the first two Godfathers, and Casino are on the short list as well).

Listening to Henry Hill’s monologues, it was too perfect a fit for today’s lunatic, depraved criminality in and around the White House. I started imagining Trump making the same speeches, and this little essay emerged. It is about 85% verbatim from the screenplay.

Enjoy.

Greetings from Rublyovka

With apologies to Henry Hill, Nicholas Pileggi, and Martin Scorsese

Musings of The Don in exile

September 28, 2031

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States. Even before I went to the golf course for an afterschool job, I knew I wanted to be a part of them. It was there that I knew I belonged. To me, it meant being somebody in a city full of nobodies. They weren’t like anybody else. They did whatever they wanted. They parked in front of hydrants and never got a ticket. In the summer, when they played golf after closing, nobody ever called the cops.

But then my Russian friends tipped me off that, it turns out, you don’t have to choose! I could be both. So here we are.

My parents would have been happy to see me, especially in the White House, even when it was a dump before I fixed it up. I was the luckiest kid in the world. I could go anywhere, do anything. I knew everybody, and everybody knew me. Wiseguys would pull up and come on in. My father and Roy taught me, you have to know people. The rest of the family could never understand, but I was a part of something. I belonged. I was treated like a grownup.

And now I live here. I mean, I’m not complaining, better than that first place in Sochi. It was warmer there, but they kept freaking out about the fucking drones and that asshole Zelensky. So now they’ve moved me here, close to Vova’s place outside Moscow, but it’s too fucking cold here. He said he could move me to Brazil or some place warm. Or maybe Thailand. I like the sound of that, Thailand, like a mai tai, or tie me up.

I don’t like calling him Vova. Sounds too much like volvo. But I can’t call him Vlad, like he’s a vampire. I know he doesn’t like it when he finds out we used to call him Pootie, but then he starts mentioning the videos, so I tell everyone to zip it about the Pootie stuff. Oh, that Jeffery and his fucking island. I should have had that taken care of a long time ago. Bada-bing, problem solved.

Zhuzhi, Mo, all the boys, they say we just have to ride this out, wait until we get our people back in place. But Marco and J.D. keep fucking things up, and the Democrats are investigating everyone. It’s a mess. So they say just wait here until it blows over.

It’s not like the old days. Oh, we had it good. For us to live any other way was nuts. To us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, they were dead. I mean, they were suckers. Like those losers in the military cemeteries. What did it get them? They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again.

Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the City, or the world for that matter, all with those five big letters across the front. I bet 20, 30 million on the stock market over a weekend and then I’d either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the banks, then I’d just borrow more. And they gave it to me, no questions.

Didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. When I was broke, I’d go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off the regulators. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking.

These are the guys Don Jr. put together for what turned out to be the biggest heist in American history: the crypto heist. The Chinese guys and the boys had it all figured out. They just kept telling me, now you’ve got 5 billion, now it’s 10 billion. It was awesome! Literally printing money. Only Witkoff was driving us nuts – just because he set this up, he felt he could bust Jr.’s balls for an advance on the money we stole. He didn’t mean anything by it; it was just the way he was.

After a while, it got to be all normal. None of it seemed like crime. It was more like we were all enterprising, making a few bucks hustling, while all the other guys were sitting on their asses, waiting for handouts. We weren’t brain surgeons, we were blue-collar guys. The only way we could make extra money, real extra money, was to go out and cut a few corners. And it worked, bigly.

The best thing I learned from the Russians is that everyone eventually has got to have them as a partner. Any problems, they go to Vova. Trouble with the bill? They can go to Vova. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, some terrorist fuck, they can call Vova. But now the guy’s gotta come up with our money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.

You know, we always called each other good fellas. Like you said to somebody, “You’re gonna like this guy. He’s all right. He’s a good fella. He’s one of us.” You understand? We were good fellas. Wiseguys. To become a member of a crew, you’ve got to be 100% in the game. See, it’s the highest honor the Russians can give you. It means you belong to a family and crew. It means that nobody can fuck around with you. It also means you could fuck around with anybody just as long as they aren’t also a member. Like that putz Zelensky. It’s like a license to steal. It’s a license to do anything. As far as we were all concerned with me being made, it was like we were all being made. We would now have one of our own as a member.

And now it’s all over. And that’s the hardest part.

Today everything is different; there’s no action. I have to wait around like everyone else. I can’t even get decent food – right after I got here, I ordered a double quarter pounder with cheese and large fries, and I got some kind of horsemeat steak and bowl of borscht. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook, at least a Russian one. Maybe the lawyers can get me a deal to go back to Mar a Lago. Like Halina. Oh, Halina. Man, she was easy on the eyes. Sweet Halina. But only if they get rid of all those protesters and clean up the mess they made.

I wonder why my security guys now all have accents?

The preceding is a work of time travel fiction. Any resemblance to the fucked up people and events of our too-ridiculous-to-believe timeline is purely the work of imagination.