It was one of those DC nights when the air’s so thick you can pour it on a waffle with a side of cream. Even the reptiles were dripping sweat, but enough with the Federalist Society.

Kamala’s on the road at a Rural Broadband junket in San Antonio, I’m in the Observatory kitchen nook nursing a Pamplemousse LaCroix — straight, slice — licking my wounds from the classified documents rumpus. Tell the FBI you found the 2012 inaugural ball seating plan under the president’s barcalounger, next thing you get Dead-Eye Jack Smith busting your chops and the First Lady ghosting you on the real housewives of the West Wing WhatsApp group.

There’s a local anchor on TV saying the White House marching powder case has just been closed, no perp: they found bupkes. I smell a rat. I may have spent the last two years hosting the Whitehouse creche and emceeing Middle School Science Fair luncheons, but this legal dog still has a few tricks — never write off the Hoff!

First stop: the second born, the burnout. Guy whose hard drive leaks strippers and cocaine so hard it has its own pole-dancing permit. I pop Hunter’s door, come in strong, catch the punk off guard in the middle of an om shanti with the circadian rhythms going. “What the fuck’re you doing, Doug!?” kid yells as I tear his duplex apart. That’s when I hear a voice from his Zoom window, “This is highly inappropriate in the middle of a healing session.” I leave the kid to his guru in Sedona, swiping a matchbook from his kimono on the way out.

Matchbook’s from the Senate Dining Club, number scribbled in the corner in red lipstick. Could be a Sharpie. Maybe, biro? I’m pretty sure it’s lipstick. Breathy voice at the end of the line. “Meet me in the Peninsular in 30.” I roll into a cheap room packed with sharks, floozies, two-bit hustlers and delegates from the Ethanol Buyback Recovery conference (meeting on mezzanine level) to find a dame in a Nordstrom pantsuit and a stare that could split glaciers:

“Yellen! What are you doing here?”

“I’m advising the second son on ethical economic policy initiatives.”

From the corner of my eye a sketchy dude eyeing me from the taco station, I chase him out the exit door and across the plaza, into the Capitol right to the Raeburn room…where it’s the Congressional Freedom Caucus bingo night.

It was Gaetz eyeballing me like an Orca scoping a superyacht! He’s with the whole crew. Boebert! Greene! Biggs! Gosar! Maxine Waters..? What’s she doing here? Oh, she wants to borrow their Nespresso machine. I take Gaetz aside, Boebert follows. Gaetz is whining about how measly his congressional salary is, how he has to take his staffers to hotel conventions with free all-you-can-eat taco, pizza and build-your-own-salad stations when Greene tells him to stop being a bitch and eat paleo with the big boys. Boebert hits back, Gosar gets stuck in. A brawl breaks out. Greene has Boebert in a necklock with one arm, Biggs in the other, and Gosar clamped between her thighs squeezing his head like a neo-Nazi walnut while Gaetz cowers in the corner using a staffer’s toddler as a human shield. I split. I’ve a hunch Waters’ presence is no coincidence, but just as I’m about to collar her two lunks pop my nut like a carnival hammer.

Now I find myself in Jack Smith’s corner office. Dead-Eye stares at me squeezing a stress ball with a concertina-ed titanium shell and microbead fill. His flunky, who looks like he just swallowed a wasp and shat a lemon simultaneously, does the talking:

“Back off Hoff, this case is too hot. You don’t want to go where it’s taking you. Trust me.”

Well, that was the subtext. He’s actually rabbiting on about me having too much time on my hands, maybe I want to support my wife on her travels a bit more, Special Counsel Smith is quite capable of handling things himself and will ask for my help if he needs it, yada yada. It’s all blarney, I’m getting too close. I can smell the truth like the backstage odor in the fifth round of a sumo final. Smith, silent as a mortuary slab, doesn’t take his eyes off me. Even when he transfers the stress ball from his left hand to his right then in-between his chin and neck in a kind of nodding duck motion, except the duck has a titanium ball under his chin. Which is disconcerting.

The flunky releases me. Now I’m walking across the Capitol green, crunching leads: Hunter, Yellen, Gaetz, Waters, Smith, all-you-can-eat taco stations….? I’m missing something. Something big. Been there from the start.

The match book!

Midnight in the Senate. I enter a shotgun office on the second floor where the queasy neon shines like month-old velveeta. A wizened old man, face dessicated by decades of rage and corruption looks up at me.

“Grassley!”

Chuck Grassley, senior senator from Iowa. 90-year-old prince of timeless evil.

“You’re the speed-hopper who left an eightball in the West Wing: we both know it!”

“I’m not sure if the senator knows what an eightball is”. So, okay, his small agriculture business adviser was there too.

“Don’t yam me, pencilneck. I know the skinny. State of the Union dinner ’21, you ask Kamala where they sell crack in downtown DC, we figured it was just another racist micro-aggression from a geriatric burnout, but I know you’re a hop-head now. Look at you: 90, jumping steeples. There’s only one way you ain’t no Feinstein: you’re king-pinning a coke racket that funnels product straight from the streets to halls of Congress. Smart. Tight. No one realized. Till now.”

Silence.

“Perhaps the Senator was being kind of mildly racist back there. He was born in a different time, you know.” Grassley’s comms guy. He’s in the room too.

“I wish the 50s never ended, is that racist? Will someone fix me a root beer float.” That’s Grassley.

“Either way, Senator Grassley does not deal in flake cocaine.” Comms guy.

“Just cos he looks like Elmer Fudd in wire-rims and sits on the Judiciary Committee you think you can flim-flam me? I’m the Second Gentleman! I chaired law firms! I teach part-time at Georgetown, motherfucker!” I leap from my seat, grab Grassley, and start popping that freeze-dried Iowan russet off the cowhide walls till he tells the truth.

Which is when the tazer struck my glutes.

A week later now. Here I am, in the Green Room of an Oklahoma Fox Affiliate while Kamala’s interviewed about reproductive rights in native American communities. They said it’s best I don’t stay in DC unattended. I say powerful people are darn scared. The truth is out there. A headline on my Twitter feed: half a trillion’s missing from the upcoming budget negotiations. “Missing..?”

Sounds like a fresh case for Doug Emhoff, Second Gentleman, White House gumshoe. Guardian angel in the town where the deep state swims breast stroke and corruption never sleeps.

Doug Emhoff: Second Gentleman, White House Gumshoe was originally published in The Washington Boast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Esteemed President-Emperor Trump! Congratulations and Salutations from the Republic of Greater Tokyo and the non-irradiated provinces of Northern Japan!

Your munificence is such that you have settled for mere elevation from President to President-Emperor on the occasion of your epochal 5th election triumph. Others with your mental, cognitive and semi-professional golfing skills might make themselves Emperor, World Commander, or even Universal Godhead but you humbled yourself with President-Emperor — just as the Supreme Court advised that the Founding Fathers always intended. It reminds us that we in Japan once had an emperor descended directly from the sun, though not as radiant as you and your most recent wife, Empress Hailee Steinfield.

Esteemed President-Emperor Trump! In recognition of your well-known fascination with toilets, toilet systems, flush mechanisms, removal of sensitive documents via flush system mechanisms and overall personal cleanliness we present you with a Toto S6000 AI Smart toilet decorated in gold leaf with a Treviso marble flush handle and platinum seat hinges.

Esteemed President-Emperor Trump! The Toto S6000 is the most advanced toilet in the world and the first of its kind from the renowned Toto toilet corporation, manufacturer of the UltraMax, Aquia, Neorest, Carlyle, Guinevere, Legato, Soiree units and inventor of the world famous Tornado flush mechanism.

Esteemed President-Emperor Trump! This toilet has an advanced flush system that can dispose of 2000 cubic grams of toilet paper (equivalent to 300 sheaths of US government standard issue 120 gsm foolscap paper plus Secret, Top Secret or Special Compartmented Information folder covers), sectioned cistern reservoirs consisting of purified water, bleach-hydroxide, advanced bleach hydroxide and nitric acid should you require the liquification of flash and pen drives or government issue encrypted hard drives of up to 2 petabytes in less than 30 seconds.

Esteemed President-Emperor Trump! We are humble admirers of your lustrous orange-auburn-golden-hued hair (such is its uniqueness there is no name that can fully describe it — perhaps burnished Mango Gold? Burnt Orange mezzotint?) Your selfless decision to gift the world with more of its bouffant yet still-firm body by increasing it by a foot in height on each of your election victories since you triumphed over the so-so-nasty Kamala Harris (in the wake of Sleepy Joe’s electrocution by high-voltage popcorn machine during that whacky 2024 debate season) makes it a now supreme 36 inch pompadour of towering majesty.

To emphasize: Your hair is in itself a wondrous edifice fit to rival even Trump Tower Kinshasa — the tallest man-made structure in the world to bear the effigy of a human face and almost twice the size of its nearest rival, the Musk Dome in Pretoria.

Esteemed President-Emperor Trump! Knowing how important the maintenance of your hair is, the Toto S6000 has been equipped with precision-guided nano trimmers for the careful tending of your exultant pubic mass. The S6000 also has bleach-dye micro-guns for color correction of all follicles growing in the groin, testes and sternum. There is too a specially-designed imaging engine that allows the S6000 to shape your pubic mass into the hairstyles of your most reviled enemies from Hillary ‘We Locked Her Up’ Clinton to Jack ‘Bad luck with the judge’ Smith, Merrick ‘shoulda nailed me when you had the chance’ Garland, Meatball Ron (who has quite literally been turned into a meatball, now encased in a plastic laminate sphere above the entrance to Trump Mountain Disneyworld), Bill Barr, Lizzo, Chrissie Tiegen and the Bella Twins. Why? Nothing speaks dominance like framing your private parts in the hair furniture of your vanquished enemies

Esteemed President-Emperor Trump! Your use of toilets to peruse, store and dispose of sensitive materials — which is of course entirely your right — is legendary. As is your ability to simply ‘think’ a document into any relevant classification category. That’s why the S6000 has been equipped with a neo-generative AI retinal scanner able to read the neural patterns of your frontal lobe directly through your eyes. This way the S6000 can understand precisely which documents you think you have declassified, identify them straight from the servers of the CIA, NSA or the National Reconnaissance Agency and upload the information directly to your mind for you to peruse, distribute to interested parties (at the correct price) or destroy as you wish!

Esteemed President-Emperor Trump! No — WAIT! Don’t touch that brush — No — NONONO!!! Please don’t use it that way —

Esteemed President-Emperor Trump..? I’m afraid that is correct. The S6000 still requires a toilet brush. Yes, that, um, well — Mm-hm. It’s what you just brushed your resplendent pompadour with.

Esteemed… President-Emperor, uh, Trump…. So. Right. Okay… I’m afraid that’s right, the S6000 can’t do anything about 36 inches of collapsed-though-still resplendent hair. However, I believe the British Delegation comes bearing a diamond-encrusted Dyson Supersonic hairdryer.

You might want to fast track them past the North Koreans?

The Presentation Of A Toto S6000 Electronic AI-Enabled Smart Toilet To President Trump was originally published in The Washington Boast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As recent events have shown: cooking professionals make great insurrectionists too

The world is still reeling from the shocking news that chief of Russia’s Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, mutinied, took control of the city of Rostov and was set to storm Moscow when a last minute deal gave him refuge in nuclear-armed Belarus and ended the crisis.

For now.

Called ‘Putin’s Chef’, Prigozhin rose to power as the Kremlin’s head caterer and CEO of a chain of hotdog restaurants, which puts him into a rich tradition of caterer, broilmaster and other cooking professional-turned-revolutionaries who’ve chopped, fried, julienned, steamed, grated and fomented overall societal upheaval in times past.

Perhaps it’s the fact they command teams of subordinates in fiery carcass-strewn environments, their skill and familiarity with blades of every size or that everyone fears and obeys them without question that makes catering professionals such formidable leaders. History offers some examples:

Hatotep, Taster-in-Chief to the Middle Kingdom Pharaohs. Little is known about Hatotep except for some hieroglyphic fragments and the spectacular burial chamber in which he was placed. What we can deduce is that he was principal kitchen-master to the Theban dynasty and invented a roast bird dish that — based on a partially preserved hieroglyph — appears to be some kind of marsh fowl, covered in a cumin rub and cooked in barley oil. The dish was so popular Hatotep was made taster-in-chief to the court. For reasons that remain obscure, Hatotep appears to have used this position to poison the entire dynasty during a banquet for a thousand courtiers all of whom are mummified in their death throes while seated at long granite table interred in his commemorative pyramid. A mummified Hatotep himself is with them at the head of the table, in a poise of perfect grace. Carbon-dating puts his corpse 30 years later than those of his victims, which suggests he carried on ruling long after mass-poisoning his employers. Later hieroglyphs show the cumin-basted fowl was superseded by a fried flamingo recipe.

Gaius Cassius Tuttus, Ancient Roman creator of the Tutti Frutti. His candied fruit snacks were sold on the streets, in galleys, chariot races and became so popular among the populace of first century Rome he was elected Senator. From there, Tuttus built a power base, whipping up sugar-crazed mobs to fight enemies of the Republic, then allying with Caesar against Pompey. When Caesar ordered him to disband his confectionary-fuelled militia and dispose of a hundred tons of candied grapefruit into the Tiber, he tried and failed to assassinate the Emperor prompting the lesser-known quote: “Et Tu Tutte?”

Yesugei, Master Broilmaster to Genghis Kan. Famed Mongol barbeque chief and roast animal specialist, Yesugei was famed for broiling so many whole yaks, cows, bison and elk for roving bands of the Mongol army the central Asian air would turn black and sweet with fragrance days after. Pioneering the ‘whole carcass brochette’ — in which medium-size animals were skewered onto large catapult lances in-between oversize vegetables grown on the fertile steppes — Yesugei turned his hardened band of livestock hunters into a private army that took control of the Korean peninsular and is widely credited with inventing bulgogi barbeque and the wagyu beef stack.

Cuitopec, the Obsidian Goddess. Yes there are woman caterer-revolutionaries too !— in this case Cuitopec, High Priestess of the Ocelot God Thumami, deity of mountain flowers, shapeless terror and kitchenware. Cuitopec proved so adept at preparing and cooking the flesh of deceased enemies in the Dandelion Wars she was made a deity herself — called the Obsidian Goddess on account of her legendary set of butcher knives. She soon gained command of an army of Totonac warriors so fierce and intelligent they destroyed a regiment of Spanish Conquistadores by pretending to admire their glass beads while disabling their muskets and sealing their armour with glue. Unfortunately Cuitopec and her men died of indigestion after consuming the scurvy-riddled bodies of said conquistadores in a peyote-laced avocado broth.

Billy Boy Murphy was the most famed potato-fryer of 17th century London, plying his trade in Southwark and widely credited with inventing the potato chip. When Puritans accused his wife of being a witch he incited a London mob to violent revolt. Lured into negotiations in the hull of an Italian trade ship docked on the Thames he was poisoned and drowned in a vat of Carovigno tomatoes by duplicitous Puritans. However, his jerkin pocket still held a sack of fried potatoes and which were eaten later by one of his famished assassins, now widely credited with creating the ketchup dip.

Pierre St Eustace was a superstar Parisian patissier banished to the French Foreign Legion for crimes of moral depravity. Sent to Algeria, he incited his troops to revolt and they marched on Oran. An inveterate racist, St Eustace would only serve his men white foodstuffs like processed flour, sugar, milk, onions, chicken meat etc and they mostly perished from malnutrition and chronic halitosis. He fled for his life, hiding in a Berber camp where he was photographed trying to tip a gallon sack of white navy beans into their communal broth. There are no further records of his existence.

So Commander Prigozhin fits into a long line of food industry insurrectionists. Now that he’s been given refuge in Belarus, it’s worth noting his love of flambée… Bananas Foster were the signature dish at his 5-star Old Customs House restaurant in St Petersburg. If history teaches us anything, it’s that what starts with a hot dog bun can end with a tactical nuclear missile.

YEVGENY PRIGOZHIN AND OTHER CATERER, BROILMASTER & PASTRY CHEF-REBELS IN WORLD HISTORY was originally published in The Haven on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.