I walked into my home office and saw the external hard drive on my desk, where it had sat for the better part of two weeks. The hard drive had one file on it: a video that showed Donald Trump engaged in urine-soaked relations with four Russian prostitutes. It was the most powerful weapon that progressives had to dismantle the Trump regime, and I had no idea what to do with it.

Oh, sure, I could have posted it on Facebook. In retrospect, that may have been the smart thing to do. The only problem with that was that it would be posted under my name, and that was the last thing that I wanted. Because of the role that I played in the 2016 primaries, I had been warned by progressive elements in the FBI not to take a visible role in the resistance. Posting the pee tape to social media would be about as visible as such things get. My family and I would immediately become a target for incandescent white supremacist rage. I couldn’t let that happen.

If you enjoy the ongoing adventures of Justin T. Fairchild, Social Justice Warrior, be sure to check out the new Liberty Island e-book featuring America’s favorite Constitutional Trotskyite. SNOWFLAKE’S CHANCE: THE 2016 CAMPAIGN DIARY OF JUSTIN T. FAIRCHILD, SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIOR is available for download at Amazon.

Even doing something simple like sending the pee tape anonymously to the CNN newsroom had its risks. I didn’t see how I could get away with it. I mean, you have to put your return address on stuff you put in the mail. Anybody could figure out that I’d sent it, and then I’d still have to deal with the same right-wing pushback.

But at the same time, I was still a social justice warrior, and I still had to figure out some way to fight back. But I wasn’t sure of the right way to go about it. I wasn’t even sure who to ask. My wife, I thought, would tell me to throw the pee tape away, and I couldn’t see doing that. I knew if I called my Aunt Joan, she would probably take the pee tape off my hands, but she would yell at me and call me an idiot. My mother would probably just screen it at the next Yale faculty meeting.

I honestly couldn’t think who I could have an honest talk with about the pee tape. I needed to find someone that would share my concern, but that would have my best interests at heart. I spent three days cold-calling every phone number on the MSNBC exchange hoping to get Rachel Maddow’s voice mail, but that didn’t work. I was at my wit’s end when my dad called.

“Hey, sport. How’s the grandchild?”

“He’s fine, Dad. Learning to walk and everything.” Richie was ten months old now, and was showing an admirable anti-authoritarian streak, by which I mean he was gnawing on all of the furniture and divesting himself of his diaper at every possible occasion.

“Almost old enough to put in day care, then.” This was a not-so-subtle attempt to push me in the direction of finding a new job, or else going to graduate school. Staying home and taking care of Richie for the last five months had helped me grow in a lot of ways as a person, but it wasn’t helping out my resume much. I knew that Dad was right, and that I ought to start looking for some kind of job, but the employment prospects for Constitutional Trotskyites was kind of thin on the ground in rural New Jersey.

“I need to start thinking about that. I have kind of a… project I’m working on at the moment.”

“Do tell.”

I couldn’t tell Dad the truth; he’d already warned me about getting involved any further in politics, and he wasn’t wrong about that. I knew he wasn’t a knee-jerk Trump supporter, but I knew he didn’t want the Administration targeting Fairchild International in some way. But he had my best interests at heart, and would give me good advice.

“I had this idea to try to get this… I guess you would call it a production… out to the public, but I don’t know the best way to do that.”

“A production? You mean like a stage play? Or interpretative dance? You’d have to ask your mother about that.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

“I mean, without knowing the details, it’s hard to say. What are you going to do, try to get people to read your campaign diary? Because, to be honest, I don’t think that’s going to have a huge market, son.”

“It’s… kind of a short film.”

“Oh. Like a documentary?”

“You could call it that,” I said.

“Well, then. First thing you’d want is to get an agent.”

“An agent?” I asked.

“Sure. An agent can tell you whether you’re on the right track, whether there are any commercial possibilities in what you’re working on. He can connect you with the right people in the business, get your foot in the door. I have a client in Los Angeles who owes me a favor.”

“Thanks, Dad; that would be perfect.”

❄  ❄  ❄

“Well, now we know that Richie isn’t a good flyer,” Emma said.

We were somewhere over the Nevada desert, a little less than an hour from LAX, and Richie had thrown up all over my shirt. It happened without any warning at all, one moment, he was sound asleep in Emma’s arms, and then he woke up, stretched, and threw up all over me.

“You’re going to have to throw that shirt away once we get off the plane,” Stacy, Emma’s mother, said. “You can get a new one at the airport.”

The only way I had convinced Emma to let me go out to Los Angeles to visit the agent was to let her and Richie go along. And then Emma told her mother about the trip, and Stacy had asked if we were going to Disneyland.

“Well,” Emma said. “We hadn’t actually discussed…”

“I AM NOT MISSING MY GRANDSON’S FIRST TRIP TO SEE MICKEY MOUSE.”

So my mother-in-law was along for the trip. Which was fine. She could go to Anaheim to take pictures of Richie next to large anthropomorphic mice, and I could talk to a Hollywood agent about the pee tape. Just one big happy family.

When we landed, I went to the bathroom to try to clean up, and Emma went to the bathroom to deal with Richie. Stacy went out onto the concourse and bought me a lime-green polo shirt. It was a size too big, but I didn’t care. I threw away my sour, reeking Oxford shirt and put the new shirt on.

“What are you wearing?” Emma said, when she came out of the bathroom.

“It’s nice,” I said. “Stacy got it for me.”

“Mom, that shirt has the Augusta National logo on it.”

“It does?” Stacy said.

“Mom! Augusta National had a policy for years excluding women! They still only let a few women golf there, and they’re either corporate greedheads or Bush Administration warmongers.”

“Excuse me for making sure that my son-in-law has a clean shirt to wear.”

“Can we just get to the rental car place?” I asked. “Before they run out of car seats.”

“You children these days,” Stacy said. “Everything’s so political.”

Little did she know.

 

❄  ❄  ❄

 

“You’re telling me you have the pee tape,” the agent said.

His name was Christopher Baxter. He was about my age, or a little older. He had a full beard and piercing eyes.

“I have the pee tape,” I said.

“How did you get said pee tape?”

“I bought it. For twenty thousand dollars. From a Russian spy in the parking lot of an IHOP in Parsippany, New Jersey.”

“Of course you did. I mean, it is not as though you found it in a mayonnaise jar under Funk & Wagnall’s back porch.”

I assumed this was a reference to something. I am very bad at references, especially references to things that don’t make any sense out of context.

“I have the pee tape,” I repeated.

“Then let’s see it,” he said.

I attached the external hard drive to my laptop, and hit the play button on the screen.

“We’ve got a BIG problem,” the laptop said.

“That’s not the pee tape,” Baxter said.

It was not the pee tape. It was Peg + Cat, a delightful children’s television show about mathematics, but that was not the pee tape.

“Problem solved!” the laptop said. “Problem solved! We solved the problem, and everything is awesome! Problem solved!”

“Wait a minute,” I said. I started clicking random files on the external hard drive. One of them had to be the pee tape. Instead, I got Peppa Pig and Bubble Guppies episodes.

“It’s on here, I swear,” I said.

“Look, I have a conference call with Charlize Theron in five minutes,” Baxter said. “If this is some kind of practical joke, it isn’t funny.”

“It was on here. I swear. My wife must have put some cartoons on there because we brought the baby to see Disneyland. Take your conference call, and I swear, I’ll show it to you.”

Baxter marched out of the conference room we were in, back to his office, and I frantically tried to search the laptop for the pee tape file. I called Emma, trying to mask my panic.

“Okay,” I said. “Do you know…”

“RICHIE,” I heard her shout. “STOP yanking on Goofy’s ears like that, honey.”

“I know you’re dealing with Richie right now, but…”

“I mean it! No Dole Whip for you, young man.”

“Emma, I just need one second…”

“Grandma is putting him in the stroller. What is it again?”

“That external hard drive. You put all those TV shows on it.”

“Right, that’s why you got it, wasn’t it? So he could watch TV on the plane if he got fussy. Please stop pulling on Grandma’s necklace, sweetie.”

“But there was a file on there…”

“There was? Oh, yeah, there was some kind of file with Russian characters on there; I deleted it. It looked like it was corrupted or something, and it was taking up half the space.”

Oh, my God.

“Emma, sweetheart, did you happen to save the Russian file onto a laptop or anything?”

“No, why?”

Because we just lost the pee tape, the one thing that could bring down Donald Trump, that’s why. “I can’t explain it, but that was a really important file.”

“I looked at it,” Emma said. “It was some kind of weird porno. I don’t care if you want to watch that kind of stuff, sweetheart, but we can’t have Richie looking at it. Are you OK? Because you sound like you’re breathing funny.”

“Just hyperventilating a little, that’s all.”

❄  ❄  ❄

I walked out of the agent’s office into a beautiful California spring day. I had let my beloved wife accidentally erase the pee tape, the best weapon that the Resistance would ever have. I looked down on the sidewalk, and there it was, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame. I resisted the urge to be sick all over it, but it was a close thing.

******

Photo by Glenn Zucman