At 8:55 p.m., my advisors leave me in my office, just as they do every Sunday night. They don’t want to be around me for the next hour. No one does.
You see, there’s a tiny bomb implanted at the base of my skull. The bomb has a micro receiver that will detonate the bomb if it gets triggered. The doctors who implanted the bomb reassured me that death would be instantaneous due to severing the brainstem from the nervous system. Most of the time, there isn’t even any blood. The victim just keels over as if they’d fallen asleep. Still, I can understand why no one wants to see it happen in person.
I’ve been through twenty-six weeks of this, and it hasn’t gotten any easier. One hour is sixty minutes, or 3600 seconds. My smartwatch reports that I take thirteen breaths per minute, so that’s 780 breaths in an hour. Except I breathe faster during these particular hours; anxiety (panic) will do that.
Who did this to me, and why don’t I have the tiny bomb taken out?
I’m the President of the United States (aka POTUS) and the bomb comes with the office.
After one too many of those presidential elections pitting the worst candidate ever against the second worst candidate ever, the American public demanded changes. That led to the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the Constitution, which created a recall mechanism for POTUS.
Thanks to the wireless era, it’s become democracy in action. Once a week, from 9 to 10 p.m. Eastern Time, every registered voter can use their unique identification number to text “RECALL” to the federal government. If a majority of voters do so, that’s it for POTUS.
The first year of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment resulted in twenty-two presidential recalls. After a few months, political leaders realized their mistake in having voters text “yes” or “no” and determining whether “yes” was a majority of votes cast. Voters who disliked the President’s party were far more likely to participate, and there was only so much the President’s party could do to motivate their own voters. Congress changed the system to its current format of texting “recall” or not; and it would take a majority of registered voters to recall the president.
Back then, there was no implanted bomb. Being recalled was just being fired, “thanks for your service,” and, of course, forfeiture of the presidential pension. The problem was that serious politicians stopped trying to become the president. The country got subjected to one unqualified clown after another in the White House. In fact, more than one vice president, upon ascending via the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, tried nominating a totally incompetent successor as a form of job protection, as in “if you recall me, this is who is taking over!” (It didn’t work; those were usually back-to-back weeks of recalls.)
To try to stop the flood of attention-seeking narcissists, Congress came up with the idea of the implanted bomb. Rumor has it that some legislative intern was inspired by an old movie, Escape from New York, where the hero has a tiny bomb injected into his carotid arteries to motivate him to complete his mission. The thinking was that voters would be less likely to recall the president if it meant actually killing a person.
As kids today would text, LOL. It was the product of underestimating some combination of the public’s cynicism and anger, the intensity of voter partisanship, and sheer ghoulishness. The first POTUS to be implanted with the brain bomb lasted one week. He wasn’t that bad of a guy; in fact, I considered him sort of a friend, someone you could grab a beer with and talk politics without getting angry. His poll numbers weren’t even that bad. I think the public—half of it, anyway—wanted to see if this bomb thing was real.
The next few POTUSes tried to govern from the middle. If forty percent of the voters are going to be against you no matter what and forty percent are on your side, which leaves twenty percent up for grabs. As long as you keep them from texting “RECALL,” you’re probably safe. Probably. That’s what half a dozen of my predecessors thought. It’s what I thought too, when I decided to seek the position.
To pass the time, I’ve tried reading a book, watching mindless TV, playing computer games, and working out. Depending on my mood, one of those sometimes helps pass the time, although it’s not always predictable which one. I do know watching TV news is definitely not helpful. And forget about checking social media.
I use the presidential tablet to look at my latest poll numbers. The White House IT department created an app that aggregates the national polls with an overall summary indicator: green if the weighted average approval rating is above 55 percent, yellow if it’s between 48 to 54 percent, and red if it’s below 48 percent. I can look at more specific poll factors to see how I’m doing on particular issues, like taxes, climate change, race relations, national security, the economy, and so on.
Overall: yellow (50 percent). I should be cautiously optimistic . . . although the error margin is +/- 3 percent. I survived a week where it was yellow (48 percent) – that was harrowing, but I figured even if all 52 percent who disapproved were willing to text “RECALL,” some would be too lazy to follow through. The analysts say the real danger zone is if the approval rating drops below 43 percent.
You can resign during the Sunday recall period; the bomb won’t be triggered until 11:00 p.m. It’s happened before, including one former POTUS who waited until 10:57 p.m. If you ask me, that’s cutting it too close. What if they couldn’t stop the transmission in time? It turned out that guy chose wisely, though: the recall votes amounted to 53 percent of registered voters.
I look at the box with the resignation button.
10:58 . . . 10:59 . . .