Author's Note: I don't usually put in an author's note, but I feel I have to mention some facts beforehand. I do a lot of stories that parody real life events, however this one-shot is special in particular. This one-shot will revolve around a letter to President Ronald Thump from a nine year old boy named Dylan Prescott who goes by the nickname "Pickles." As I suspect, you know who Dylan "Pickles" Prescott is a reference to, however, I did not choose to reference Dil randomly. In late July 2017, the White House Press Secretary actually read a letter to the President from a boy named Dylan who goes by the nickname "Pickle," and when I heard this I knew I had to make a story about it. So, now that that's out of the way, please enjoy my story.
While most of their lies were about Thump personally, on Wednesday, July 26, 2017, the Thump regime broke another bizarre record. At 2:30 PM, Eastern Standard Time, TNN aired the White House's daily press briefing. For the first six minutes all that was on the screen was an empty podium in the remodeled press briefing room, a room plated in gold with the UST flag situated on a pole on the left and the White House logo placed on the wall behind the podium. Soon after, a door on the left side of the small room opened up and out came Press Secretary Rex Pester, along with Secretary of Education Christine Weemer, Chief of Staff Meinrad Wyatt Stellmacher, and a few other advisors.
Weemer and the advisors sat on a row of chairs next to the door while Pester, a man in his sixties with a red-haired toupée who still wore his signature look from his BIG Action News days back in Los Angeles, a pair of white shoes with brown pants, grey belt, black dress shirt, moss green tie, and yellow suit jacket. He greeted the audience of TNN journalists, who all had pre-written questions handed out to them before the press briefing, with his iconic large-tooth smile. After a short introduction, he passed the podium over to Secretary Weemer for her short rant about her department's plans to "reform" public education, which was really about gutting its finding and cracking down on dissent on college campuses.
As soon as Secretary Weemer was finished giving her speech, Pester returned to the podium, and said, "Thank you, Secretary Weemer. Now, over the last few months I have come to know President Thump very well. He's an exemplary human being who's been giving it one hundred and ten percent when it comes to making America terrific again. As a thank you to his supporters, the forgotten men, women, and children of this country who the president is fighting so hard for, we are going to shake things up a bit. Every once in a while we're going to read a letter or email the president received from one of his supporters."
Pester then pulled a handwritten letter out of one of the podium's compartments, and said, "I'd like to initiate this tradition by reading you a letter from 9-year-old Dylan."
Pester held up a sloppy written letter riddled with so many punctuation and grammatical mistakes that no normal nine year old could have written it, and proceeded to read, "Dear President Thump. My name Dylan Prescott but every body calls me Pickles. I'm 9 years old and you're my fovrit President. I like you so much I had a birthday about you. My cake was the shap of your hat. How old ar you? How big is the White Hose? Ho much monny do you have? I dont now why peeple dont like you. You seme nice can we be friends? My pitcher is in here so if you see me you can say hi. Your friend Dylan."
After finishing reading the letter, Pester put it down, rubbed his eyes after reading the illegible letter, and chuckled before repeating the words he had once said on a news report nearly thirty years ago, "Ah, childhood, a time of joy, a time of innocence."
For the remaining twenty minutes Pester answered the questions that had been given to the reporters by his superiors and answered them in a way that portrayed Thump in a positive light and his opponents negatively. Pester ended the press briefing a minute before three o'clock and exited the press briefing room with Secretary Weemer and the group advisors following him through the door they entered. While some of the advisors went their own way, Pester, Secretary Weemer, and Chief of Staff Stellmacher all headed towards the Oval Office. Thump had remodeled the office to better represent him after Kabadaian's Purge. He plated the walls and the Resolute Desk in gold; he even replaced the desk's door that once concealed President Franklin Roosevelt's leg braces with a golden panel bearing his family's crest. The crest doesn't even belong to his family, in true Thump fashion; he stole it from another family and slapped his name on it. The crest used to say "Integritas," Latin for "integrity," on the bottom, now it says the opposite, "Thump." Other objects in the room were also replaced; the carpet and drapes were all replaced with gold versions, and the window behind Thump's desk, the UST flag, and a table holding framed pictures of Thump, his family, and a picture of Russian President Vasily Patrushev, shirtless and flexing his muscles while sitting in his office overlooking Saint Basil's Cathedral, overlooked three fountains with golden statues mounted above the nozzles.
Stellmacher was set to give an interview with TNN in a few minutes, so he was setting up his lapel microphone. Unfortunately for him, the device had turned on by accident, capturing the conversation that was about to unfold. When Pester, Weemer, and Stellmacher entered the Oval Office they found President Thump at his desk writing down something Attorney General and Counselor to the President Angelica Pickles, the second in line for the Presidency, dictated to him.
"Okay, then end it with something about how he watched your speeches while he was in the hospital and it helped him move on from there," Angelica said.
"I got it, Tits, I'll write about how my speeches helped this guy," Thump replied using his nickname for Angelica, and claiming he came up with her idea, something he constantly did.
"So that actually happened to you?" Patrick Koerner, the Senior Policy Advisor in his early thirties with virtually shaved off dark hair and a receding hairline who once claimed that the powers of the president are "very substantial and will not be questioned," asked.
"Yeah, my mom made me volunteer as a candy stripers and I tripped and broke my nose. But then I got an idea from watching TV, and hey, I got a nose job at thirteen," Angelica said as she pointed at her nose.
"Done. Look at my phenomenal work, I mean, it's just amazing," Thump said as he held up another letter written in sloppy handwriting and full of mistakes.
"Oh, yes sir, it is amazing," everyone in the room said, sucking up to their boss in order to keep him from getting angry at them.
"So, do you have any more stories to fake some more letters?" Cody Peltzer, the dark haired Senior Advisor to the President in his mid-thirties and Thump's son-in-law, asked.
Angelica though it over for a few seconds and replied, "Oh yeah, I've got tons. Like, this one time when I was a kid I knocked over all of the Cole Slaw and the FBE followed me all the way to Florida. Or, at least that's how I remembered it."
"That reminds me of the time I got rid of the Director of the FBE for secretly investigating me. I remember I got a call from Patrushev and he said that was Jacob Comley was looking into my ties to Russia, so I fired him, literally. I had him taken out, fantastic!" Thump said, admitting the only reason he had gotten rid of the FBE Director was because he was uncovering dirt on him.
"Okay, so maybe something like this person was wrongfully accused of the crime and when you got rid of Comley things got better for him? That's a great way to spin this story," Peltzer suggested while he sat at the couch.
"Well, we're not really lying, I mean, there is a real person named Dylan Prescott, he was once nine years old, and people have called him 'Pickles,'" Angelica added.
"Fine, while you guys figure this out, I'm going to watch some TV and see all of the great stuff people are saying about me," Thump told his staff.
As Thump dazed off watching TV, instead of leading the country as he had promised in the campaign, Angelica became exited and exclaimed, "Ooh ohh, I've got another story, we can't really use it for a letter because Kabadaian is basically doing to the people in my story what Comley was doing to Thump. Koerner, go get everyone, Trickum, Hershowitz, Szarka, Antonis, Mangold, especially get Kraskell, he should know who I'm talking about. I shouldn't even be telling you guys this because it's so top secret, but what the hell. Okay, here's a taste of what it's about; so basically I grew up with these twins and you'll never believe what they did, or should I say who they did? Spoiler alert!"
While Angelica hyped up her story to the other staff, Thump kept turning his head from the TV to his staff because he could have sworn the conversation going on was the same one being played on the TV. It took the man with a notoriously short attention span a while to figure out the audio from the room was being played on national TV, but like the saying says, "even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while." Everyone began to notice Thump's head move back and forward and when they saw why he was looking everywhere they realized that their conversation had been leaked. The secret that Thump had really written the letter from Dylan "Pickles" Prescott, and was planning to write and have Rex Pester read more, was out.
Everyone in the room immediately became suspicious of everyone else, they all had a guess who the leaker was, but when Stellmacher pulled the mic receiver out of his pocket everybody realized he was the leaker. All of a sudden, the TNN feed was cut and the White House Director of Communications, Francis Lee Barnum, entered the room and ordered the staff out of the office. F. Lee Barnum had joined the Thump team the previous Friday and he had big plans for the future of the regime. He believed that Chief of Staff Stellmacher was a leaker, a person releasing secret information that incriminated many people in the regime.
"Wyatt is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac," Barnum told Thump.
He went even further and impersonated Stellmacher, saying, "Let me leak the fucking thing and see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Barnum for six months."
The fact of the matter was that Barnum did not know for a fact that Stellmacher, an establishment Republican who once called for Thump to drop out of the race a few weeks before the election when a tape of him using profane language became public, was the leaker, but he felt as if he was the leaker. He was the one who tampered with Stellmacher's mic receiver, used his connections as Communications Director to have TNN air the audio, and make it look as if Stellmacher was deliberately leaking a private conversation. Thump fired Wyatt Stellmacher the following day, much to Barnum's content, and made Secretary of Homeland Security Admiral Roy Davis Jr., a tall man in his sixties with grey hair and a family history of military service, the new Chief of Staff. This new shakeup made Admiral Davis Jr. one of three members of the Thump regime to hold multiple positions, the others being Kabadaian and Angelica. As for the letter Pester read, the majority of the country accepted that they were not real, but after time had passed he was back at the podium reading letters full of spelling and punctuation letters that were written by the man who was supposedly in charge of an entire country.