AN: Before you start reading the chapter I just wanted to go ahead and point out that my depiction of Republicans in this story at this stage has clearly been an exaggeration: basically, I'm generalizing and magnifying certain striking certain traits that have come up in some Republicans, starting during Obama's presidency. So, if it feels like I'm caricaturing Donald Trump all the time, please bear in mind that this is not meant as an attack on Republicanism or Republicans in general. Just to make sure I'm not offending anyone ;)

The first time Sara had stood before an audience, she had realized what a truly fickle little thing time was. That was middle school, by the way, a presentation on FDR's New Deal, which Sara had taken very seriously. A clock, on the opposite wall, stared Sara in the eye throughout the awkward preliminaries when she cleared her throat, adjusted her hair (green move) and wrote the title of her first section on the board. Writing on boards is an extinct breed by now, but she'll never forget the feel of chalk in her sweaty hand – it would take her years and years to build defenses against those shows of weakness, and moist palms were the hardest to shake off, worked so closely with human instinct. Sara shook her fair share of sweaty hands, even inside the White House, which served as evidence that not everyone could lose the habit.

There was no particular reason why Sara should remember that sixth grade presentation, except from that lesson it taught her about time. How you can't rely on your senses at all to help you estimate how much has gone by since you've started to talk. When she was halfway through her first section, she would have sworn at least fifteen minutes had gone by, with all those eyes peering at her, staring it seemed at the anxious rashes growing on her collar and making them redder, but she was down only to three minutes, the clock said. Later, when she grew more confident, focused on her facts and her message rather than the faces of her classmates, ten minutes flew by faster than ten seconds, and she had to rush through her last section.

Well. Now, she thought she ought to have known that time in the White House would be as treacherous as it had been, during that first presentation, and eighteen-hour days would turn into months faster than she could comprehend.

During her first few months at the White House, a few things became abundantly clear, notably that lawmaking with a hostile Republican Senate wasn't going to be easy – in fact, that they were going to make the least reform excruciatingly hard, if only for the sake of opposition.

"Can they do this?" Sara asked Kellerman, pointlessly, during one post-midnight meeting in the oval, after the rest of the company had gone home. "I mean, can they actually talk every measure I try to introduce to death –"

"They have no shame, Sara." Kellerman said. "Before, it might have been different. They might have cared that it made them look like sore losers to the public, feared accusations of sexist bias. If you'd asked me fifteen years ago, I would have said – no. They'll come around." He shrugged. "In post-Trump America, though, I'm not too sure the Republicans care in the least what the press says about them. What does it matter, when no one even trusts the press anymore? The Republicans really became that dangerous in the 2016 elections – when they lost their credibility. Losing face in politics used to be fatal. Now, I don't even know the rules anymore. They've got nothing to lose. They'll bleed you dry if you let them."

Sara pressed her knuckles to her forehead. There was comfort in this, finding herself alone with Paul, without needing to assume a presidential posture, trusting he believed in her dignity enough that she didn't have to wear it around him like a cloak.

Much like her Democrat predecessor, Sara had wanted to focus this first term on domestic issues. It was what she knew with most intimacy and thought of as a priority among what needed changing. Despite traditional American exceptionalism amongst presidents, Sara didn't actually think of herself as the leader of the free world. America alone had voted her into power. By definition, if the world needed changing, she needed to start with this country.

Not that she was going to make it, if every bill got filibustered before it could have a chance to become law.

Reform in America was so desperately urgent, Sara had found herself at a loss where to begin. Reduce the cost and expand access to higher education. Pick up her predecessor's efforts on healthcare and immigration – gather the scraps from the DREAM Act and try and make it into acceptable legislation for a Congress that was half blue, half red.

But the red half wasn't looking to compromise or even keep a show of fair play.

It got her so worked up, Sara would pace the great Master Bedroom at night, her hate for her excessively luxurious surroundings rising in peaks.

"I'm the President of the United States and I can't do anything. I can't do anything."

Demands from the public about Republican strategy led to interviews and a mild effort at hypocrisy. "These things take time. We're considering the matter. Is compromise at all possible? I don't know. Obviously, we still have to think about it – and I would add our young president still has much to learn."

"Right," Sara said, to herself, sometimes to Kellerman, when he happened to be around. "Except they won't meet with me, they won't return my calls. They're actually ghosting me." She wanted to laugh; this was ridiculous. "This isn't Tinder for Christ's sake. I'm not a needy girl looking for a date."

Paul was patient with her. "The more energy you waste on them, the bigger their victory. That's all they're doing, don't you see? Killing time, Sara. They're going to kill as much as they can so that, by 2024, you'll have barely scratched the surface of what needs doing. They'll paralyze you. If we can't work with them, we'll work around them. Better not let them get to you."

Sara's best option was to do damage to the Republicans' image by making them look responsible for the situation in the Senate, and hope that eventually got them to retreat.

But something surprising happened, a few months later, that demanded a change of strategy.

Sara was in the middle of a national security meeting when she received a call from Kellerman, currently in Beijing.

"Paul, I'm glad you could join us. Isn't it something like three a.m. in China?"

His tone made it immediately clear he wasn't in the mood for laughs. "We have a Bagwell problem," he said. Though the simple phrasing could have meant a hundred things ultimately trivial, Sara became earnest immediately – didn't like the sound of her friend's voice right at this second. "Get on the internet and type: 'America Now' Podcast."

"I'm rather busy right now."

Sara cast an ensemble look at her team, lingering a split second on Gretchen Morgan whose cold blue eyes gleamed with interest.

"If I were you," he said, "I'd want to know about this. Call me back when you're ready to work on a counterattack. We're going to have to strike back fast, and we'll have to do it on their ground – you'll know what I mean when you've listened to it."

"He's joking, right? He's got to be joking." Lincoln spoke the words to himself, waiting for the "L". He'd taken to listening to the news and information podcasts on his phone to pass the time on his way to work.

Theodore Bagwell had been teasing his upcoming podcast "America Now" for months, and Lincoln had decided to listen to it for the same reasons he paid attention to political chatter at the restaurant.

"With everything that's going on in the world, these days, better be alert."

That was the answer Lincoln gave anyone who asked about his views on politics or what he thought of the latest news coverage.

"Better be alert."

Those simple words, which spared him from revealing himself to his colleagues, were on his mind, all throughout the subway ride that took Lincoln on his way to work, one evening in March. He got through the fifty-nine minutes of Bagwell's podcast, but not without letting out crude commentaries –

"Oh, you're shitting me. No way in hell you aren't shitting me."

Journalist Todd Navuto served as Bagwell's cohost, but it wasn't one of those evenly splitting of the floor for two celebrities of equal weight – it was clear Navuto was only there to ask the questions, so the dullness of his plain voice would heighten the charm of Bagwell's slick southern drawl, like a bland plate of pasta seems to bring out the flavor of elegant savory meals.

Food images were recurrent since Lincoln had taken that job at the restaurant. At times, he surprised and laughed at himself, vowing he'd need to do something about it, but right now, there was a more pressing issue.

"But when you're saying America's a country in crisis," Navuto said, "you mean that on what front? Are we talking about a financial crisis? A crisis in ideology?"

"I mean on every front, Todd, my friend. I mean the cracks have taken such a toll on the sweet surface of our national identity, America is starting to look like a broken mirror. We are no longer as one, Todd, but glass fragments, nothing but distortion and disunity."

Lincoln shook his head, in mild disgust and disbelief. "Anyone can say that," he protested, "anyone!"

A few of the people in the subway aimed suspicious frowns at him. Those standing immediately next to him moved away a couple of steps.

"And what's the cause, do you think? This crisis – what brought it about, and how can we fix it?"

An efficient pause followed Navuto's theatrics-laden question. Lincoln didn't doubt any American who'd ever watched Bagwell on television could picture his Cheshire grin, rising all the way to his ears.

"A simple answer to you, Todd. Everyone who hasn't been living in a cave for the past twenty years knows that America is starting to look less American by the hour."

"Oh no, he didn't," Lincoln sighed.

"Immigration. As simple as that. Like water in a sinking ship, taking the glorious boat all the way down to its blue underworld. Snatching the shine out of this magnificent country, turning the luster of our beaming colors into grey mush."

"That means nothing." Lincoln said. "Words. He's just saying words."

"Of course, that's only the beginning. The more rats eat into a piece of cheese, the more holes you're going to get and the less food. That's pure logic. But it's not just that the face of America's changing – no. What really threatens our country with destruction, is that these people have gotten so numerous, stealing proper American jobs from our struggling citizens – they've actually gotten to vote one of them into power."

"And by that you mean –"

"Miss Sara Tancredi, Todd, of course. I mean our current president."

"What?"

As Lincoln was discovering Senator Bagwell's podcast, on the subway ride to work, Sara was making her own opinion – listening while maintaining an audio-only Skype conversation with Kellerman. Right now, she didn't want to see anyone.

"But he can't say that. That's ridiculous. That's –" Sara interrupted herself in the midst of her rambling. What did such protests matter, in an age where 'ridiculous', like a great deal of graver things, had become a mere shell – a mere word?

"That's right," Bagwell sighed earnestly. "I'm afraid I hold it from very reliable sources that Sara Tancredi, Justice Frank's daughter, is in fact a bastard child – and not born in the least on American soil."

"Did he just call me a bastard?"

Sara wanted to laugh. Right now, as if to set up the proper reaction for the rest of the world to follow. As if human beings were like dogs, to be talked of in terms of breed and pure blood.

Ridiculous, she thought again. He'll get laughed out of the floor.

But respectable journalist Todd Navuto didn't laugh. "That's a serious accusation you're making, Senator."

"Wish I didn't have to be making it, Todd."

"No," Lincoln said, sharing Sara's outrage all the way from Chicago. "He won't get away with this. He can't."

"There're pictures of my pregnant mother," Sara said. "What is he saying? She lost the child and my dad hooked up with some mystery mistress on foreign soil? That's –"

"Ridiculous," Lincoln echoed Sara's thoughts. "Ridiculous."

"Please, Paul, don't tell me you want us to take this seriously."

"My sweet Sara."

The necks in Sara's neck bristled. She didn't know what surprised her most – the sudden absence of formality in his talk, or its genuine sympathy.

"Have a look at Twitter. The podcast's been out for three hours, and we're up to a hundred thousand hashtags. By tonight, we may be talking two or three hundred thousand. Ridiculous is beside the point."

Sara was dismayed to see he was right.

Hashtag NoFakesInTheOval. Hashtag AmericaNow.

Sara sat motionless in the presidential chair, for a while, alone in the oval office where she had just dismissed her team.

Protest rose in her mouth but something stopped it from getting out –

Something that realized the changing relation of this country to reality, and realized protest would not make a difference.

Truth mattered very little.

Because it had come in the voice of a charming reliable public figure, because hundreds of thousands had been passing on the information, this was a concrete problem, that had been magically weaved into existence but would not so easily be wished out of it.

"All of my efforts to press on the immigration issue, to send ships to rescue all those people drowning at the gates of Europe, to condemn my predecessor's behavior and the leaders who let those people die – all of that will get lost and confused with the unfounded accusation that I'm ineligible for the presidency."

Kellerman gave no answer. Sara hadn't really been talking to him.

"It doesn't matter to him that innocent people are dying. Hard borders are tough, and he wants to make me look soft. To make look weak."

"What are you going to do?" Paul asked after a while.

"Gather my communication team and work on a defense. I'm tired of playing nice. We'll fight fire with fire."

End Notes: I realize it took me a long time to update! I've had a busy month of September, but I'll try to get back on tracks. I enjoy this story so much. Please let me know your thoughts and reactions as always!