In a MAGA Re-education Camp, Day 2

I was shocked to find myself sharing a cell not only with a woman, but a woman of note — Des Moines Register pollster J Ann Selzer, who’d annoyed President Trump by finding that Kamala Harris was going to beat him in Iowa by three points, rather than lose to him by 13, which is what actually happened. When I asked if E. Jean Carroll had inspired her to call herself J. Ann Selzer, her eyes filled with dread.

“I have no intention of raping you,” I realized I need to make clear, “or anyone else for that matter.”

She looked relieved. but only for a moment. “You’d better rethink that,” she said. “They put men and women together like this for a reason. MAGA men are expected to embrace the ‘your body/my choice’ idea.”

“But you’re not my type,” I blurted. “You’re a pollster, or at least a retired pollster, corn-fed-looking, wholesome, and matronly. I’m more into cocktail waitresses, pole dancers, cosmetologists. I find some goths quite sexy. Elvira. The late Chrissy Amphlett of the Divinyls.”

“The type thing might work,” she mused, “thought it didn’t work for Trump in the E. Jean trial.”

A deafening alarm began shrieking. Our cell was suddenly the brightest place on the Great Plains (though, in honesty, I’ve never been to Grand Rapids). “WTF!” I marveled.

“It’s always Mr. Trump,” J Ann explained. “Or President Trump. Never just the great man’s surname alone! My bad! My very bad!”

A trio of thugs in riot gear burst into our cell, and beat me, though it had been J. Ann’s bad, until there was no breath left in their lungs, and none of their faces wasn’t the color of a beet. “Around here,” the one who regained his breath first snarled, revealing that MAGA had been spelled out in tiny jewels on his four foremost incisors, you show a little respect, or risk internal hemorrhaging.”

“God, I love this job,” one of them grunted as they departed.

I was taken to a windowless room in which half a dozen or so fellow inmates were sitting in electrified chairs, learning passages from The Art of the Deal from memory, sort of like young Muslims memorizing the Qu’ran, except I’m not sure that young Muslims are made to suffer an electric shock if they get a few words wrong.“Please,” the student being tested implored our instructor, who looked like the daughter Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham might have produced if there were no God and they’d been allowed to have a child together. “Oh, please, miss.”

“Recite, now!” the spawn of the two aforementioned monsters shrieked, brandishing the remote control device with which she dispensed shocks.

“‘My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward,’” the student, wearing the hunted look of a Democratic candidate contesting an office for which Elon Musk was bankrolling an opponent’s campaign, recited, trembling, sweating visibly.

He stopped. The instructor pushed her little red button, and the reciter, twitching, yelped in pain. The air smelled of singed Caucasian flesh.“Did I suggest you pause?” the instructor wondered in sarcastic confusion.

The reciter, sobbing now, recited, “‘I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.’”

“Everyone now!” the instructor barked, getting to her feet.

“‘Sometimes I settle for less than I sought,’” the class mumbled in unison, with no greater enthusiasm than my first grade class had brought to the Pledge of Allegiance — which we pupils of the Los Angeles Unified School District, not brainwashed as our little counterparts in the schools of Russia and China were, had to mumble in unison each morning. I hoped to God the instructor couldn’t read lips as I, who confine my reading to scripture, pretended to recite along with them.