5

By the fifth day I was hearing from sources that people inside the White House were panicking. Immediately following the attacks, the entire nation had gone into shock. By the second day, that shock had given way to a morbid acceptance and even fascination. As the bodies continued to pile up and the funerals began on the third day, the horror turned to white anger. On the fourth day, fear set in.

But for the administration, it was the fifth day that proved to be the most dangerous. That was the day people began deciding who was to blame. A New York Times political cartoon by Witte showed a caricature of Wrightman sitting behind a large desk on which sat a small sign reading, “The 63,000,000,000 bucks stop here!” That number being the estimated budget of our intelligence agencies, although in actuality it was considerably more than that. When I was mean and green, we referred to it as the three-step: first, real sorrow for the victim; second, gratitude it wasn’t us; and third, the realization the bad guys were still out there.

There was a growing consensus that the administration was fucked. It seemed like every social media post was anti-Wrightman. He was photoshopped water-skiing in the Morgan City flood. His face was superimposed on the classic monkeys seeing nothing, hearing nothing, saying nothing. Another cartoon depicted him being lectured by a furious Uncle Sam, who was berating him, “You had only one job…”

“Well,” Jenny the eternal optimist said when I reached her midmorning, “at least there’s one little ray of sunshine.”

“What’s that?”

“I haven’t seen one post calling for Trump to come back.”

Supposedly Wrightman was on the warpath in the White House, although we weren’t allowed to describe it that way, as that phrase was now perceived as being politically incorrect. Instead I wrote that “Sources close to the president apparently are staying as far away as possible from the president…”

For the administration this was becoming far worse than an American tragedy, it was becoming a serious political liability. Wrightman had run on the promise that he would restore order—and in exchange we would voluntarily give up a little bit more of our personal freedoms.

The irony was so obvious even a Trump voter could understand it. We had surrendered some constitutionally guaranteed rights to make it easier for the government to protect our constitutionally guaranteed rights. For example, large solidarity marches had been planned for the following weekend in major cities; but citing safety concerns, Homeland Security had prohibited any demonstrations of more than two hundred people. To protect our right of privacy, the government found it necessary to tap into the phone calls and texts of anyone it decided was a risk.

It didn’t change the key equation: As long as people had no one to blame, they were going to blame the president. Immediately following the attacks, the president’s approval numbers actually went up, as Americans rallied around the flag. But as a day passed, then two, without the terrorists being identified, those polls dropped faster than a politician’s promise the day after an election. The president was pissed and getting pissier by the hour. Apparently it was getting ugly at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.