Read “The Future According To Donald Trump” – An AllHipHop short story by ironsidehex, art by Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur
The alarm goes off at 6:30 a.m. Miller slowly wakes, then sits up in the bed, blonde hair mussed.
He throws the covers off his bare, pale legs & bounds barefoot over the hardwood floors into the bathroom. He grabs his toothbrush & toothpaste, then turns on the shower. Miller strips out of his boxers & steps into the running water, dental tools in hand. After taking care of his hygiene needs, he gets dressed for work in his best, an Armani navy blue pinstripe suit, a crisp matching blue button down shirt complete with a sleek blue Armani tie. Lastly he reaches into a battered shoe box & came out with a pair of scuffed black Rockports. He observes the new scuff for a moment. Never seen that before. “F**ck it,” Miller says under his breath, stepping into them and tightens the shoe strings.
He grabs his keys off the lone table in his small apartment, jets down the steps and out of the front door. He approaches the crowded bike rack in front of his building, kneeling down to unlock his front tire, when he sees that it’s flat. “F**K.” Miller silently debates whether he should try to patch the tire or walk to work. Since the weather is uncommonly nice for an early April morning, he decides to hoof it, detecting the faint smell of something burning in the air.
The sidewalks aren’t crowded yet so Miller starts off on a stroll, instead of half-running in a throng of humanity. There’s a steady stream of bike riders in the freshly painted bike lane, everything from grown women in skirts riding tricked out dirt bikes to men in suits on tandem bikes. He walks down the street, turning his head to look whenever an occasional car passes, always with every seat full, sometimes with five or even six occupants. Suburban commute. Miller sighs, remembering that life. Riding, b*tch in the back and at times chauffeuring four or five other muthaf**kas to work. He’s been trying to sell his car for over a year with no takers. Miller unleashes a weary sigh, just thinking about it and steps over a homeless person sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk. He momentarily thinks about waking him up, but decides against it. He hasn’t got time to deal with an irate vagrant. Let the Trump Brigade deal with him.
Up ahead he can see one of the Trump Brigade’s urban tank parked in the street facing the virtually nonexistent traffic and agents doing their morning “STREET SWEEP,” dressed in all black tactical gear, complete with ski-masks and headgear fitted with face-cages and tinted visors.
They look like modified black football helmets. Miller walks closer to them, he can see them better, as they use their collapsible batons to poke the few people sleeping on the pavement. Their black jumpsuits are torn, dirty, & blood stained. They’ve probably been out clearing the streets for weeks during the day, and at night going on illegal immigrant raids with ICE & Homeland Security agents, among other things. He shakes his head, continuing on, unconsciously reaching for his wallet, just in case the federal police want to see his passport card. As Miller reaches them, the agent impatiently waves him by, hardly looking up from his iPad as he checked the citizenship info from a homeless man’s biochip. Being a Caucasian male certainly has its privileges, Miller thought, the voice in his head sounding like a sarcastic Bill Maher. He hadn’t been chipped yet because he hadn’t had any contact with the law.
He gets a wiff of a foul aroma as he walks by the officers and the homeless they’ve rounded up. The smells of sweat, blood, body odor, and human feces mingle with the faint acrid smell of smoke & he wrinkles his nose and gags, not sure if the stench was the homeless or the overworked agents. The Trump Brigade. Their real name is THE FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT BRIGADE. At the beginning they were just a rumor, shrouded in secrecy. When Trump first introduced them in 2018, he vaguely stated that these agents were here to enforce federal laws. People were confused. Doesn’t the FBI handle the enforcement of federal laws? What the Hell was this? What are these guys here for? Where are they from? Why do they hide their faces? They were here to enforce Trump’s Laws, which changed daily, with little or no warning.
Rumors swirled around the formation of the teams. Some say they were plucked from various federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and that made the most sense. After they had been around for six months, people started to say that they were actually plucked from various prisons. After seeing their behavior that made sense too. By 2019 there had been over 200 brutality claims filed in local police precincts countrywide. The FBI started an investigation into alleged civil rights violations by the Trump Brigade. The problem was, “Who do you take your findings to? Who do u indict or subpoena?” The members of the Trump Brigade were totally anonymous and answered only to their commanders who answered directly to the president himself. They didn’t even know each other. They met up with their masks already on, and had been wearing them since they began training. They answered to a number, like prison inmates. They were so secretive that one Trump Brigade member could be standing in line at the grocery store with another one and neither would know it, even though they were side by side kicking in someone’s teeth the night before. They were even paid in cash.
Miller looked around, as more people started to come out of their homes, some riding bikes, some joining him on the sidewalk. Almost none getting in cars. He saw a woman in a business suit get into an older model blue sedan, then saw a portly man in dirty overalls walk out of a house across the street and join her. Car pool. Miller looked at the time display on his iPhone with the shattered screen. He needed a new one badly but iPhones were more than $1000 now. He quickened his step, crossing in the middle of the block. He didn’t bother to look both ways, there were no cars on the street anyway, just bikes. As Miller crossed he, saw a building decorated with graffiti. Most of it was a mishmash of gang graf and profanity written haphazardly all over each other. It looked like the renderings of a bipolar child with a box of crayons with too much time on it’s hands.
Except for one tag.
“THE REAPERS”
