Jared Kushner Gets Grilled

SECRET SERVICE AGENTS are escorting JARED to the White House where IVANKA is maintaining her snack drawer, with her daughter. STEVE BANNON is consolidating power, again, and screaming, via megaphone, about how even though MITCH MCCONNELL kept Justice Scalia’s seat open for an entire year, what has he done for him lately. He is also lighting a hibachi grill he has pilfered from CLARENCE THOMAS. SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS is sitting at her desk, wearing noise-canceling headphones so she doesn’t hear anything and therefore, even accidentally, know what she is talking about.

SECRET SERVICE AGENTS [in unison]: We found him in a Cabela’s on the Eastern Shore, eating freeze-dried chili mac with beef.

IVANKA [sternly]: Jared. Corey. Kushner.

SECRET SERVICE AGENTS [in unison]: And using a file share over an unsecured network.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [precociously showing off knowledge she has acquired because of her Spanish-immersion summer camp]: What’s cabellas? Like, female hair?

IVANKA [powerfully]: It’s a gun store.

JARED [misremembering how he ended up at a sporting goods store on the Eastern Shore]: I was looking for a tent.

IVANKA [calmly]: Thank you, officers. We — [IVANKA snaps her fingers at her private security detail.] — will take him from here.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [tugging at JARED’s shirt]: Daddy, what’s a gun store?

STEVE BANNON [placing non-kosher hot dogs on CLARENCE THOMAS’s grill]: A gun store is what will save Western civilization.

IVANKA [to JARED]: Go sit over there with Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with you.

[JARED complies with IVANKA and finds a seat across from SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, who is not doing anything. STEVE BANNON asks JARED, in Dothraki, whether he wants a non-kosher hot dog and then laughs hysterically when JARED looks to IVANKA and then SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS for a translation. SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS points to her headphones and mimes that she can’t understand either STEVE BANNON or JARED.]

JARED [pleadingly, to IVANKA]: I would’ve come back. It’s exhausting scanning the crowds to make sure there’s no one from camp or college or law school or business school who can run into me.

IVANKA: At a gun store? [IVANKA chucks food whose sell-by date is tomorrow into the garbage.] Jared, you’ll only be attending low-level meetings until we know whether you also responded to the Russian oligarchs. Don Junior is only trying to impress Daddy. I can’t think of why you’d be — [IVANKA’s phone buzzes.] — Ugh, it’s KAC. Are you butt-dialing her again, Steve?

[STEVE BANNON paws for his phone, in one of the left pockets of his cargo shorts, and scrolls through his recent calls.]

STEVE BANNON [in Dothraki and in English]: No.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [sensibly]: Don’t answer, Mommy.

IVANKA [proud that her daughter has learned how to manage up, but ultimately ignoring her advice]: The American people wanted a television show and that’s what we’re giving them. [Answering her phone] Hello Kellyanne. Your bitmoji looks nothing like you.

[STEVE BANNON mimes to IVANKA that he needs to tell KELLYANNE CONWAY something. He grabs her phone.]

STEVE BANNON [charring his disgusting hot dogs]: KAC, it’s Steve. Tell Mitch McConnell that when he repeals Obamacare, to replace it with air conditioners. [STEVE BANNON mimes a noose.] Yes, just fucking air conditioners. We’ve already seized the Carrier factory to manufacture the most energy-inefficient ones possible.

[STEPHEN MILLER emerges from the bathroom off of the Oval Office and writes on a white board, “TRUMP = dismantle admin. state + dismantle Antarctica”. He says nothing and then exits.]

STEVE BANNON [skewering a hot dog onto a bun and slathering it with ketchup]: Look, I don’t give a shit about heroin addicts in Maine. I’m not going to be lectured by someone whose tits are as fake as the Clinton News Network. [STEVE BANNON eats the hot dog, hoovering it so quickly that he nearly chokes to death.] That’s not her? [STEVE BANNON coughs until the pork product dislodges from his throat.] Huh. I guess I don’t know who Susan Collins is.

[STEVE BANNON mimes to no one that he needs a drink. Meanwhile, the KUSHNER DAUGHTER begins building a diorama depicting a scene from The House on Mango Street. JARED thumbs through the accompanying paperback, and is baffled his daughter is reading at this grade level. He shows the book to SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS who finally removes her headphones.]

SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS [hearing her voice for the first time today]: The Steves said I should wear noise-canceling headphones so that way I have no clue what’s happening around me. The other day I had to Google what smoking gun means.

JARED [flipping through his DAUGHTER’s book]: Yeah, same. Can you believe she’s reading a chapter book already? We’d be so lost without Ivanka.

[STEVE BANNON tosses a burnt hot dog in JARED’s direction. JARED flinches so theatrically that he knocks over the table his DAUGHTER is working on.]

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [precociously]: This is why we can’t have nice things.

IVANKA [writing a lawyer phone tree onto the white board, and then triple underlining the phrase Do Not Erase]: Baby doll, what did I say about making victim noises like that?

[GARY COHN jogs into the West Wing, triggering STEVE BANNON because he reminds him of BILL CLINTON running to McDonald’s during his heady first term. GARY COHN beelines to JARED, who has begun to read The House on Mango Street. STEVE BANNON sits, wondering if his chest pains are phantom.]

JARED [letting his guard down because he considers GARY COHN his mentor]: Ivanka says that even though our voters don’t read books, we still should.

GARY COHN [rewriting the tax code on his phone]: What’s the last book you actually finished?

JARED [confidently, for him]: American Pastoral. My senior year of high school.

GARY COHN [sending his changes to MITCH MCCONNELL who replies immediately, “air conditioners??”]: Bullshit.

JARED: I swear.

GARY COHN [responding to MITCH MCCONNELL that he has no clue what he is talking about]: Okay, so what, that was five years ago? I’ve read the first page of Moneyball on my last fourteen summer vacations. Page 1. And I’m the most powerful person in America without Ivanka’s last name. Your father-in-law’s voters read books. Just check a bestseller list, if you doubt me. [He looks for a New York Times but then remembers where he is.] Come on, let’s go for a run, Jared.

STEVE BANNON [his breathing moderating enough to mock]: Let’s go for a run, Jared.

GARY COHN [rifling through his briefcase]: Here, use these. [GARY COHN tosses JARED gym shorts emblazoned with the Goldman Sachs corporate logo.] Ivanka, I know he’s on punishment, as we discussed, but we’re only going for a run. [GARY COHN nudges JARED to stand up.] I read in one of the Bannon profiles that he used to run five miles every day at lunch. If that sea cow caught in a commercial fisherman’s net ever was able to do that, we certainly can today.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [channeling Wikipedia]: Manatees inhabit marshy coastal rivers. Commercial fishermen would never —

STEVE BANNON [scrubbing clean CLARENCE THOMAS’s grill]: Enjoy your run, Democrats.

GARY COHN [hedging]: Steve, I’d be doing the same thing with Bill Clinton, if Hillary won. Money is bipartisan. Right, Jared?

[JARED, GARY COHN and the SECRET SERVICE AGENTS leave for their run. STEVE BANNON then reads aloud from JARED’s SF86 and literally pisses himself, as IVANKA and her DAUGHTER buy things together from IVANKA’s phone and SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS Googles to figure out what a moneyball is.]