(Excerpted from Professor Gib Edward, The Decline of the US Empire, Dugong Publishers, 2025.)
President Dump, feeling a little out of sorts one day, called in the White House doctor. “It doesn’t look like anything serious,” the doctor said, “but we’ll do a few tests just to be sure.”
That was the beginning. The world soon heard about the follow-up, which started with the doctor saying, “Mr. President, it’s nothing at all to worry about. In fact, it’s good news: you are going to have a baby.”
The response was not at all what the doctor expected. “I can’t have another child,” President Dump declared. “It’s hard enough providing government jobs for the ones I have already.
“Besides, pregnancy will interfere with my job. When we finish the next war, I have to be able to land on an aircraft carrier and proclaim ‘America is great again.’ I can’t fly like that if I’m pregnant.”
President Dump was clearly surprised when the doctor refused his request for a termination, citing his religious objections to abortion. It later emerged that the doctor, unknown to the President, was an activist in the Society for Compulsory Parturition.
Presumably, the President would have quietly found another doctor to perform the procedure. But the entire country was thrown into uproar when a Russian television station broadcast a full recording of President Dump’s conversation with the White House doctor.
Opponents of abortion rights rose up in fury across the country and began planning a national march on Washington “to restore morality in the White House.” The outrage was only slightly mitigated when Bishop Belfry, the leader of the American Christian Birthist Church, explained, “The Bible does not forbid abortion in general. It only forbids it for women.”
The controversy fractured traditional lines in Congress. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, trying to please both sides, only managed to alienate both, and was deposed in a nearly unanimous vote. But it then eventuated that the House was unable to elect a replacement: the anti-abortionists defeated every pro-abortion candidate, but could not agree among themselves on their own candidate. Much the same thing happened in the Senate, leaving that body without a President pro tempore.
This was still the situation two nights later, when Vice President Mickey Tuppence asked to see the President in the Oval Office. There, he declared that “hormones and worry and all those pregnancy things” had made the President incapable of properly fulfilling his duties, and therefore, under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, Tuppence would become Acting President until such time as President Dump had given birth and regained his physical and mental faculties.
Historians have tried in vain to determine what happened next from the two conflicting accounts. Both agree that Dump promptly told Tuppence: “You’re fired!” They also agree that Tuppence then wrote out his resignation. Dump’s version (on Twitter) is that Tuppence did this out of remorse at having betrayed his President. Tuppence says he was coerced by members of the President’s family and staff, including press secretary Evan Spicier; the Chief Rasputin, Blazes Banshee; and counselor Constance Alleyway.
Whatever the truth of that confrontation, it left the US government missing the top three figures in the presidential succession, as the country and the world suddenly realized when Dump announced that he was resigning as President.
Dump denied that his decision was in any way caused by the growing opposition from the religious right, combined with the already strong opposition from secularists and the left. “I have decided,” he said on nationwide TV, “that this is the only way I can spend less time with my family. In the White House, I can’t turn around without tripping over them. I need some time to myself, to count my money and look at the photos from my beauty pageant dressing rooms.”
As is now common knowledge, after the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the President pro tempore of the Senate, the 25th Amendment names the Secretary of State as the next in line of presidential succession. Thus it was that, to his surprise, Rexxon Pillager found himself being sworn in as the 46th President.
It is generally agreed that Pillager’s decision not to run for election in his own right in 2020 was only partially due to the controversial circumstances of his rise to the office. Probably more important was his expressed desire to “spend more time boating” as the melting of the Greenland icecap flooded much of Washington.
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