He sat quietly with the group around the big table in the back of the cafe where they met for breakfast twice a week. He was retired LAPD just like them. They’d all taken their pensions and had fled the liberal disaster engulfing California for a conservative enclave in northern Idaho. And they all shared the stories of their careers with each other over breakfast twice a week, but with no one else. Some of the details were pretty rough.
He knew he could trust these people with the story he had decided to tell them. He had never told this story to anyone. He wasn’t in the story, but his father, a career cop in upstate New York, was, and it was his father who revealed what happened during a late night interrogation of a burglary suspect.
“So, my Dad has this guy cold, right? He was arrested coming out of an apartment building. He had burglary tools, jewelry, cash, coins, whatever, on him. And this was his third strike. So, he was going away forever unless he could cut a deal,” he told the group around the table. “My Dad was the interrogating officer. Tape recorder running, he asks the perp what he’s got to offer. Now just imagine this really old guy who’s up against dying in prison.”
He paused and then asked half-jokingly, “Any of you guys registered Democrats, by any chance?”
They all shook their heads in unison and as the table erupted in laughter, somebody muttered, “Are you frickin’ kidding?”
So, he continued. “My Dad says the perp tells him a story about when he was younger, much younger, before his first prison stretch. He was working as a part-time chauffeur for rich folks in Manhattan. So, like, when a regular chauffeur got sick or something, he’d fill in. And one Sunday, back in mid-June 1946, he gets a call. A man and wife in Canada need somebody to drive them back to Manhattan. Their regular driver has taken sick. So, his company sends this part-timer up.”
The waitress came around and poured more coffee, and he stopped telling his story until she was finished and had left. With their cups filled, the group urges him on. “So, he gets to the hotel in Canada where the couple was staying and sees that the wife is obviously pregnant. Seems the husband is a bit of an asshole but that comes with the job, and he’s told they have to get back across the border pronto. Which is shorthand for ‘you need to break the speed limit, dumbo’, which he understands completely.”
“So, they set off , speeding like they were in the Indianapolis 500. And they get about ten minutes from the border and the wife begins to pop. And the asshole husband tells him to pull over, which he does. And they both help deliver the baby in the backseat of the limo. But, in Canada. They never made it to the border.”
There was silence around the table. They all knew that there was more, much more to this story. So, they waited.
He smiled as he knew he had them just where he wanted them. They had been telling stories about murderers, rapists, drug dealers, kidnappers, but none of them had ever told a story about how Donald Trump’s mother gave birth to him in the back of a limousine on the wrong side of the border!
“Oh, shit!” came the unanimous response to this revelation. “Trump was born in Canada?”
He shrugged and confessed, “That’s the story this guy told my Dad. And he went on to give details about how they arranged for the newborn to be smuggled into the States and how they got the birth certificate jiggered, and all that. The whole deal.”
One of the group asked, “When was this interrogation, anyway?”
“1968.”
“So the perp was trying to leverage his information about the old man, Trump’s father, into a deal. Donald Trump was still in college at the time and not a national figure yet, right?” one of the group said.
“Exactly, so my father told him he’d get him a sentencing recommendation, which he did. And my father was smart enough to turn off the tape recorder for most of the interrogation. Anyway, the chauffeur died in prison in 1973. But my father had taken detailed notes, which he kept.”
He paused again and then added, “And which I now have.”
The group looked at each other. One of them, a retired Captain, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes for a moment, and then unapologetically said, “Well, come on, it’s Canada. It’s not frickin’ Kenya!”
The group burst into laughter, ordered more coffee, and waited for the next story.
End