Save Jon Frump!

In another universe much like ours, Precident Jon Frump stared at his phone in irritation bordering on panic. The people with the power to extricate him and his family from this decade-long nightmare still hadn't gotten the message that he needed their help, and time was running out.

The weekend's posts to his Chirpster feed were the most outrageous yet, which would have pushed any normal Congrease into immediate and full-throated impeachment hearings. Instead, the parallel sales pitch designed to steer its members toward doing his bidding was having the opposite effect, with the leadership doubling down to protect him against the consequences of any impropriety.

He turned on the visitelly and flipped through the news channels. To his disgust, the media was still only getting half the story. Worshingten insiders from previous administrations and the growing gaggle of lawyers and former prosecutors were focused on his cover and the evil acts that he was being blackmailed into doing, but they still hadn't discerned his real motivation. His only hope was that someone would figure it out on their own, giving him deniability as he half-heartedly protested that it was fiction and used his public persona as a gullible idiot to enable being cut off from doing more of Pushkin's bidding.

Stopping at Lenny Frock's propaganda channel, Frump gritted his teeth as well-meaning idiots picked up on his pain and tried to make him feel better by attacking everyone but his real tormentor. Their own biases, based on the manufactured biases that drove Lenny's successful profit model, kept them from giving credence to the observations of the rest of the media which would have provided the context needed to see the whole picture. It wasn't lost on Frump that this had been a big part of Pushkin's plan all along: isolating feelings from facts was the basis of his own success.

The phone buzzed, making him jump, as a text message appeared from an unidentified caller. "Tickety-tock," it said simply. He knew precisely who had sent it, and what it meant. What do I do now? he thought feverishly.