The Art of the Lie

Posted on May 30, 2025

On May 29, 2025, Donald Trump’s press secretary stepped forward—eyes alight with borrowed fury, lips heavy with overburdened grievance—and offered not so much a political statement as an act of dark alchemy.

She said:

“Three Judges of the US Court of International Trade disagreed and brazendly abused their judicial power to usurp the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him. The courts should have no role here. There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected Judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision making progress.”

This was no mere misstatement. It was a masterclass in misdirection.

Not the kind of lie that blushes or stammers.

No. This lie salutes.

It sings the national anthem while picking the constitutional lock behind your back.

It is The Art of the Lie.

Let us peel the layers:

First, the judges “abused” no power. They discharged their solemn duty—etched in the parchment bones of the Republic—to oversee the legality of executive acts. Their ruling was not an overreach, but a reminder: no President, no matter how worshipped or reviled, is above the law.

Second, the most insidious trick: invoking a “mandate from the American people.”

Not a single ballot conferred permission to break the law.

No voter consciously endorsed the dismantling of judicial oversight.

Trump was given a mandate to pursue his vision within the bounds of law—not beyond it.

To claim otherwise is not a misunderstanding. It is heresy against democracy.

And yet—the spell works.

Why?

On page 38 of Fort Knox: The Greatest Heist of All Time, Kim’s gospel of manipulation is revealed:

“As the salt tax had once stoked the fires of revolution in 18th-century France, so too did Kim and Mephisto fan the flames of discontent among the forsaken of America. The more brazen the deception, the more eagerly it was swallowed, because for these masses, the lie was not deception—it was redemption. Fact-checking was an amusement for the privileged. Hope, however misplaced, was the last refuge of the desperate, and Kim knew how to cradle it like an ember…”

That is the dark magic:

Not the denial of the crime, but the erasure of its significance.

Not “He broke the law,” but “That doesn’t matter, because he fights for us.”

In this passion play, the courts become villains.

And the desperate don’t crave justice—they crave vengeance draped in the garments of hope.

“The courts should have no role here.”

This line contains its own venom:

It isn’t just false.

It’s an incantation, meant to make the audience forget that judicial review is a pillar of the Republic, not a footnote.

It’s a lie that hopes to rewrite the script, mid-performance.

The Art of the Lie is not just deception. It is narrative.

It is the subtle rearrangement of memory.

It is hope’s forged twin, walking through fire with a counterfeit crown.

And somewhere, Kim is smiling.

Holding the ember.

Watching it glow.

The Dream of Every Bank Robber

Posted on May 29, 2025

In Las Vegas, where the neon never sleeps and truth checks into a timeshare with illusion, the Vice President stood upon the altar of crypto and made his declaration.

JD Vance, channeling the wild-eyed prophets of digital gold, proclaimed: "Maybe the most important thing we did for this community: we rejected regulators!"

Ari Melber, ever the chronicler of democracy’s unmade seams, broadcast this moment on MSNBC. One could almost hear the ghost of Allen Ginsberg howling in the server farms.

Meanwhile, on page 41 of Fort Knox: The Greatest Heist of All Time, a passage had already been written for this very moment:

"It was the dream of every bank robber made manifest: first, dismiss the security guards and local police before unlocking the vault. And while the world still believed itself safe, the very ground beneath its feet was already being pulled away."

Prophecy? Coincidence? Or the inevitable rhyme in the poem of power?

I wrote that line in the fugue-state between nightmare and lucidity, when fiction grows fangs and begins to chase reality down dark corridors. I did not know it would appear on screen beneath the curl of Ari’s eyebrow, nor that the Vice President would so eagerly play his part.

But now it is written. And the vault—literal, metaphorical, digital—is not just open.

It’s welcoming.

So here we are, dear reader, blinking in the gold-flash of revelation. This book was never just a story. It was an alarm clock, rigged to go off when the last lock clicked open.

The dream of the robber is now the policy of the state.

And somewhere, Kim is watching. Waiting.

When Reality Outruns Fiction

It is a well-known hazard of the novelist’s trade that reality, rudely and with no concern for narrative rhythm, sometimes leaps past one’s most fevered invention.

In “Fort Knox: The Greatest Heist of All Time”, I imagined Kim — a character shaped from moonlight and Machiavelli — surgically neutralizing the legal gatekeepers of the Pentagon. Here is how it was written:

“Kim, hardened by past encounters with the Department of Defense, knew with the certainty of a being that understands the dance of the celestial bodies, predicting an eclipse, that the guardians of law in the Pentagon —those scholars of statutes and guardians of protocol— would resist. They would frown, object, invoke legalese thick as fog, and ultimately, they would refuse.

And so, the solution was as ruthless as it was elegant. Kim orchestrated a silent reshaping, ensuring that every lawyer within the Pentagon's walls who might hesitate, who might question, who might so much as raise an eyebrow, was replaced. In their stead came the loyalists—men and women for whom the word ‘no’ did not exist in the lexicon of obedience.”

Yes, I thought, this was bold. This was fiction doing what fiction does best: dancing on the knife-edge of plausibility.

And then came reality.

Unlike Pentagon lawyers, who can be relocated like chess pieces by those in power, federal judges are not so easily erased. They are appointed for life. Their independence, written in the constitutional stone, is meant to weather the tempests of demagogues.

But as I heard Nick Akerman’s warning in Bloomberg on May 30, 2025, my fictional Kim — the schemer, the silencer, the shadow-strategist — seemed suddenly tame. Here is what Akerman said, in full:

“There is one little item in that one big beautiful bill that basically would take away the judges contempt power to enforce temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions. And not only does it make it prospective, meaning that it would be used in the future, it also is including past actions of contempt. So you have got judges there considering contempt with respect to the Garcia matter. They’re considering attempt on a number of other items. You got 170 orders that are out there right now by federal district court judges. And the only way that they can have any power to enforce these orders is to be able to use the contempt power. And what they’re trying to do, the Republicans snuck this little piece into the bill, would in the dead of night literally to make it so that you give immunity to all of these people, all of Trump’s minions and sycophants who have been basically undermining the judges and obstructing these judges orders. You’ve got the situation in Maryland with Abrego Garcia, where the judge is trying to do an investigation. All of that would be thrown out if this piece of the bill passed. And what they try and do is try and make it look like it’s part of the reconciliation by talking about the money that’s being spent by the judges to enforce their orders when in fact, all they’re trying to do is destroy the judiciary and take away their powers.”

That’s not fiction. That’s a legislative scalpel, dipped in ink and poison, slipped into the gut of the American legal order. And the most chilling detail? Every single Republican voted for it. The entire party endorsed a proposal to disarm the judiciary, to clip the wings of the one institution still resisting Trump’s will.

As the author of “Fort Knox”, I now find myself in the strange and terrible position of being outpaced by reality. My villain Kim could never have dreamed of such brazen legislative alchemy — to cast a spell within a bill, to enchant the legal system into silence.

Where does one go, as a storyteller, when the truth begins to write your next chapter for you?

Posted by the author of “Fort Knox: The Greatest Heist of All Time”

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The Dictator’s Whisper: Trump, Putin, and the Fiction That Tells Too Much Truth

On June 4, 2025, Donald J. Trump posted on Truth Social—his digital confessional, his oracle of grievance—the following:

“I just finished speaking, by telephone with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia. The call lasted approximately one hour and 15 minutes. We discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplaines, by Ukraine, and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides. It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace. President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields.”

One reads such words and wonders: Why this tone? Why this deference, this soft curtsy in the direction of a man whose boots still carry the mud of Bucha?

And then, as in all good fiction—and especially in those rare fictions that masquerade as metaphor only to reveal the mechanics of truth—we stumble across a passage that speaks louder than any real-world press conference ever could.

In the novel Fort Knox: The Greatest Heist of All Time, Kim’s bizarre and servile relationship with Wanja—a shadowy figure whose name carries the Slavic chill of familiarity—offers a disturbing mirror. The genders of both characters remain undisclosed, yet the emotional power play between them drips with political allegory. In their dance, fiction and reality bleed into one another like oil and ink:

“Kim’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine, however, belonged to an entirely different plane of existence. Unquestioning loyalty—this was what Kim demanded from those who reaped the benefits of an association with Kim. And yet, in matters concerning Ukraine, the roles were reversed. Here, it was Kim who found an obligation to remain loyal to Wanja. And so, without hesitation, without the faintest flicker of doubt, Kim cast aside America’s self-proclaimed mantle as the guardian of the free world. Before the eyes of the international stage, in the cold glare of the cameras, Kim renounced the weighty pretense of righteousness and, with deliberate calculation, crossed the threshold to stand alongside a dictator—because, in the end, was it not all in service of the greater design? To sow discord among the nations, to dismantle the fragile order that kept America at its center—this was the true objective, and in pursuit of it, nothing was sacred.
And so, behind closed doors, in hushed conversations where history itself seemed to hold its breath, Kim offered Wanja the following proposal for peace:

1. Ukraine would lay down its arms and recognize the territories annexed by Russia as sovereign Russian land.

2. Ukraine would immediately hold new elections following the peace agreement, with Russia serving as the sole overseer of their legitimacy, without the presence of international observers.

3. After the elections, Ukraine would independently decide which political and economic bloc to join.

4. In return, the United States would receive from Russia the right to extract a predetermined quantity of raw materials from Ukrainian territory.

   To Kim, these demands seemed just and reasonable. Any remaining sense of reality had long since been eclipsed by an unshaken devotion to Wanja.
   Beyond the geopolitical turmoil such an agreement was sure to ignite, Kim was certain of one thing: a peace of this magnitude would, without question, secure the Nobel Peace Prize. And that, too, was part of the plan.”

Is Trump today’s Kim? Is Putin Wanja with a scarred smile and a hand always just out of frame?

Fiction does not predict the future—but it sometimes explains the present better than the news ever could.

Fort Knox is not just a heist story. It is a philosophical decoy, a hall of mirrors reflecting the dangerous seduction of power, and the madness that masquerades as peace.

And for those who think such tales are only make-believe: remember, the most dangerous fiction is the one that makes you forget it’s fiction at all.