CNN had just called the Illinois primary for Donald Trump, but I might have been the only one inside Trump Tower who noticed.
When I first arrived at 7 PM, the solitary television over the bar was tuned to ESPN. But “Jeff”—a hardcore Trump supporter from Rockford—kept hounding the bartender, “Ellie,” to change the channel to CNN for election results. She eventually relented and switched the programming from a sporting contest to a political one—though she left the sound muted, forcing us to endure the tepid sounds of corporate lounge music instead of Wolf Blitzer’s tenor. Which, in retrospect, was probably the right choice.
But then Jeff hedges on his offer to splurge on shots for the rest of us. Perhaps taking a cue his favorite presidential candidate, he tries, unsuccessfully, to hector poor Ellie into giving us free shots to compensate for a faulty pen she gave him to sign his tab. (“You think Trump would accept a broken pen?”)
But things get awkward quickly when Laura suggests that my friend and I start to “get romantic or whatever.” With that we exited the 98-story phallic ode to the man who could be our next president and never looked back.
