Location: The Oval Office, late evening.
Donald Trump is leaning over an enormous, cluttered mahogany desk, wearing a red MAGA hat that looks slightly crooked and staring intently at a laminated flyer for a high-end garage sale. Elon Musk is standing nearby, tapping impatiently on a tablet.
Trump: (Tapping a thick finger against the desk) Look, Elon, everyone’s talking about this. Iran. Big computers, centrifuge things spinning around like washing machines. Very complicated. But I’m saying we need the files. The whole file. Secret documents, top-secret folders, whatever they got in the desk drawers over there in Tehran.
Elon Musk: (Sighing, rubbing his temples) Mr. President, you can't just put out a bounty for state-sponsored nuclear secrets like it’s a lost Chihuahua on Craigslist.
Trump: Twenty million dollars, Elon! Twenty million! That’s a lot of money, even for me, but mostly for them. They love cash over there. They use rugs, they use carpets, but they love greenbacks. You put twenty million in a nice leather briefcase—very classy, maybe gold-plated corners—and you walk right up to the desk, you say, "Hand over the nuclear codes, let's see the schematics." Boom. Easiest deal ever.
Elon: Sir, you’re talking about enriched uranium, heavy water, and centrifuges governed by complex physics. You can't just download the nuclear program onto a thumb drive like it's a pirated movie.
Trump: Of course you can! Everything is digital now, Elon. My grandson, very smart kid, he does things on the iPad I can't even believe. You click "Save As," you put it in a folder called "Iran Nuclear Stuff," and you email it to me. Why is nobody doing this? It’s embarrassing! I go on television, I talk about the enrichment, everybody's crying about isotopes—nobody knows what an isotope is, by the way, nobody!—and all we needed was a guy with a backpack and a PayPal account.
Karoline Leavitt (walking briskly into the room with a stack of press briefings): Mr. President, the State Department is on line one. They’re begging you to stop tweeting that you’re funding a Kickstarter campaign to steal Iran's atomic secrets.
Trump: (Waving her off) Tell them to relax, Karoline! We’re stimulating the economy. It’s venture capitalism, but for weapons grade material. Very legal, very cool.
Elon: (Staring blankly into space) I want to go to Mars.
Trump: You can go to Mars later, Elon, first we gotta find someone in Tehran who takes Venmo.