For over three years now, I've been a "Tertiary Video Propoganda Consultant" to President Donald Trump. Truth told, Trumpo — as he likes to be called because "it makes me feel like a cartoon elephant everyone loves" — almost never requires my services. As he mentioned in our first meeting, "Everything I need in terms of a propaganda video, I already learned from D.W. Griffith's 'Birth of a Nation.'"

Still, in the past months, Trumpo has reached out three times. You've seen my work:

1. The St. John's Episcopal Church Episode — This was, admittedly, a bit of a disaster.

My original storyboard called for the president to cross Lafayette Square in an agonized trot, wearing a bandolier of bullets and raising his arms to the sky like the mortally wounded Sgt. Elias in "Platoon." The U.S. Army Band would play Barber's "Adagio for Strings" at maximum volume to drown out the screams of napalmed protesters. Then, when an eerie silence descended on the smoke and rubble of the scorched square, Trumpo would pull a Bible from his backpack and hold it triumphantly aloft.

Everything went perfectly until the very end, when Trump extracted the book and ... it was a copy of James Baldwin's "Go Tell It On the Mountain."

"James WHO?!" Trump asked. He threw the volume in the trash.

2. This past Sunday, I entered the private "White House Suite" at Walter Reed. 

"Hey, Rick!" the president wheezed, wearing a Halloween mask of Bill Clinton. An oxygen tank was somehow hooked up with O2 hissing directly into an aperture in his moon-like belly.

I quietly asked a doctor, "He DOES know that mask protects absolutely no one, right?"

"Nope," Dr. Yes Man whispered. "He thinks he's here so we can remove his tonsils. He remembers the first time he had them out, when he was a kid, and got to eat ice cream. The mask is for Halloween."

Trumpo then hit me with a new video concept. He wanted to get in the car and go get some "show girls" and then eat even more ice cream.

"On the way," he theorized, his voice sounding like a defensive lineman stomping on an ankle-deep pile of fried porkskins, "you film me as I wave at my fans gathered in front of the the hospital."

"Those are actually philosophy students," I said. "Bertrand Russell's on life support two floors down."

"Bernie SANDERS?!" The president hacked and gasped like a beached mossbunker injected with wasp repellent.

"Mr. President, I hate to interrupt but your lungs stopped working," a Yes-Man pulmonologist said.

"Too bad. We're going!" Trump said. And after he was resuscitated by one of those "bolt of lightning" machines we associate with Frankenstein movies, we in fact did.

3. Claiming he hadn't "felt better than the night I spent on the women's Ice Capades tour bus," Trumpo returned to the White House Monday.

I filmed as he emerged from his helicopter and, aided by puppet-style strings secured overhead in tree branches, pulling his legs and arms in a "walky" motion, he made it up to the Lincoln Balcony. Staring into the void, he dramatically removed a new COVID mask to "show my subjects I'm fine and this carnova virus thing is nothing. I repeat, NOTHING!"

Then he collapsed.

I, ah, edited that part out.