Serving Time

"45 is on the move". 

It was 6:30 AM on a Tuesday in mid June of 2025. It promised to be a beautiful morning, sunny and with but the slightest of breezes. The object of attention of this detail of four men was preparing for his morning constitutional.

The four worked in rotation. At least two were to be at the ready at any moment during the day. Their quarters next to 45. Their accommodations? Let's just say you wouldn't make reservations to come here.

45 was scheduled to remain in this location for the next three months. This was not a matter of his choosing.

He had awoken around 4 AM. Turned on the television that had recently been installed for him. There were no books by his bed, as he never considered himself a reader. With pen and paper, he intermittently scrawled his thoughts. There was no cell phone to accommodate his musings.

The four men would be in this place for the next five days. Then the next cycle would come to replace them. When they had first applied for their employment, each at least ten years prior, this is not what they envisioned.

Riker's Island sits on over 400 acres in Bronx, NYC. It is home to ten different jails. Its reputation as one of the worst prisons in the nation is well deserved. In fact, in 2019, the city voted to close this facility by 2026.

One of the jails here had long ago been emptied of any occupants. Now there was one. Or five, if you count the four tasked with protecting the former President of the United States.

In another time 45 may have envisioned coming to this property with the idea of somehow acquiring it, or at least obtaining an option to purchase if and when the City decided to abandon it and cut their losses. The art of the deal. But today he was something less than a real estate baron on the hunt.

In the long history of this nation we have been witness to some seemingly unimaginable events. A civil war in which we cannibalized each other, maybe the most extreme deviation. This had to rank among the more unthinkable. And yet remarkably, had Mr. Trump gathered but five more electoral votes in November of last year, he would have awoken this morning not in the Big House but in a very big house in Washington. His sentence delayed until after he completed his destruction of our democracy.

And if that had been the facts at hand, these four men would not this magnificent late spring morning be serving time for a crime they didn't commit.