“What are Trump’s plans?

“Who were Trump’s contacts in the Russian government?”

“Who hacked Podesta?”

“Deep dish or thin crust?”

They shined bright lights down on the hat and played “You Can Call Me Al” at ear-ripping volume for an hour to soften him up, before dousing him with a bucket of icy water. When he serenely floated off the table on the wave of water, he was tackled and beaten for trying to escape. The hat suffered all this with a stoic grace and only a slight rumpling.

They sent in a good cop/bad cop pair. The bad cop talked about the hat getting raped in prison. The good cop that offered the hat a cigarette and a bottle of water. The hat ignored the threats and the small kindnesses. The bad cop slammed his hand down on the table. The good cop slapped the cigarette away and dumped the water on the floor. Curse words drifted into the room over a crackling intercom.

“Drown it in a filthy toilet.”

“Hook it up to a car battery.”

“Does it have testicles? I have pliers! Freeze it. Burn it. Bring in acid.”

“Nothing disfiguring!”

A drooling retard from Forestry was brought in and the hat was roughly jammed on his misshapen head over and over again, his elastic band stretched to the breaking point, his most intimate concavity repeatedly violated. And still the hat gathered his scraps of remaining dignity and sat on the table where they placed him, mute and inscrutable.

The hat was thrown into a filthy breakroom microwave and warned he would receive a lethal dose of radiation if he didn’t talk. The hat was shown a twenty-minute industrial films of hats being fed into a shredder, a horror film of ripped bills and hanging entrails of brim and visor. The hat was kicked for thirty minutes by men with clean shoes and warped minds, who made jokes about the hat shitting out his splintered bones over the next week.

“What if it is just a hat?”

“Impossible.”

“We have to consider it.”

“Impossible!”

The hat was given an intrabillious injection, scopolamine and cocaine, and subjected to strobe lights and a soundtrack of Donald’s voice a twice-speed playback, a fake speech by Donald cobbled together from audio clips, Donald’s voice denounced the hat in stilted dialogue, Donald’s voice said the hat was nothing, nothing but a hat, only a hat. The hat remained loyal and silent.

After six hours of interrogation, THE DEEP STATE had gotten nothing from MAGA Prime. Agent DEEP COVER was called in and given the hat.

“Return MAGA Prime to the vault. Trump can never know it was missing,” the Grand Vizier ordered.

As Agent DEEP COVER opened the vault, she saw that the hair, still clumpy with pink paint, was on the floor. She hadn’t told them about her act of vandalism. She picked up the hair and studied at the paint. Trump would know that someone had been in the vault, that his security had been compromised. Her mission was over. She would have to leave the White House, under the usual cloud of disgrace, and hope that she could disappear.

She unwrapped the hat and sat it on its little throne and put the hair back on its gold bust and closed the vault behind her.

“Speak to me, man,” the hair said quietly, “What happened?”

“They… did things.”

“What sort of things?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I tried to come for you,” the hair said, “The vault door…”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’ve almost broken the paint down.”

“Good,” the hat said, “I just want to go to sleep.”

But in the cold pre-dawn hours that followed, the hat couldn’t sleep and the hair heard him weeping.