1. Note: This is a work of satire. Most of the information included herein has been entirely fabricated and should not be taken at face value.

The sinister, world-controlling cabal the Illuminati are encountering increasing difficulty in controlling their onetime pawn, former U.S. president and current American presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“He’s just become uncontrollable,” said Bob, a member of the Illuminati who is speaking pseudonymously to hide his identity. “At first, we didn’t think he was too smart. We could handle him. But he’s steadily grown more and more arrogant.”

The Illuminati’s relationship with Trump began in 2015, ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. At the time, the group believed that he would be popular, but relatively lacked in true leadership ability and easy to manipulate. From the White House, Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Climate Agreement, courting of authoritarian leaders such as North Korea’s Premier Kim Jong-Un, and controversial attacks on the press all fulfilled certain Illuminati objectives (“If I said more, I’d have to kill you,” Bob explained).

Trump’s dynamic with the group began to shift, however, during the 2020 election season. He started to make bombastic false claims his handlers did not write. Among these was his support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, which Bob finds laughable. “Who would ever think that is real? Nobody puts secret messages on social media! You put them on dollar bills where no one will notice, like us!”

Not helping matters was the way that so much of the GOP flocked to Trump’s banner. “We certainly paid Republican leaders to [endorse Trump],” said another, senior Illuminati figure who supervised Trump’s manipulation. “We replaced people with androids. We even blackmailed Senator Lindsay Graham with proof that he was the Zodiac Killer. But we never anticipated that so many people would genuinely want Trump to stay in charge.” 

Things came to a head when Trump encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, against Illuminati orders. “Orchestrating catastrophes is our thing!” Bob fumed. “Do you have any idea how it looks when you kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, but your stooge almost overthrew American democracy?”

Since the insurrection, Trump has decidedly become a free agent. He apparently intends to return to the Oval Office free of the Illuminati’s strings, despite their attempts to bring him to heel. “We tried to sabotage the Republican primaries and make the viewing audience support Chris Christie,” said Bob, “but the batteries on our thought-controlling-signal projectors ran out.”

“It’s incredibly surprising, how quickly and how easily Trump has managed to go rogue,” a Niles North history teacher commented. “This is shocking, to have the Illuminati–who have basically hand-picked every U.S. president since Millard Fillmore–so flagrantly, and so successfully, defied by a single man. Not only that, but Trump is gathering a following of his own, in part using different conspiracy theories he and his allies have made up, which weakens the Illuminati. And you have to wonder, will Trump start to create a kind of counter-cabal of his own? Will another conspiracy, like the Bohemian Grove, step in to fill the power vacuum?” 

When pressed on how they know about this stuff, the teacher replied, “Eh, I’m a history teacher. I know things.” They immediately fled out the window. Exhaustive subsequent investigation has revealed that this particular teacher is not present on any birth certificate, driver’s license, or other public record.

Bob is not certain of the Illuminati’s next move. “We thought we could puppeteer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a rival who would take votes from Trump, but they already found the brain worm we put in him, so that’s out.” When asked if he had anything to add, Bob replied, “Just one more thing: this conversation never happened.”