INT. TRUMP TOWER – PENTHOUSE DINING ROOM – NIGHT
A bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1961 breathes between two titans of ego. The city glows below them like a subdued kingdom. Donald Trump wears a silk robe with “45” embroidered in gold. Patrick Bateman, razor-sharp in a Brioni dinner jacket, decants the wine like a surgeon handling blood. On the TV: an old clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger barking, “Stop whining!”
DONALD TRUMP
(scoffs, watching Arnold)
There he goes again—“Stop whining!” Easy for him to say. He’s the Terminator. Married into the Kennedys. Has a tank in his garage. And muscles the size of Rhode Island.
PATRICK BATEMAN
(deadpan, pouring Trump’s glass)
It’s always the musclemen and money priests telling us to shut up. Arnold. Warren Buffet. The Rothschilds. It’s like a chorus of oligarchs anonymous.
DONALD TRUMP
(snorts)
Buffet lectures me on taxes. Arnold tells me to stop whining. Meanwhile, we’re sitting here drinking wine worth more than most Americans’ annual salary—and we’re still not even close to Rothschild rich.
PATRICK BATEMAN
(raising his glass)
You ever meet a Rothschild?
DONALD TRUMP
(shaking his head)
No. I invited one to Mar-a-Lago once. They sent back a polite rejection letter… written in Latin.
PATRICK BATEMAN
(dark chuckle)
They don’t go on Forbes lists. They own the lists. Their idea of poor is probably us drinking a bottle from the 1960s instead of something from Napoleon’s cellar.
DONALD TRUMP
(grumbles)
I own towers. Golf courses. A Boeing 757. And still—somehow—I’m a peasant to them.
PATRICK BATEMAN
(swirling his glass)
We’re nouveau royalty, Donald. Flash. Gold. Hotels. But they’re dynastic. Old money. Banking bloodlines. Illuminati whispers and Swiss vaults. We’re rich. They’re immortal.
DONALD TRUMP
(half-laughing)
And Arnold thinks we need him to motivate us? He’s a movie star from Austria who got famous pretending to be a robot. Great guy, by the way, but I don’t need a Terminator telling me to work harder.
PATRICK BATEMAN
(mocking tone)
“Stop whining,” he says—as if our problem is attitude. Not the fact that every central bank probably owes the Rothschilds interest payments until the end of time.
DONALD TRUMP
(toasting)
To being poor—by billionaire standards.
PATRICK BATEMAN
(clinks glasses)
And to whining about it—with style.
They drink. The Rothschild bottle gleams in the low light like an artifact of another world. On the screen, Arnold flexes. Somewhere far away, the Rothschilds don’t notice—or care.