SAN NARCISO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- On November 10, Donald Trump attended a private transition meeting with Barack Obama. The current president walked his successor through the duties of running the country. Sources present at the discussion said Trump appeared bewildered by the scope of responsibilities, and was genuinely unfamiliar with the job. Trump’s aides seemed equally unprepared, not realizing that the existing White House staff would need to be replaced. In his accustomed fashion, Trump made several odd remarks. He reiterated his confusion about manufacturing nuclear weapons with no intent to launch them, he compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, and then asked when he, like the 16th president, could “declare war on blacks” [sic] and “begin hunting vampires.”

Donald Trump: Vampire Hunter

Despite his absolute lack of government or military experience, Trump and his supporters believe that he is the right man to shake up the establishment and restore America to its past grandeur -- an era that likely ranges from 1860 to 1968. Trump has already selected key cabinet members and enlisted advisers to guide him through the murky waters of U.S. politics.

To demonstrate his commitment to the nation’s prosperity and protection, Trump has been studying past presidents for insight on the role. Lincoln, the first Republican to hold the office, represents Trump’s foremost model. Unfortunately, the only materials Trump has read about the Great Emancipator’s history are Wikipedia and Seth Grahame-Smith’s fictional novel, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Outgoing members of Trump’s unpredictable transition team revealed that the president-elect repeatedly asked Security Adviser Michael Flynn when he could begin hunting vampires.

“I can’t reveal all the details, but I can say that my security team has given me a secret journal that belonged to Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said. “It’s classified. Very secret. I can’t tell you everything that’s in there. Top secret stuff, folks. Some of it very frightening. But I can tell you that before winning the war on blacks [sic], Lincoln was saving this nation by killing vampires.”

Trump admitted to believing in the existence of “blood sucking parasites” who have invaded these shores from foreign countries and “south of the border,” alluding to the Southern vampire horde referenced in Grahame-Smith’s “secret journal of Lincoln.”

“It all makes sense,” Trump stated. “They sneak into America during the night, they drain our resources dry, they’re repelled by the Christian cross and they sleep in dirt. I’m talking about ISIS and Mexicans. Vampires.”

To bolster his point, Trump recalled Sarah Palin’s own initiative to rid Alaska of werewolves. That story broke in 2008 when reporters discovered Palin’s hobby of aerial hunting -- shooting wolves from a low-flying plane. But according to research conducted by sociologists in 2011, Palin’s pastime may have been a covert security operation rather than the enthusiastic massacre of wild dogs.

Dr. Regis Ketamine, a sociology professor at San Narciso College, headed the comprehensive two-year study, which connected Palin’s eradication of werewolves to her immersion in the occult, evidenced by her membership in the Wasilla Assembly of God Church. Founded in 1951, the pentecostal sect is known for its relentless fight against contemporary witchcraft. Following is an excerpt from Ketamine’s report of five years ago.

Palin is a staunch lifetime member of the Wasilla Assembly of God Church. Draconian as the church might appear, noted Kenyan witch hunter Thomas Muthee oversees this congregation as a sort of modern-day Van Helsing. Palin belonged to a select group of members who received a special consecration from Muthee that protects them against witchcraft. As one of the “chosen blessed,” she can be identified by unique forms of stigmata, which appear as phrases and random words on the palms of her hands. We know that she regularly used her gifts to hunt werewolves roaming the wilds of Alaska. To optimize her power, she patrolled the areas from an airplane and fired upon her prey from above.

It is impossible to tell how many people her actions saved, as these lycanthropes had begun moving closer to residential sites. Now that she has ostensibly retired from political life, Alaska is no longer a “safe zone.” We urge all people to avoid this area until 2012, when Palin will either run for office with Rick Perry or usher in the destruction of the world as prophesied by ancient Aztec writings.

Trump, without revealing all the dire events chronicled in Lincoln’s diary, cautioned that many of our current hostilities and threats may be otherworldly in nature.

“There’s all sorts of supernatural stuff lurking in the bedrock of this country,” Trump said. “My top advisers keep telling me this. Natural disasters caused by God’s hatred of gays, a bunch of cross-burning ghosts who follow me around to protect me, the miracle of winning a presidential election while losing the popular vote by almost 2 million -- that’s all magical and unexplainable. I even found out today that some of my new officials come straight out of Hogwarts -- they belong to a mystic klan of knights. Some are goblins, Grand Dragons and Grand Wizards. Crazy stuff.”

Taking up arms against the nosferatu infestation has moved to the top of Trump’s agenda. On Tuesday morning, he walked back his pledge to prosecute Hillary Clinton. His new opposition to jailing Clinton rattled and disappointed supporters, but the president-elect urged them to focus on more critical matters -- such as ridding America of its undead menace.

Trump: Our American Cousin by Marriage, Twice Removed

Beyond the shared mission of slaughtering monsters with a penchant for exsanguination, Trump aligned himself ideologically with Lincoln’s attitudes and policies.

“I have tremendous respect for the legacy of Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said. “He was a great president. A great man. Just great. A great leader. Great. And my presidency will follow the great path he laid, which other not-so-great presidents have destroyed.”

After skimming what he described as a “really long Wikipedia entry on Lincoln, full of big boring government words,” Trump liberally interpreted some of the 16th president’s beliefs as echoes of his own.

“I’m going to be a lot like Lincoln,” Trump explained. “We’ve had a generation of Great Emasculators, now we’re getting back to Great Emancipators. I will fight to free the minorities in this country -- the one percent who are harassed and attacked by the other 99 percent. Like Lincoln, I will also oppose Muslims and immigrants and the dishonest press.”

Repressing the Press, Lincoln Style

On Monday, Trump invited television executives and anchors from top news stations to a conference at Trump Tower, where he berated and censured them for their unflattering coverage. Attendees included Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos and Wolf Blitzer.

Trump has also maintained a running blacklist of media outlets to which he will never grant credentials. While critics have derided these actions as violations of a free press and the first signs of despotism, Trump cited Lincoln’s handling of the media as a precedent.

Writing for the New York Review of Books in 2014, Gary Wills explored the repression of journalists under Lincoln’s wartime administration as described in Harold Holzer’s book, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion.

But many government departments joined in actions to restrict or censor news gathering -- the telegraph company, the Post Office, the Treasury, the War Department, as well as some local courts. All exercised some form of censorship, especially after bad news flooded out from the disastrous early defeat of Union forces at Bull Run. Lincoln generally just let this censorship happen, without taking the blame.

Journalists who tried to break the censorship could end up detained with other war prisoners at Fort Lafayette, which became known as the “American Bastille.”

Religious Freedoms Extend Only to Protestants and Catholics

To justify his Muslim registration and deportation goals, Trump quoted a speech on religious freedoms delivered by Lincoln at a Whig gathering.

RESOLVED: That the guarantee of the rights of conscience, as found in our Constitution, is most sacred and inviolable, and one that belongs no less to the Catholic, than to the Protestant; and that all attempts to abridge or interfere with these rights, either of Catholic or Protestant, directly or indirectly, have our decided disapprobation, and shall ever have our most effective opposition.

“Catholics and Protestants,” Trump snapped. “That’s it. No Muslims. America’s greatest president clarified the First Amendment in no uncertain terms, and there should be no more arguing whether this is a Christian nation. It is. And there’s nothing about Muslims being allowed to practice their faith here.”

All Men, Except Foreigners, Are Created Equal

Although the 16th president famously supported immigration as a means for strengthening a nation ravaged by war and moral divisions, Trump’s reading of another Lincoln statement was largely skewed.

Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” Soon it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners.”

Trump ostensibly took Lincoln’s words far outside their context and promoted them as a guiding principle of his proposed policies.

“This was Lincoln’s vision: creating equal opportunities for real Americans,” Trump observed. “And, you know, he got right to heart of who these real citizens weren’t -- negroes and foreigners. He was killed by an actor before he could fulfill that dream. Being killed by a stupid, insecure, unfunny actor doesn’t surprise me in the least. Not in the least. People like musical theater casts and SNL employees, they’re prone to violence. But as president, I will carry on the legacy of Lincoln. I will see his visions come to pass, where equality is restored to the pure sons of America and stripped away from dark forces, swarthy pretenders and creatures of the night.”

(c) 2016. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. All articles are works of satire. See disclaimers.