To do over again, sure, I probably wouldn't have helped Donald Trump run for president.

In my defense, you have to understand one thing: When we started, we never meant to take it this far. We didn't want any of this to happen. Honestly.

I know that must sound impossible now, with Donald leading the GOP and absolutely dominating the media landscape, but, once upon a time, this was supposed to be a joke.

I should start at the beginning.

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No, not that part.

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The Beginning

Donald first reached out to me a year ago because he liked my book, How To Fight Presidents, which was really no surprise to me. Ego is a huge part of that book, and Donald -- the real Donald, that I know -- has privately described himself as "a student of ego." He's always been fascinated with the idea of deluded, larger-than-life characters, people who make living legends of themselves. He emailed me saying he enjoyed the book, an email turned into a text conversation, which turned into a phone call, and before I knew it, I was meeting Donald Trump for lunch every week.

Talking about the book got us talking about the time the Secret Service interrogated me while working on the book (the short version is that, while researching, I wrote a satire article on Cracked that might have been considered "vaguely threatening" to the president, then the Secret Service made us take the article down, and then the Secret Service interviewed me to make sure I wasn't a terrorist [I wasn't and am still not]). Donald loved that story, and since we'd gotten pretty close at this point, I told Donald something that I hadn't admitted to anyone else before.