The staff of the Onion, a satirical online newspaper that's been a reliable antidote to reality for nearly three decades, was not thrilled by the prospect of a Trump Presidency. The paper’s longtime writer Chad Nackers told me in March that the thought of having to frequently satirize Trump and the bit players in his Administration for four years—or more—filled many of the publication's staffers with "comedic dread." The Onion has been tormenting Trump for close to twenty years, beginning back when he was a mere citizen-object of scorn, with headlines like 2012's "Donald Trump Stares Forlornly at Tiny, Aged Penis in Mirror Before Putting On Clothes, Beginning Day" and, from 2013, "When You're Feeling Low, Just Remember I'll Be Dead in About 15 or 20 Years." (The latter provoked Trump's general counsel, Michael Cohen, to demand an apology to his client. The Onion ignored this request.) But, for a President Trump, Cole Bolton, the Onion's editor-in-chief, told me last week, "We needed something much bigger, much broader, which can hit all the themes we want to hit in a single stroke."

More than a dozen writers and eight graphics editors have been assembling that something over the past four months: seven hundred pages of Trump-related documents that have been "leaked" to the Onion_._ The first batch was revealed at noon on Monday on the Onion's Facebook page, as well as on a special Web site. "Document dumps," Bolton said, "are the vogue way to talk about major breaking news in the world, whether it's WikiLeaks or the Panama Papers. Leaks seemed like the perfect means to get at Trump and his inner circle, as well as his decision-making."

Among the leaked Trump documents: a string of e-mails between the President and Boeing's C.E.O., about Trump's desired upgrades—marble everything—to Air Force One; some of the Vice-President's handwritten notes, with helpful illustrations, describing puritanical inventions of his, like a "nose harness" to prevent the smelling of "sinful smells," like a woman's skin, and a "blouse that cannot flutter in the wind"; and three of the President's idiosyncratic daily briefings, written on children's placemats. "Like you get at Denny's," Bolton said. "They say things like, 'These are the security issues today. Find them in the word box!' " There are Mad Libs-style executive orders ("fill-in a 'fear-inducing noun,' " one instructs, then an "adjective that implies 'sub-human' without actually stating it"), a note from Obama to Trump that was left in the Oval Office, as well as handwritten letters between Melania Trump and her concerned relatives back in Slovenia. All the documents appear to have originated between Trump's Inauguration and the current day, with the exception of a few e-mails between the press secretary, Sean Spicer, and Trump, exchanged prior to the election. Trump's voice is limited in the documents. "His voice is so over-mocked," Bolton said. "Everyone throws the word 'huge' in there and says they're an orange-so-and-so with small hands. Those jokes are done to death. We wanted to not fall in those traps."

Riffing on the minutiae of the news cycle is generally not the Onion's goal, and these documents are no different. There are a few items related to the recent James Comey chaos, like a series of very simplistically encrypted e-mails that Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, sent to Trump. ("Flynn has device Moscow is pleased," one decoded missive reads. Another says, simply, "Focus Donald.") A few other specific events are mentioned, such as Spicer suggesting that Bashar al-Assad is worse than Hitler. But the documents mostly play on broad themes of the Trump Administration: stupidity, duplicity, and the strategic use of fear.

Verisimilitude is critical: White House letterheads, government fonts, official document formatting and style. "We did a lot of background with that stuff," Bolton said. "Then our graphics team put it all together, so everything looks like it's official." There are a few lawsuits that appear to have been filed in court, using the appropriate legalese. (In one, Trump sues a yawning West Wing tour group for not talking to him about his Electoral College victory.) Most painstaking of all, after an Onion staffer typed or hand-wrote the documents, another staffer then printed and scanned each of them, one by one, so that they look like "real leaked documents." "There always are people who think what we do is real," Bolton told me. "Our intention is not for them to be perceived as real. It's to make them look as much like actual things as possible. That helps with the satire. We put a lot of effort into these things not to try to fool people but to try to expose underlying truths, as we see them, about the Trump Administration."

Each day for the next two weeks, the Onion will reveal the leaked documents in the publication's Facebook Live segments, which were actually prerecorded. An actress in her mid-fifties who also works in communications for an Illinois state agency—and, for that reason, asked to remain anonymous—plays the part of Elizabeth Strickland, the Onion's Washington bureau chief. "I think what makes the Onion's satire so strong," she told me, "is that it's very straight. You never give away the joke. So I have a lot of straight lines. I'm just reporting on the documents." She went on, "I said to a producer, 'Do you want me to show some Anderson Cooper-like concern?' The producer said, 'Nope. This is important information to get to the public, but don't show judgment.' So I channelled a mix of reporters and anchors, but certainly not the White House press team." She added, "I will say that you have to have a special kind of talent to do what Kellyanne Conway does and keep a straight face."