The New Yorker:

The former governor of Illinois, who served time for trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat, advises buffing up, finding a cool nickname, and watching out for crazies urinating in the oatmeal.

By Charles Bethea

In 2009, Donald Trump fired Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, from “The Celebrity Apprentice.” “Your ‘Harry Potter’ facts were not accurate,” Trump told Blagojevich, who was under indictment at the time, for trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat the previous year. Blagojevich was found guilty, and in 2012 he began a fourteen-year prison sentence, which Trump commuted eight years later. “Seemed like a very nice person,” Trump said after the commutation, calling Blagojevich’s punishment “a tremendously powerful ridiculous sentence in my opinion.” Blagojevich emerged from prison a self-described “Trumpocrat.”

“I’d have just been coming home a couple weeks ago had President Trump not, you know, shortened it,” Blagojevich said recently. “I keep having this dream where I’m still in prison,” he went on. “Probably because I’m writing this book.” Since last August, Blagojevich has been at work on a memoir about his time in the clink, with “Gangster Disciples . . . Sinaloa drug-cartel leaders . . . murderers, bank robbers, sex offenders,” and Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling. “I went from Obama, Clinton, congressmen, senators, and lawmakers to Smelly and Socks and Sharky and Mr. B.,” he added. “They all have nicknames.” His was Gov. The former governor does not enjoy writing but said that he hopes that his prison memoir “will be helpful to folks facing hard times.” Trump, who is now facing up to four years in prison for thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records, might want to skim the CliffsNotes.

Go to link