Just the Woman in the Room

In thirty-two years of marriage to Arnold Banks, the forty-sixth President of the United States, I never once saw him make his own coffee, prepare his own lunch, or do anything for himself that he could make someone else do for him, and I include in that list the basic human acts of kindness.

From my Connecticut home, I'm writing this with the fresh scent of the sea in the air, seated at a kitchen table strewn with black Moleskine notebooks. Each notebook was filled with the loops and lines of my handwriting. The evidence within each paper was a testament to my two years within a presidency intentionally built to cause harm from day one.

I know that's a large claim to make in the opening paragraphs. I intend to support it thoroughly. I have dates. I have names and numbers. I have direct quotations from conversations my husband conducted on speakerphone.

How did I get that, you might ask? Because in all his years in the White House he never once learned to close a door, which tells you something about his respect for the people around him and something about the quality of intelligence available to anyone who cared to listen through the walls. Which I did every day for two years with a notebook in my lap and a pen in my hand and a growing certainty that someone needed to be writing this down.

My name is Gloria Hartwell Banks. My time as First Lady of the United States, from January 2025 to December 28th, 2026, ended with me packing one suitcase, taking my notebooks, leaving my wedding ring on the dresser, and driving to Connecticut to start writing the book you hold. My perspective is biased, so I cannot be an impartial narrator. My love for him turned to shock as I watched him change into something my vocabulary couldn't capture, though I've dedicated significant time to finding the words.

Monster is too dramatic, though he certainly is one. Sociopath is close, but still too clinical.‌ The word I keep coming back to is empty, because that's what Arnold was. Hidden beneath the bold confidence, the rousing rallies, the fine scotch, and the supercilious pen, an expensive item that wrote with the seamless flow of a device engineered to make signing feel momentous, regardless of the substance of what was being signed.

He was empty, and he filled the emptiness with power, and that power was never enough. The insufficiency of the power required him to gain more of it, and the acquisition of more power required the destruction of everything that stood between him and the feeling he was chasing. Which was not happiness or satisfaction or even dominance, but something simpler and sadder: the sensation of being large.

Arnold Banks needed to feel large. He needed to look down on everyone. Whether they were highly skilled professionals or the young intern who brought his coffee. He achieved this by making everyone around him feel small, and he did it so effectively and for so long that by the time he became president, he had refined the process into a governing philosophy.

Let me tell you about the index cards.

My final six months in the White House saw me develop a routine that a therapist would likely find intriguing, yet I avoided consulting one, recognizing that their profession relies on honesty and pouring your soul out. I was already dedicating these things entirely to my many journals.

The index cards. I wrote descriptions of eternal punishments for my husband and his associates and hid them throughout the White House in places Arnold would never look, which was essentially everywhere, because Arnold Banks moved through that building the way a train moves through a tunnel: on rails, eyes forward, oblivious to the walls. I hid them inside books on the Lincoln Bedroom shelves that hadn't been opened since the Clinton administration.

I tucked them behind picture frames he'd never straightened. I slipped them under a tea canister in the kitchen he'd never entered because the man hadn't made himself a cup of anything since 1994. I was Dante with a pack of index cards, designing circles of hell for the men who were dismantling the country, and it was the most fun I had in that building, which tells you everything you need to know about what my life was like inside it.

The card I wrote for Theodore Kessinger, the tech billionaire Arnold had appointed to gut the federal workforce, read: Condemned to call the Social Security office for eternity. Always fourth in the queue. The hold music is a recording of himself explaining why federal employees are "dead weight," played at half speed. Every time a representative answers, the call drops. He is not permitted to build an app to solve this.

The one I wrote for Roy Henderson, whose private contracting company profited from every piece of the government Arnold tore apart, described Henderson living in one of his own detention facilities forever. Two meals a day, both lukewarm beans and white bread. Heating optimized to fifty-four degrees. A contract physician who visited on the first Tuesday of the month and not a single day more. They always stick him in the stomach with a series of rabies shots.

The one I wrote for Arnold, which I'll share more fully later in this book, was much longer and proved to be the most accurate writing I've ever produced, an accuracy that still deeply unsettles me in ways I'm still coming to terms with. I described his hell as experiencing every consequence of every policy he'd ever signed, all at once, without end. The tariffs, the veteran suicides, the disability checks that never came, the children separated from their parents. I wrote it as a coping mechanism, sitting in my chair with a glass of Sancerre and my reading glasses on my forehead, and I meant it as dark comedy, the creative output of a woman who needed to laugh because the alternative was screaming.

This book tells the story of the last week of Arnold's life. Of course, he didn't know it was his last week, and I didn't either, and I'm not sure it would have changed anything even if we had. It covers the seven days between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve of 2026, during which my husband was visited by three dead presidents who showed him exactly what his policies were doing to the country, exactly what his choices were doing to his family, and exactly what was waiting for him after he died. They showed him everything. They gave him every chance.

He didn't take a single one.