There is no Lamborghini or Ferrari in the driveway – the kind that seems to continually cruise Ocean Boulevard outside – just a simple Tesla in the garage that Patterson says he’s happy to be able to drive again freely now that Trump is no longer president and there aren’t Secret Service agents closing the road every other weekend. He greets me dressed in an open-necked shirt and jeans, and guides me through the property to a modest patio set out back. I meet Patterson at his home, a Mediterranean-style villa in Palm Beach. In June, they will release their second jointly written thriller, The President’s Daughter, one of many co-authored projects Patterson has become known for. Since their first collaboration, which Patterson called “a highlight of my career”, Clinton calls at least a couple of times a month, he says.
But our discussion about Clinton, with whom he co-wrote ( at least to some degree) the 2018 bestseller The President is Missing, puts him on a more comfortable footing.
It’s clearly not a topic Patterson likes to dwell on. “There’s a lot of bad stuff that went on there. Patterson, who claims to be a left-leaning political independent, was no fan of the Trump administration, and admits the pair haven’t spoken since. And he looks at me and he goes, ‘Crazy world, huh?’” “And he wasn’t running then, nobody knew anything that he stood for, zero. “He was ranked first among who people would like to see as a Republican candidate,” Patterson says.
Indeed, Patterson tells of an encounter a dozen years ago in which Trump, ebullient at a newspaper article he’d just read, said to him: “Did you see the polls?”