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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26824
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

One easy, cheap and workable approach to writing without worldbuilding is when the world is _known_.

Your story takes place at the White House, your protagonist is President Trump. Everyone knows all the rest. Just sketch out the events.

Another, harder - is to write apart from the setting. The events and conflicts are universal, essentially per Alexander's answer.

What you're trying to do though, is very hard to do right - and very easy to get wrong. When the world is just a minimal sketch of weirdness surrounding the characters, but definitely interacts with them, you're at constant risk of introducing [Deus Ex Machina](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina) - a very bad tool, a total rock bottom when it comes to quality of prose.

Your deus ex machina may come as immediate solution, contrivance or problem that was not foreshadowed, is not understandable to the reader, serves no other purpose than to advance the plot, and in effect your story becomes either a pulp of cheapest kind or a starts resembling milder forms of [Schizophasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophasia).

It takes a very skilled writer to pull it off - have the world with unexplainable mysteries, but still compelling, the sudden revelations spicing the story up instead of watering it down. Considering you're even asking this question, I'd suggest you take a more conservative approach. Just knowing that it _can_ be done doesn't put you much closer to knowing _how_ to do it right.

Original score: 12