What's Wrong with Trump-Themed Fiction?
Why the Stories We Tell about Dictatorship Are Badly out of Date
Naomi Kanakia, who writes the wonderful literary Substack Woman of Letters, finds that people don’t like reading fiction about Donald Trump:
“Our current political situation” is like the bad part of town: you only go there if you need something. You don't go there just for fun. And yet because you can't go there, you're always haunted by it. The bad part of town really exists, in reality, as a place where real people live, but it also has an existence in our subconscious, where it becomes a factor in our politics, our self-image, etc.
This regime haunts all my thoughts, feelings, plans, aspirations. It colors everything I read, write, and say. And yet…I know it would be tiresome in the extreme if this regime was all that I wrote about.”
I realized, reading her essay, that I've come to share this widespread aversion to Trump-themed literature. I can barely stand reading news articles about him these days. And nothing turns me off a good short story like the suspicion that I'm about to encounter some writer’s opinion of a certain pouty-faced dictator. But why?
Whatever you think of him, Trump's a major figure, undoubtedly one of the most consequential men of our time. And the MAGA movement as a whole cries out for analysis. Sure, as Kanakia says, it's painful to talk about. But why would that stop us? Don't people talk about painful topics all the time? Isn't that what stories are for? Ignoring Trump feels a bit like writing a novel where smartphones don’t exist. Yeah, you can do it, but why try? Doesn't this amount to a form of willful self-delusion?
Kanakia suggests that we avoid discussing Trump because of the feelings of powerlessness he evokes—the fear that we might be abducted at any time by agents of his regime. There's something to that, but it doesn't feel quite right to me. It sure doesn’t seem to stop most people. You can go on Bluesky—or Substack, for that matter—and find thousands of folks yammering away, same as always, about the terrible things Trump has done.
Nevertheless, there is something irksome about art that deals with Trump's regime. It seems to me the stories people tell about Trump are almost always unsatisfying, and almost always in the same familiar ways. In particular, they're informed by a conception of authoritarianism that's still firmly rooted in the culture and politics of the twentieth century. We have trouble grappling imaginatively with Trump, I think, because the kinds of stories we're used to telling about people like him—the liberal myths of the past hundred years—are inadequate to describe our situation.
Pop Culture’s Vision of Autocracy is Old Hat
The major motifs of those liberal myths are probably familiar to most Brits and Americans. There's a kind of ur-narrative, found mostly in pop culture but with high culture versions as well, that celebrates liberal values by setting them in conflict with a crew of convenient antagonists: decadent aristocrats, religious fanatics, McCarthyite conservatives, power-hungry totalitarians, corrupt elitists, and corporate executives. The key thing to note is that these archetypal enemies always seem to have a few features in common:
1. They control the media, practice widespread censorship and surveillance, and ruthlessly suppress dissent.
2. They're racially homogenous and persecute ethnic minorities.
3. They're sexually repressed, punish sexual "deviance," and keep women out of power.
4. They hew to rigid ideologies that insist on cultural and intellectual conformity.
5. They aggressively pursue foreign conquests and whip their people into a state of war fever.
6. They're brutally effective at running large organizations and wielding overwhelming power.
7. They're humorless, joyless, and austere.
Examples include Voldemort's Death Eaters, the Star Wars universe's Galactic Empire, the regime in Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, Oceania in 1984, the Kree from the MCU, Sauron's Mordor from The Lord of the Rings, the Capitol in the Hunger Games, the Harkonnens in Dune, the state in Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, the various enemies of the Culture in Iain Banks's novels, Gilead in the Handmaid's Tale, the censors in Fahrenheit 451, and a parade of Star Trek villains, from Klingons and Romulans to Cardassians and the Borg. Stretching the formula a bit, we might also include the robotic adversaries from the Matrix and Terminator movies, the Cybermen from Doctor Who, and the evil, all-powerful corporations from the Alien films, the Lego Movie, and countless cyberpunk properties.
The dominant feature of all these entities is that they're obsessed with purity: racial purity, ideological purity, sexual purity, cultural purity. The antithesis of liberalism is envisioned as a movement that prizes control, imposes a mirthless uniformity, and wipes out individual differences in favor of an ethic of collectivized aggression—an organization, imperium, corporation, or hivemind that's able to pursue its aims with terrifying singlemindedness, using censorship and repression to keep its constituents in line. The most familiar version of this bogeyman is, of course, the white-male-led totalitarian state with its jumble of features borrowed from real historical empires: pale-faced imperialists who build like Soviets, dress like Nazis, and speak like British aristocrats. But wholly mechanical versions are on offer, too.
Faced with such a nemesis, it's clear what liberalism represents. Mess. Variety. Humor. Pleasure. Impurity, but in a good way. The fructifying chaos, the generative disorder, of life itself. Hence the iconic band of liberal heroes we see marshalled, in story after story, to defeat these totalitarian threats: a chaotic cohort of scrappy outsiders, underestimated oddballs, and loveable weirdos who outsmart, outrun, and outquip the purse-lipped autocrats who seek to spoil their fun. Naturally, these motley heroes need to learn to control their own disciplinarian tendencies: to ease up, chill out, and overcome their differences if they ever hope to succeed. The miracle is that they're able to overcome their differences, not by gritting their teeth and subordinating their interests to some overarching governing structure—which would disrupt the thematic contrast between authoritarian control and personal freedom—but by hashing things out until they learn that they're not really so different after all.
Our Current Situation is Different
This D&D-style contrast between chaotic good and lawful evil seems readymade for YA fiction. But I find it popping up everywhere in liberal descriptions of Trump, which insist, over and over again, that the MAGA movement closely resembles these fictional fascist threats. Does it? Take the points above in order.
1. The Trump movement does crack down on speech. Agents of the regime are suppressing pro-Palestinian activists as we speak. But Trumpists haven’t proven to be especially effective or thorough censors, and Trump's actions have attracted so much vocal criticism that attacks on him are now commonly greeted with a yawn even by those who oppose him.
2. The Trump movement does demonize immigrants. But it's supported by nonsignificant numbers of minorities, many of whom it elevates to high positions.
3. The Trump movement does persecute transgender people. But it welcomes prominent gay members and supporters, puts women in key roles, and draws support from an online culture that revels in raunchy jokes.
4. The Trump movement does count ideologues among its members, such as Curtis Yarvin and N.S. Lyons. But it also embraces crackpots of many stripes, thrives on informational chaos, and struggles to impose message discipline on even its highest members.
5. The Trump movement does rattle sabers in a reckless and aggressive fashion, threatening to annex Gaza, Greenland, Canada, and other foreign territories. But it also flirts with isolationism and opposes America's biggest ongoing military entanglement.
6. Far from embodying soulless bureaucratic efficiency, the Trump movement is consistently slapdash, sloppy, bumbling, erratic, and embarrassingly disorganized.
7. Far from being joyless and humorless, the Trump movement wallows in prankish shenanigans and adolescent humor.
The main quality we were taught to look for in fascist movements—that fanatical obsession with purity—just isn't much in evidence, here. The MAGA movement isn't a united front of stormtroopers, theocrats, and white male eugenicists moving in lockstep as they march across the earth. It's a rabble of misfits, cranks, billionaires, working class Latinos, gay tech-moguls, Indian-American officials, gun-toting women, potty-mouthed influencers, ranting conspiracy theorists, and assorted bros. It doesn't look like the Galactic Empire, the Cardassian Union, the Death Eaters, Gilead, the Nazis, or the Soviet state. It looks like Joe Rogan's guest list.
The reason it's hard to tell stories about Trump, I think, is because we know, deep down, that the people who'd want to read those stories can't bring themselves to face this reality. They either want to pretend Trump's election was an embarrassing screwup that will soon be forgotten, or they want the old, comforting stories about ragtag teams of free-spirited underdogs who outfox all-powerful police states. The ugly truth is that Trump and his allies have many qualities we're used to associating not with evil dictators, but with beloved pop-culture heroes. These guys are wisecracking doofuses who flout the rules, thumb their noses at snobs and scolds, pal around with social rejects, and stick to their guns despite all odds. They're a pack of feisty outsiders who rose up to topple a hated enemy regime. The only catch is that the regime they’re toppling happens to be our own.
And so stories about Trump inevitably slip into one of two modes. Either they resort to allegory, swapping in a version of the old, archetypal totalitarian menace for the actual band of rogues ruling over us today—that's the preferred approach in pop culture—or they brood obsessively on the horror of watching our current disaster unfold, replaying again and again the shock of feeling a Weltanschauung crumble into fragments. How can it be true that good liberals were outmaneuvered by a bumbling, vulgar, incompetent buffoon? How can it be true that millions of women and minorities supported him? How can it be true that people raised their voices, speaking truth to power and sounding a warning, only to have it make no difference? How can it be true that liberals are no longer plucky rebels opposing an oppressive establishment, but beleaguered and, yes, elitist defenders of traditional institutions?
How? How? How? In many modern stories, especially literary stories, these questions drone in the background like a low-decibel alarm, a source of pain that doesn't need to be described—because everyone feels it—and is better left unmentioned—because no one knows what to do about it. Trump becomes a signifier for a general sense of dissociation, discussed through euphemism or circumlocution—as in Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking about This, where he's referred to simply as "the dictator," or Kaveh Akbar's Martyr!, where he becomes "President Invective"—while every form of unrest connected with him is glossed as a tantrum thrown by aggrieved white men.
No One Knows What Comes Next
What would it mean to face the Trump phenomenon head on? What would those stories look like? Kanakia says she has no clue, and neither do I. Our theory of how to resist fascism has been eclipsed along with our conception of what characterizes it. The bad guys don't look the way we thought they would, so our stories about what it means to be a good guy don't make much sense anymore, either. Are we fighting the system? Defending the system? Trying to restore it to the way it was before? Are we champions of meritocracy? Enemies of meritocracy? Is cheeky humor a help or a hindrance? What about tech? What about free speech? Is social media more helpful to demagogues, or to the people who oppose demagogues? Are we still trying to overcome our differences, or do we think it's now necessary to emphasize our differences? Do we want to promote a positive vision of masculinity, or are we dedicated to overthrowing gender stereotypes? Do we want to understand Trump supporters, or do we think it's dangerous to empathize with Trump supporters? Is tradition good? Bad? Somewhere in between? What about religion?
I don't know how most of Trump's opponents would answer those questions, and I'm not sure how I would answer them, either. All I know is that we all hate Trump.
None of this, of course, is to say that Trump's movement is actually good. I certainly don't think the old narrative has been flipped on its head, making Trumpists into ecumenical guardians of free speech while liberals behave like dogmatic Puritans. Too bad! That would at least make it easy to understand our situation. Instead, the agony of our moment is that the old myths turned out to be partly prescient: too relevant to jettison entirely, but inapplicable in key respects. The dictator came as we feared he would, but the movement backing him turned out to be more diverse, demotic, and undisciplined than anyone had predicted. More, well, American.
Figuring out how to cobble together a new worldview is probably going to be the work of generations. I'm not even sure how we'll do that work in our current informational environment, which favors micro-targeted flattery over shared ideals. In the meantime, we're stuck reheating the same old Boomer-era stories about diverse teams of weirdos standing up to scarily competent dictators—not because they help us understand our current dilemma, but because they help us avoid it.