In November 2016, the British novelist Howard Jacobson woke up in the middle of the night just after Trump’s election and felt that he urgently needed to act. Jacobson made some tea and immediately started writing: “which is not good for me; I don’t write my best like that.” Six weeks later, he’d finished it — a fable about a potty-mouthed prince named Fracassus and the feeble efforts of various courtiers to reform him. The book took its one-word title — unprintable in a family newspaper — from Trump’s “Access Hollywood” video. It came out in Britain but never got a U.S. release. “I don’t think it was that word, but that word didn’t help,” Jacobson said. More likely, he thought, publishers didn’t think American audiences would warm to an Englishman commenting on their politics.
Jacobson expected to be part of a crush of novelists taking on Trump: “I thought every writer in the country would be doing it — that every writer will have set aside his novels or her poem or whatever,” he said. “I was amazed to discover nothing else was happening.”
Not quite nothing: Peter D. Kramer, a psychiatrist best known for the 1993 bestseller “Listening to Prozac,” also started writing a Trump novel shortly after the election, similarly envisioning it as just “one tile in a mosaic.” The novel follows a well-meaning therapist who one day finds his patient, an unnamed egomaniacal president, dead on his couch.
In the face of what seemed like a “paralyzing disaster,” Kramer felt this was the best way to use his talents. He might not have more acute political analysis than the next person, he thought, but he knew what it was like to sit and listen to people — people, often, who were difficult to like and who had done terrible things.
“I thought: I can do this! I can write a novel, where if people read it, then they will understand what’s so bad about Trump by analogy,” Kramer said. “Or they will feel understood and that other people get what the intimate experience is of living in a bad regime.”
He’d never had a hard time publishing his work — “knock on wood” — but by the time he finished the draft four years later, it was difficult to find it a home at the major publishing houses. Debra Englander, a consulting editor for Post Hill Press, took an interest in the manuscript on the basis of Kramer’s past sales and the strong blurbs he’d already solicited for it. The book, “Death of the Great Man,” was published in 2023 and got frustratingly little attention. “Yes, I got the pleasure of trying to do something constructive,” Kramer said, “but did it actually do something constructive?”
Elinor Lipman, whose body of work at that point included 12 novels (and a collection of comic verse, “Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes From the Political Circus”) also encountered surprising hesitation when she submitted her manuscript for “Rachel to the Rescue” in June 2020. In most ways, it was similar to her previous work — a sunny romantic comedy — only this time involving an ex-bureaucrat who accidentally stumbles on a White House sex scandal.
“Everybody was worried about Trump fatigue,” Lipman said. Her British publisher wound up accepting and releasing the book first — on Election Day 2020 — and her American publisher, Mariner, eventually followed with a paperback in 2021. Lipman, who warns her writing students against putting topical references in their fiction, for fear of dating it, looks back on that book with a laugh: “Boy, I had some nerve!”
“Not only are publishers loath to take on a specific political figure, in fiction it becomes a loaded question of, how do they even market it?” said A.M. Homes, whose most recent novel, “The Unfolding,” delved into a clique of Obama-era, pre-Trump Republicans (and, she said, had weaker sales than any of her previous books). And those who read to escape current events, she said, “they’re not thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get into this world of political fiction.’ They’re looking for some relief, or comfort, or distraction.”
For novelists with a track record of writing political satire, Trump presented less of a publishing problem, since readers (and editors) already knew what to expect from them. The trouble had to do with craft.
Christopher Buckley, author of “Make Russia Great Again,” about a hapless Trump hotelier promoted to be White House chief of staff, wrote in an email that he first resisted, then “succumbed,” to the subject.
“Because he’s ultimately self-parodying, a proverbial ‘low-hanging fruit,’ that makes him all the more challenging as a target of ridicule,” Buckley said. “He’s in that sense auto-ridiculous. He doesn’t need satirizing. But who can resist? In the end, I couldn’t. But contempt is a pretty powerful motivator.”
“How do you improve on the real-life Donald Trump?” asked Carl Hiaasen. His novel “Squeeze Me,” a sendup of Palm Beach, Fla., society, prominently featured a fictionalized Mar-a-Lago, home to a president referred to by his Secret Service code name, Mastodon. “How do you make it more outrageous? With Trump, you have to turn the dials all the way up just to get close to what he’s really like.”
“I will never be able to write a Trump monologue that’s as good as an actual Trump monologue,” said Mark Doten, who wrote “Trump Sky Alpha,” a surreal dystopia about language and the internet, and followed it with two short stories about Trump that will appear in a forthcoming collection, “Whites.”
Eventually, Doten realized that the trick was not to try to make Trump more outrageous. Rather, “it’s about the little granular details and strange turns that the speech takes.” Doten added: “He’s someone who has a very particular mode of speech — it’s very digressive, and the digressions have offshoots themselves, and those have other offshoots. And then you see him having to kind of battle his way back out to get to whatever point he was making. It’s really fascinating to work with the character on a monologue that has no center.”
But the major risk was of writing something that would be too quickly overtaken by actual events, which might change the public’s understanding of the real-life leader and his significance.
Doten started writing the novel in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and recalls that most concerns about the candidate centered on how Trump might be a profiteer in the presidency.
“But that becomes, in a way, the least of our problems,” they said. “That type of corruption is less interesting to people than the survival of our democracy.”
After the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, Hiaasen felt compelled to write a new epilogue for the paperback edition of “Squeeze Me,” which describes the ex-president retreating to Florida, “hunkered like a wheezing badger for weeks after the messy expulsion from Washington.” But as Trump easily clinched the Republican nomination this year, Hiaasen wondered again if he got the tone right: “I wish at the time that I would have foreseen that he was going to rebound so strongly,” he mused. “That may have worked a bit differently. I would have left the door open a little more.”
Seven years after publishing his satire, Jacobson thinks that if he ever wrote about Trump again, it would have to be in an entirely different genre — one that allowed him to be more of a real, rounded character.
“I saw this man as the world’s greatest buffoon, and likely to do great evil, and who believed evil things,” Jacobson said. “And I think now a novel about him would have to allow him to be, just possibly, something else. What, in the still reaches of the night, is it like for Trump to be Trump?”
Opinions are split on whether another, larger wave of Trump novels will eventually arrive. “This will be one of those distinctive periods that people want to write about,” Kramer said.
Homes believes that the audience for political fiction is dwindling: “If there was ever any appetite for it, there’s certainly less.” Her students, she notes, are much more interested in fantasy and sci-fi.
(Maybe both are right: One book in the pipeline for October, “Queen Bess,” features a time-traveling tech executive who gets Elizabeth I to run against an autocrat in 2028 — written, said author Maria Vetrano, “to give people a sense of relief.”)
Either way, most of the existing crop of Trump novelists say they don’t plan to try it again — even in the face of another Trump term.
“This is so tacky,” Lipman said, “but I think I have more readers now, especially after ‘Ms. Demeanor,’” her most recent novel. “I would rather not turn off a reader.” She added, “I think my editor would be happy to hear that.”
“Well, in a way, the chance has gone. I bagged it and can easily see the argument that it should have been done better — although, well, we could always do better,” Jacobson said. “I don’t think there’s shock value now. The jokes you’re bound to make about Trump, they’ve already been made. I’d be very curious to see who could do it.”
“In the event of a second Trump term, we’ll be well beyond satire, and into another genre entirely — tragedy,” Buckley wrote. “Not much funny in that.”
