The Brief and Frightening Reign of Trump

For the past eight years I have searched for the perfect literary analogy for the Trump era. I thought perhaps I had found it in Robert Coover's postmodern fable about the Cat in the Hat running for president. I thought maybe the top contender was Alfred Jarry's play about an infantile pleasure-principle-dominated tyrant, Ubu Roi. But now, at last, I have a nominee for the prize that tops them both: George Saunders's 2005 satirical novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil. 

The book was written and published in the midst of the George W. Bush administration. And I suppose it could be read—and probably was read at the time—as a commentary on the national chauvinism and arrogance the country displayed in the era of the Iraq War. But, what is profoundly eerie about reading it now is how much more directly it seems to speak to our own time—almost two decades later—than the one in which it was written. 

The story, after all, follows the progress of a demagogue who is far more Trump than he is Bush. It is set in a mysterious world made up of fifteen part-machine, part-organic cyborgs who fight over a circumscribed piece of terrain. (If you crossed Flatland with Gulliver's Travels, you might get something like this book.) The disputed terrain in question is divided into a small, cramped, and impoverished Inner Horner, and a vast, prosperous Outer Horner, which does not wish to share with the former. 

The titular demagogue Phil—a cyborg creature made up of a brain perched on a rack that is always at precarious risk of sliding off—rises to power through scapegoating the impoverished Inner Hornerites and accusing them of seeking to deprive Outer Horner of its natural superiority. When one of the Inner Hornerites accidentally trespasses into Outer Horner, because the former country has literally shrunk in size and displaced part of his body into the latter, Phil screams that it is an "invasion." 

Tell me truly if Phil's fulminations on this subject could not be transcribed verbatim from any Trump rally on the subject of immigration. Not only is there his talk of "invasion." He and his goons also refer to the Inner Hornerites as "animals." After imprisoning them in confined conditions, they then comment on how ridiculous and "uncouth" they look, all stacked on top of one another. 

Then there are Phil's proposed solutions to the problem, which sound like Trump's discussions of our international alliances. Throughout, Phil appeals to the same kind of crass national egotism and selfishness that we hear every day from the lips of Trump: "if we have a National Defect," Phil declares, "it is that we're too generous! Is it our fault that these little jerks have such a small crappy land?" He proposes taxing them for the mere right of occupancy. 

Compare with Trump's recent interview about Taiwan, in which he said that the U.S. should stop supporting the country's defense. Why should we care? Why not force them to foot the bill themselves? The idea that America's only sin is being "too generous" would resonate with Trump. And his constant pledges to threaten NATO with a U.S. withdrawal in order to coerce the latter into paying more (and doubtless to embolden his friend Putin) sound the same note. 

Meanwhile, the Outer Hornerites respond to Phil's appeals to national chauvinism (finally, someone notes "how wonderful and generous and under-appreciated" they are) and his blunt style. "He just comes right out and says it," one of them observes; "Thank goodness someone finally has," another adds—as innumerable Trump rally supporters have said over the past eight years, who applaud the demagogue for supposedly "telling it like it is" and "just saying what we're all thinking." 

What Phil says about the confined Inner Hornerites could be lifted from a Trump commentary on the subject of Taiwan, Ukraine, refugees, immigrants, captured prisoners of war, or anyone else who is temporarily down and in a potentially exploitable state. "[T]ake a look at these losers," says Phil. "If they are as good as us, why do they look so much worse than us? Look how they look! Do they look valorous and noble and huge like us, or do they look sad and weak and puny?"

Eventually, Phil builds a wall. Specifically, he builds a cage around the Inner Hornerites, which he calls the "Peace-Encouraging Enclosure." 

But even beyond the direct parallels between Trump and Phil, the other circumstances of the Outer Horner world, in Saunders's novella, bear a troubling similarity to our own. Phil, after all, does not begin the story as the president. When he initiates his rise to power, this office is still held by another president—an extremely aged man who is well-meaning, but regrettably incompetent, surrounded by mealy-mouthed advisers, and trapped in a state of deep denial as to his own declining faculties. Who does that sound like?

After Phil starts to commit outright atrocities in his persecution of the Inner Hornerites, word reaches the elderly president. And he is at first convinced that this is an "outrage." As I say, he means well. But he proves utterly incapable of stopping it, mostly because he refuses to acknowledge his own age and health problems. "What condition? I don't have any condition," he tells an adviser. He denies that he is "becoming increasingly ineffectual" and "always repeating [him]self in a state of perpetual confusion." 

Meanwhile, his advisers conspire to ensure that news of the president's "recent battiness not travel beyond" the palace walls. Again—who does that sound like? Before this summer, I would never have replied "Biden." But after his abysmal debate performance, it does indeed appear that he is a great deal like the elderly president in Saunders's tale—unwilling to admit his own limitations and therefore unable, despite the best of intentions, to provide any bulwark against the rise of a fascist demagogue. 

Phil accuses the elderly president of being so incompetent that he essentially welcomed the supposed "invasion" that Phil accuses the Inner Hornerites of mounting. "Knowing these Inner Hornerites were prone to unmotivated spasms of violence," Phil declares, the elderly president nonetheless "daily proclaimed, via that pathetic mere string of a border: Come in, invade us, feel free to commit your unmotivated violence spasms all over our sleeping innocent babies." 

In short, Phil sounds exactly like Trump on the subject of the supposed "migrant crime wave," "Biden's open borders policies," the "migrant invasion that Joe Biden is encouraging," Trump's narrative that Biden is "emptying prisons and jails and mental hospitals and insane asylums" to send immigrants here—etc. etc. etc. 

It would seem that there is a kind of Platonic form of pure demagogy that exists out there in the ether. How else to explain how perfectly Saunders was able to channel this voice, in a 2005 satire, long before the real-life Trump would emerge on the scene and start using the very same style? 

Then there are Phil's henchmen, including one ever-loyal blockhead named—presciently enough—"Vance"! Vance makes a big show of how loyal he is to Phil, and how he will essentially do anything that is asked of him, with no regard to his own dignity or integrity—just like his real-life analogue. "We're really good at doing whatever someone says," says Vance's brother, speaking for the two of them. All Vance asks for in return is to be complemented periodically on "how obedient" he is. 

And indeed, that seems to be all that the real-life Vance gets out of licking Trump's boots.

Of course, Phil ultimately proves to be a disaster for the Outer Hornerites, just as much as for the Inner Hornerites. He eventually turns his lust for power and his paranoia and his megalomania against his own people—including members of his inner circle. When Phil's career eventually comes to an end through the loss of his brain-device, the people of Outer Horner are therefore relieved. They write him off in their memories as an aberration and a "monster"—someone never to be imitated again. 

Obviously, one could predict that Trump will follow the same trajectory. He will become increasingly megalomaniacal and power hungry, to the point at which he eventually alienates even his own henchmen. 

One could say that, that is, if it hadn't already happened. That was the whole tale of Trump's first administration. Have you noticed that he ended by endorsing the murder of his own Vice President for refusing to unlawfully and unconstitutionally throw the election results in Trump's favor? Trump ended up with no one by his side—even Bill Barr was not willing to go far enough in the direction of subverting the rule of law, by the end, to retain Trump's affections. 

Trump already enacted the whole story. He already had his brief and frightening reign. And the American people realized, just as the Outer Hornerites do when Phil is gone, that they had been "duped." He was as bad for them, in the end, as he had been for their neighbors. The American people knew all of this in 2020. That's why Trump did not win the election. 

What no satirist was ever yet bold enough to imagine is the world we now appear to be entering: one in which Phil—having been defeated and justly defeated; having alienated everyone once close to him and gone down in history as a monster—nonetheless comes back in the next election: and indeed shows every sign of being on track to win.