So it’s finally come to pass: Someone as qualified to be president as I am (and I’m not at all qualified) will represent a major American political party in November’s election. How will it end? I suggested an analogue drawn from the world of fiction last fall; more recently, I’ve been thinking of film parallels. Dr. Strangelove is the most obvious one: We bomb the shit out of someplace; that place bombs us back. Or maybe the destruction is limited to the Republican Party, and Donald and Reince’s wild ride ends, like Thelma and Louise’s, at the bottom of a cliff. Or to localize things even further: Maybe Trump discovers himself in a “What now?” moment—like Dustin Hoffman at the end of The Graduate, like Robert Redford at the end of The Candidate. Or perhaps the whole debacle turns out to be a long con (see The Usual Suspects) or a longer daydream (see St. Elsewhere, and allow for the genre switch).
Another possibility: Trump’s campaign will be viewed, in retrospect, as a sly homage to The Producers. I mean, Springtime for Hitler—that couldn’t possibly become a hit, could it?
*
Here’s Walt Whitman, 160 years ago, prescient as ever, imagining a Trump victory:
The spectacle is a pitiful one. I think there can never be again upon the festive earth more bad-disordered persons deliberately taking seats, as of late in These States, at the heads of the public tables—such corpses’ eyes for judges—such a rascal and thief in the Presidency.
And here’s Allen Ginsberg, a century later, imagining the same:
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
