Truth is stranger than satire
I think we’re all agreed about Donald Trump — by which I mean all of us who read the literary novel, buy hardbacks and take pleasure in good writing. The novel as a form is interested in different points of view; is protean and humanly various; listens to different voices patiently; does not shout down. As Auden said, the novelist ‘in his own weak person, if he can, /Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.’ Donald Trump is not much like that. He shouts down; he evidently does not see much in other people to recommend them, other than their opportunity to proffer sycophancy; and the range of his
