Washington Post book club compares Donald Trump to great dictators of literature

Brett T. | 8:48 PM on June 09, 2016

We’ve said it before: Donald Trump has provided a lifetime’s worth of material worthy of serious criticism. So why is it newspapers are so intent on beclowning themselves with pieces on what America might look like if Trump defeats Hillary Clinton?

The New York Times recently rounded up a group of legal scholars to imagine what might happen to the constitutional separation of powers if Trump were to get his hands on President Obama’s pen and phone. But on Thursday, the Washington Post took things a step further, choosing not to write dystopian fiction but rather measure Trump against it.

How does Donald Trump stack up against American literature’s fictional dictators? Pretty well, actually. https://t.co/ibRXbz2XK6

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 9, 2016

https://twitter.com/Hivepaint/status/741015104326488064

Carlos Lozada, the Post’s nonfiction book critic, finally was given his chance to put his knowledge of American literature on display — it turns out that writers have been warning us about the nomination of Donald Trump since the ’30s, and possibly as early as Classical Greece.

Reading these works in this moment, it is impossible to miss the similarities between Trump and totalitarian figures in American literature — in rhetoric, personal style and even substance. Yet the American-bred dictators are not the true protagonists. Ordinary citizens, those who must decide how to live under a leader who repudiates democratic values and institutions, are the real story. They must choose: Resist or join? Speak up or keep your head down? Fight or flee?

Did you hear that? It’s impossible to have missed the similarities … unless, of course, your college administrators buckled to pressure and purged the curriculum of its psychologically abusive focus on dead white dudes and their Eurocentric writings.