Michael Weiss writes: Well, I suppose a man who derives verbal inspiration from Charles Lindbergh, James Cameron and Bane, a man who celebrates fallen American intelligence operatives by comparing his cover appearances on Time magazine to those of Richard Nixon, can’t really be faulted for naming a holiday after his own resistible rise to power.

But the floridity that strikes the eye and ear in Donald Trump’s first presidential proclamation, heralding the day of his inauguration as a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion,” eerily echoes another insecure authoritarian’s advertisement for himself.

“Today, feelings of patriotism and love for the Motherland are truly invaluable for our vast multiethnic country. These noble qualities and the steadfast civic-mindedness of our people underpin the country’s unity and sovereignty.

“Of course, many factors are essential for the security of the country and its stable development. But they are only effective if people believe in their Fatherland, have respect for it and support it, if they consider our country the best and aspire to live and work for its prosperity.”

Thus spake Vladimir Putin on Russia Day, June 12, 2016.

Now compare. “A new national pride stirs the American soul and inspires the American heart,” the new commander-in-chief informs us, referring to nothing so new as his own state of becoming commander-in-chief. “We are one people, united by a common destiny and a shared purpose.”

I wouldn’t quite put it like that to the millions of women and men who marched in every major American city on Saturday, much eclipsing the headcount at Trump’s rainy Friday anointment. They seemed to declare their destiny and purpose distinctly at odds with how the pussy-grabbing, wall-building executive chooses to define these. And any sensible viewer of White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s first two performances on the size of the crowd at the National Mall, or Kellyanne Conway’s reference to alternative facts on Meet the Press by way of justifying that lie, emblematic of every wobbly despotism, will have been stirred by a feeling other than pride. [Continue reading…]

Judith Thurman writes: In 2004, Philip Roth published “The Plot Against America.” The four main characters of the novel, which takes place between June, 1940, and October, 1942, are a family of American Jews, the Roths, of Newark — Bess, Herman, and their two sons, Philip and Sandy. They are ardent supporters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but, in Roth’s reimagining, Roosevelt loses his bid for a third term to a surprise Republican candidate — the aviator Charles Lindbergh — whose victory upends not only politics in America but life itself.

The historical Lindbergh was an isolationist who espoused a catchphrase that Donald Trump borrowed for his Presidential campaign, and for his Inaugural Address: “America First.” The fictional Lindbergh, like the actual Trump, expressed admiration for a murderous European dictator, and his election emboldened xenophobes. In Roth’s novel, a foreign power — Nazi Germany — meddles in an American election, leading to a theory that the President is being blackmailed. In real life, U.S. intelligence agencies are investigating Trump’s ties to Vladimir Putin and the possibility that a dossier of secret information — kompromat — gives Russia leverage with his regime.

Roth wrote in the Times Book Review that “The Plot Against America” was not intended as a political roman à clef. Rather, he wanted to dramatize a series of what-ifs that never came to pass in America but were “somebody else’s reality” — i.e., that of the Jews of Europe. “All I do,” he wrote, “is to defatalize the past — if such a word exists — showing how it might have been different and might have happened here.”

Last week, Roth was asked, via e-mail, if it has happened here. He responded, “It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel — Melville’s last — that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’ ”

American reality, the “American berserk,” Roth has noted, makes it harder to write fiction. Does Donald Trump outstrip the novelist’s imagination?

Roth replied, “It isn’t Trump as a character, a human type — the real-estate type, the callow and callous killer capitalist — that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump as President of the United States.

“I was born in 1933,” he continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.” [Continue reading…]