George Saunders Gets Trump’s America All Wrong
George Saunders may be one of America’s most lauded fiction writers, but when he turns his pen to the phenomenon of Donald Trump and his supporters, he reveals the limits of his political understanding — and produces some of his worst stories in the process.
George Saunders on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, November 10, 2022. (Scott Kowalchyk / CBS via Getty Images)
“I don’t think that the current mess we’re in is separate from the fact that we’ve allowed the artistic mode of thought to degrade,” said George Saunders in early 2017, shortly after the inauguration of Donald Trump. Speaking at a bookstore in Washington, DC, Saunders sought to defend artistic thought by reading a poem that he had written about the president, “Trump L’Oeil”:
A fragile egomaniac
Has taken up the reins,
Obsessed with size, defensive,
And unmoved by others’ pains.
It continued like this for another sixteen stanzas, rhyming “flailing man” and “Kellyannes,” “pursuit” and “Brioni suit.” At the end, Saunders urged his audience to action:
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