For four years I have been playing a game with myself, asking what
imaginative writers could have dreamed up a figure of such grotesque
comic malignity as Donald Trump. I have come up with five candidates:
Jonathan Swift (the Yahoos, “the most filthy, noisome and deformed
animals which nature ever produced”); Terry Southern (Guy Grand, the
billionaire trickster figure of his 1959 novel,/The Magic Christian/);
Bertolt Brecht (Arturo Ui and his resistible rise); Alfred Jarry (Ubu
Roi, the obese, infantile, grandiose, and gluttonous antihero of a play
that, fittingly, caused a near-riot when it was first performed in Paris
in 1896); and William Gaddis (what is Trump really besides the child
tycoon JR all grown up?). I tend to resist dignifying Trump with any
comparison to figures in Shakespeare or Greek and Roman literature, but
hey, knock yourself out.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-disappointed/
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