In turning away from daily journalism, I did not abandon my investigation of the American story. Nor could I have. Writers wind up chasing their white whales, like it or not. All I did was shift the means of my pursuit to fiction and essays.
Given my lifelong obsession with the power and frailty of the Fourth Estate, it will come as no surprise that my first novel, a disastrous 190,000-word bildungsroman, arose from my journalistic misadventures in El Paso. My hero, a glib young reporter at a border newspaper, fabricates a florid feature story that runs on the front page. Naturally, he gets found out and banished to the copy desk. He eventually goes berserk, quite boringly: skips out on his job, betrays his girlfriend, meets an old Mexican shaman who heals him—just the sort of twists you’d expect from a rookie novelist with the gifts of a middling memoirist.
As a character, my protagonist is painfully unconvincing, and infatuated by his own glib banter. But as a spokesman for my anxieties about the decline of print journalism, he has his moments. He can see that newspapers are imperiled, not by the recklessness of show-offs like him, but the frantic pace of digital culture and the merciless incentives of the free market.
As my anguish about our civic life escalated, I began to churn out a steady stream of essays and editorials lamenting the cynicism overtaking us as a people, the expansion of the right-wing media, and its outsized influence over our discourse. I was particularly agitated by the rise of the Tea Party.
Like a lot of naïve liberals, I’d initially viewed the movement as the plaything of corporate interests, a pale mob riled up by billionaire PACs and Fox News hoopla. Their signs, festooned with swastikas and hammers and sickles, bearing slogans such as KEEP GOVT OUT OF MY MEDICARE and OBAMA’S PLAN: WHITE SLAVERY, made it tough to take them seriously as political actors. But the 2010 midterms had proven that it was possible to dominate media coverage, and to win elections, without being informed or even especially coherent.
The Tea Party represented a strain of American fundamentalism, one that converted feelings of declining utility into heroic victimhood. Its aims were political but its means were emotional. And I could see that a determined operator would be able to capitalize on all this, especially if he knew how to manipulate the media.
And so I began to write a novel about a hedonistic, right-wing demagogue named Bucky Dunn who decides to run for president and shocks everyone, himself included, by nearly winning the GOP nomination. I hoped to have a draft ready in time for the 2016 election. But I fell out of love with my hero—always a fatal blow to works of imagination.
For reasons I hope are understandable, I couldn’t bring myself to look at the manuscript during the campaign. Nor did I need to. Bucky Dunn’s code of conduct—manic self-promotion, gluttony, screen addiction, sexual predation, casual racism—was on display everywhere I looked. Bucky sounded nothing like a right-wing demagogue. But his shtick on the stump sounded all the same themes: The nation is in flames. The media is corrupt. The elites are mocking you. Eerily, I’d even written a Trump cameo into the book, after Bucky visits one of his resorts:
Trump had refurbished a mile of coastline, rendering what had been a haven for seagulls and their filthy ways into a world-class destination … This was a golf course, an Eden beyond the jurisdiction of public sector employees. The grass exhaled oxygen and the oligarchs made gentle thwacks. Somewhere close by, quail were being spun in centrifuges and released to the heavens. At each tee, a video of Trump greeted us, his lovely anus of a mouth extruding promotional syllables, his delicate hair panels radiating deserved self-love.
Anyone who’s been tracking the convergence of America’s conservative media and its broader political theater could have confected Bucky Dunn. He’s simply coming at the scam from the opposite direction of folks such as Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin.
He spends the early sections of the book barnstorming cable TV shows from the back of his massive SUV, which he’s converted into a portable studio. He knows that folks who feel looked down upon crave the malignant charms of the bully so he stages feuds on Twitter and hijacks news cycles by making outrageous accusations (the president has erectile dysfunction). Rather than delivering formal speeches, he holds raucous rallies in swing state arenas. He dreams of repurposing the presidency as a platform for a raft of reality TV programs.
Bucky has a long history of womanizing, drinking, and making offensive statements. But he promotes these coarse behaviors as proof of his authenticity. (“My sins were my assets. The worse I behaved, the better my hotel room. It was an absurd and thrilling arrangement.”) Bucky intuits what Trump would affirm: that contempt for the political and media classes is so intense among certain voters as to cancel out issues of character or competence. He dominates the debates by making brash statements, to the ecstasy of his intended audience: GOP primary voters.
In a culture impervious to serious discourse, why shouldn’t a guy like Bucky take his shot? What’s the point of writing the script for your followers, if you can’t play the leading role?
Bucky is ultimately undone by his addiction to attention, which lures him into appearing on a program called The Gauntlet, where all his most damning secrets are revealed: that he lied about his history, that he once experimented with homosexuality, that he pressured his ex-wife to get an abortion. Bucky comes to realize that he’s been played by conspirators who promoted then torpedoed his campaign. He flies into a rage, assaults the host on live TV, and winds up in prison.
It’s a liberal wish fantasy.
So what became of the novel? This part of the story is a bit more complicated. Essentially, my readers felt Bucky was too cruel and cartoonish. Nobody would vote for a guy like that. And nobody, I was assured, would root for a character like that. And so I began to second guess my hero. Or rather, I began to encumber him. I handed him a young son to parent and an estranged daughter who was kidnapped by Somali pirates in early drafts, and later morphed into a recovering addict. Bucky became more “sympathetic,” but in the process—and there’s a cruel lesson here, for those not afraid to see it—he became less compelling.
This is what I meant when I said I fell out of love with Bucky. I’d conceived of him, consciously, as the embodiment of our civic dysfunction. But I also adored his misbehavior, his appetites, his joyous repudiation of liberal guilt. I’d created Bucky to enact my own repressed urges. Then I’d strangled the life out of him, using my superego as the murder weapon.
Bucky was trying to tell me something: that we had moved beyond truth and shame in American politics. But I refused to listen. He was the part of me, of all of us maybe, who awaited the arrival of Donald Trump. I don’t mean the folks who fed off his hate or fell for his pitch or even the ones who subjugated their common sense to tribal allegiance. I mean the other 73 percent of us, who couldn’t look away from the spectacle, who kept pumping the oxygen of attention into his crusade. We told ourselves a bad story: that he would inevitably crash, and that his crash would serve as a tough but necessary lesson in the resilience of American democracy. We refused to accept that Trump might be starring in a story of his own, an epic about the power of unbridled aggression.
We forgot about Ahab, up on deck, roaring at his crew. “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”