This evening, I attended a panel discussion at Jewish Book Week in London entitled “Trump on trial”. The three panel members were all distinguished writers who viscerally loathe US President Donald Trump. What follows is an account of highlights of this discussion which I provide without further comment.
The first panellist was historian Simon Schama, who immediately after Trump’s election called it a “cataclysmic moment” and said “democracy often brings fascists to power, it did in Germany in the 1930s”.
The second was Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland whose new thriller To Kill the President, written under the name Sam Bourne, imagines an assassination plot hatched against a volatile demagogue in the White House – who does things like tweet, lie and grab a female aide by her genitals – for fear that he intends to launch a nuclear attack.
The third was novelist Howard Jacobson, whose latest novel Pussy, written in a “fury of disbelief” about Trump’s election, is a “comic fairytale” about a man called Prince Fricassus who imagines himself to be the Roman Emperor Nero, fantasises about hookers, is idle, boastful, thin-skinned and egotistic and has no manners, curiosity, knowledge, idea or words in which to express them – and who may therefore be the very man to lead his country.
Noting that the panel contained no Trump defender, the chairman Jonny Geller asked the three to identify two good things or successes that Trump had achieved.
Schama replied that Trump was liquidating positive governance in America. He was appointing to critical government agencies people whose “only qualification” was they would destroy them. Thus for example Scott Pruitt, who was appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, was “abolishing regulation on toxic chemicals”; Education Secretary Betsy de Vos “doesn’t believe in public education”. Trump was a “deeply disgusting, reprehensible, dangerously unbalanced individual. The only good thing he does is once in every four days he plays golf”.