Right now we’re in the middle of a satirical Trump book boom. Stephen Colbert has written one, Whose Boat Is This Boat: Comments That Don’t Help in the Aftermath of a Hurricane. Trevor Noah has written one, The Donald J Trump Presidential Twitter Library. There are Donald Trump annuals. There are Donald Trump intelligence tests.
And now there is a Donald Trump poetry book. Dumpty is a collection written by John Lithgow, illustrated by the actor’s own beautiful drawings. In it, Stephen Miller is “The Little Man Who’s Not All There”. John Bolton finds himself the star of a Lewis Carroll-inspired verse entitled “The Walrus and the Kleptocrat”. My favourite poem, entitled “A Liberal’s Complaint”, goes after Fox News in the most delightful way imaginable; “Sean Hannity, Sean Hannity, You tidal wave of vanity! … Your brain is mashed bananity! You’re such a horse’s fannity!”
But Trump is the central figure here, presented as Dumpty, a lumbering, slow-witted oaf who trudges through the book, intermittently stopping to wreak further unthinking damage on a world that deserved better. However, this wasn’t always the plan.
“My first impulse was to write a book only about the cast of characters in the Trump administration and leaving him out entirely, almost as a way of insulting him,” says Lithgow. “Because it is the most amazing rogues gallery. But, you know, after I’d written four or five poems, I realised I’m not really writing about them. I’m writing about Trump.”
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“And one thing that I find remarkable is that people are kind of startled. They’re startled by the fact that they hadn’t thought about Jim Mattis for eight months. Or John Kelly or Harold Bornstein or Tom Price and Ronny Jackson.”
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It isn’t just that times are bad and our need for catharsis is urgent; it’s that all of these figures are cartoons. They’re so out of touch, so one-dimensional in their pursuit of power at any cost, that they have become ripe targets for parody.
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“Colbert and Seth Meyers and Samantha Bee and Noah are all incredible, and yet they are not changing the course of human events,” he goes on. “Trump is. It’s the satirist’s dilemma, I guess. Are you only solidifying people’s opinions rather than changing them? Because God knows, the reaction to satire by people who are politically opposed to the satirist is just more entrenched than ever. They are enraged by satire. And I think it’s an interesting truism that fascists hate satire. They are incredibly paranoid about being laughed at.”
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“We were all secretly hoping that Trump would tweet about Dumpty, but maybe he’s got too much on his mind,” he says. “Besides, I don’t think he’d get any of the jokes.”
The Guardian
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