Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election was such a surprising event that it was hard not to assign a televisual quality to it: the implausible, last-minute plot twist that changes everything, just in time for a season finale. And what’s happened since has been so jaw-droppingly strange and so dramatic that it has upended our sense of what’s possible. It’s not surprising that one of the persistent jokes from the Trump era is the suggestion that we’re living in a bad piece of fiction, and that we’re all at the mercy of “the writers,” a mysterious collective author crafting these twists and determining our fate.
Casting the Trump administration as fiction is an understandable impulse — I know this as well as anyone, having spent the past year recapping the administration as if it were alternately a reality show, an evening soap opera and a dark anti-hero drama. But it’s also a queasy tendency that reveals as much about our psychological needs in this moment as it does about the chaotic main character in the story we all occupy.
There’s no question, as the writer Richard Yeselson has suggested, that treating the Trump era as fiction is, effectively, a “consumptive luxury afforded to middle class cultural consumers who have sufficient distance from the unfolding catastrophic narrative not to be wrecked by it in real time.” It’s easier to try to understand the Trump administration as a baroque and disquieting fantasy when you’re not at immediate risk of being deported, or when you’re not trying to calculate how the trade tensions between China and the United States might affect your livelihood. The administration’s decision-making, however chaotic, has material consequences for millions of Americans; its impact isn’t merely in how it makes us feel.
But while our national narrative may not be the most important or most immediate casualty of this moment, it’s foolish to pretend that it is not one of the issues at stake. Even if the arc of each presidency is shaped only in retrospect, historically, we have certain expectations for how the president of the United States will respond in a given set of circumstances. We want the president to be a secular pastor in times of grief and crisis; a moral arbiter who weighs in on questions of right and wrong when Americans find themselves pitted against each other; a leader who models strength and steadiness at moments when the nation feels threatened or faces serious upheaval; a storyteller who explains us to ourselves.
Trump has abandoned these roles within his first 15 months in office. He is diffident or detached in the moments he’s meant to be consoling. He is oddly reluctant to draw clear lines, even to condemn white supremacists. He tweets his way through international crises, leaving both his own appointees and the country in suspense about what America stands for. And given that the only stories Trump has ever cared about are the ones that star him, he is uniquely ill-suited to craft a grand national narrative that goes any deeper than the vague promise to “Make America Great Again.”
Of course we hope someone will emerge to make sense of all of this and to assure us that we are living through events that are constrained by something or someone. Pretending we’re all minor characters in a work of fiction can be a way of distancing ourselves from the seeming horror of our time or emphasizing our own feelings of powerlessness, and pointing to “the writers” often helps us deny any responsibility we may have for Trump, whether as voters or as journalists who covered the election. But whatever else we’re doing when we joke about Trump and the swirl of chaos around him as fiction, we’re expressing a wish that this moment will resolve in a narratively and morally comprehensible fashion.
Trying to figure out what sort of story we’re all living through may seem awfully hypothetical and meta. But it also allows us to explore what sort of world we’re living in, now that some of the old rules have been tossed away. Having some understanding of how the president will behave is not a guarantee of total certainty in this life. But it does provide a certain psychological baseline. We want to have some sense of how this story might end.