His supporters, while swearing they personally wouldn't do such a thing (the feds were listening, after all), warned that insurrection was a real possibility.īesides distracting me from my work, the election season was a reminder that the world can change quickly.
He encouraged his "Second Amendment people" to consider the use of guns if the election didn't go his way. Whether or not he won, Trump's candidacy was changing the nature of political discourse in horrifying and mesmerizing ways.Īs the election neared, he spoke ominously of "vote rigging," and told supporters to watch the ballot boxes. He said things that would have immediately disqualified most politicians – and would have disqualified any woman or person of colour. Soon after I returned from Berlin last July, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president and, seemingly every day, came out with statements I'd never heard a politician speak in public. I wanted to dramatize the frustration that arises from political impotence and show how it can lead to violence at home, not just in other places. I've long been interested in the radical terror groups of the seventies – the Weather Underground, Red Army Faction, Action Directe – and in 2013, with an anti-Obama Congress blocking all progress, this felt like a timely subject to tackle. Unlike the globe-trotting espionage stories I'm known for, I tried an American-set story about homegrown terrorists – not Islamic or right-wing, as my friends assumed, but left-wing terrorism. In 2015, when the presidential campaign was still a subject of speculation, and Trump hadn't yet announced his candidacy, I gave my editor a draft of The Middleman, which had taken me a fraught two years to write. As a novelist, I couldn't help but be intrigued – this is all grist for the mill – but what surprised me was how, stealthily, Trump derailed years of work on my novel-in-progress. Much has and will be written on how Donald Trump's candidacy and win disrupted American public life: political norms, the language of race relations, the role of the established press and the (mis)uses of Twitter.