It’s ironic that the least literate president of my lifetime seems to have inspired the greatest number of literary allusions. When he was elected in 2016, we began to see references to Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. I don’t remember if The Handmaid’s Tale was on the list then or not. It is now.

All of these books are set in an authoritarian society where the individuals suffer physically and from loss of freedom. They all depict a sad sort of world. It is, I imagine, what a lot of us see coming during the second Trump presidency. However, I would add two books to the list, possibly more pertinent to where we are than the others. They show how the worlds oldest government under the same management slid from democracy to authoritarianism. They also show how we might recover.

The first of the books is Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. The second, published in 1935, is Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here.

The Roth book has a fairly narrow scope: New York, Jewish neighborhood, a family named Roth with a younger son named Philip. It tells of the country rejecting Roosevelt and voting for Charles Lindbergh and his America First cause. They believed that Lindbergh would keep them out of the war in Europe. They applauded his “understanding” with Hitler. All of this until they successively lost their freedoms and were terrorized by government-sanctioned vigilantes.

In Lewis’ book, Buzz Windrip, the candidate who becomes president, gets elected by promising a guaranteed annual wage, a promise that, in the middle of the depression, was a dealmaker. To get the three to five thousand dollars a year, most people were willing to overlook the danger signs, such as Windrip’s fifteen points, a document more than a little similar to Project 2025, just shorter. They were willing to accept the weakening, then the destruction of the Checks and Balances written into the Constitution. And when they were weak enough, just ignore the law and rule as a despot.

Point fifteen if Windrip’s platform demanded that Congress would immediately “initiate amendments to the Constitution providing that the president shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch.”

Once elected, Windrip forgot about his promise of an annual wage and began cracking down on newspapers and other media, banning (or burning) books, changing place names, and dreaming about an Empire of North America, perhaps to be followed by an American-led Empire of South America. His government had people rounded up and put in concentration camps, although that’s not what he called them. He had laws passed that discriminated again Negroes and Jews (who didn’t have employees).

It’s almost as if Sinclair Lewis were looking over Trump’s shoulder and Trump and his enablers planned and executed his campaign. Here are the points that matched:

Make extravagant promises that he neither plans nor has the ability to execute. In this case, Trump was going to immediately lower food prices. I believe someone on his staff probably knew that the president had very few tools to affect food prices unless the president wants to enter the forbidden land of price setting. Trump’s rich friends wouldn’t like it, and we’ve already proved that they don’t work. Instead, he’s said that he won’t immediately lower food and energy prices, but will instead institute a raft of tariffs that are guaranteed to make prices go up.

Weaken the Constitutional Checks and Balances. Trump, with the cooperation of the Senate Majority Leader, started this in his first term by appointing three very conservative justices who, by my understanding, all lied about their reverence for "settled law." This resulted in the decision that overturned Roe v Wade. They also ruled that the President had immunity for official acts, such as inciting to riot and defaming citizens. Trump also has a slim majority in House of Representatives that is afraid to disagree with him and vie for the privilege of licking his boots. (Note the Congressman who has floated an amendment expressly written to allow Trump a third term, but not apply to any previous living presidents and the one who called for Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde to be deported, although he didn’t explain how one deports someone born in this country to citizens of this country.)

Aggregate power to the presidency. He’s going to get rid of all those pesky civil servants who think their loyalty should be to the country instead of Trump. According to him (and to Project 2025), that means reclassifying about 50,000 federal employees who currently are protected by civil service rules to political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president.

Changing place names and calling for expansionist actions (and not dismissing using the military). In one of the sillier actions of this silly season, Trump issued a directive that changed the names of the Gulf of Mexico and Mount Denali, a directive that will probably be honored only by people receiving federal paychecks. More serious, however, were the noises he was making about Iceland and Panama (and the noises some of his supporters were making on social media about Canada).

Ignore the law. Last week, Trump summarily fired 17 government inspectors, employed to make sure that government business was conducted according to government regulations. The law says that he must notify Congress 30 days before taking such action. When informed of this, Trump’s response was, “It happens all the time.” Or something like that. He also signed an Executive Order abolishing birthright citizenship, despite it being a part of the Constitution.

And all of this was in the first week, along with threatening several of our allies.

When I was first looking at these parallels, I was glad that not everything fitted so neatly. For instance, Windrip had a paramilitary group that reported only to him and his chief advisor. They cared little for legal niceties and less for appearing humane. They were called the Minute Men and recruited from the dissatisfied, the failed, and the insecure. The pretty blue uniform and the license to beat or even shoot Americans with impunity evidently helped them feel more manly. The social rejects finally had power, and they enjoyed inflicting pain on others.

Then he pardoned the January 6 rioters, including people who had assaulted police officers or had been given years in prison for seditious conspiracy. Now he has his own army. They will do what he says, as they did on January 6. They will not worry about legalities since he pardoned them once and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again. And they are recruited from the same murky gene pool.

It appears that we may have our own Buzz Windrip, although ours is probably not as smart as the fictional one.

Fortunately, neither of the books ends on such a sad note. In both of them, the author shows hope that no matter how bad the mistake we made at the election, there are those who will fight to bring some kind of sanity back to the country.

Let us pray that this is true.

Pray for the Republic.