Wherein I Am Defeated: A Brief Memoir

In 2017, two former friends and two men with guns showed me our bitter future.

Dangerous denizens of the Las Vegas Book Festival.

Several years ago, during the first Trump administration, I attended a conference in Las Vegas. It was a literary conference called the Vegas Valley Book Festival. There were panels on topics like diversity in YA fiction. On that particular panel, there was an interesting discussion of whether Asian teen girls should wear short bangs in novels or if that reinforced a stereotype.

My panel was on the subject of writing about Trump. It was October 21, 2017.

From the nation’s capital, Trump was nastily harassing and spitefully lying about a Black congresswoman. “A president’s somber duty skids into spectacle,” read a Times headline.

My co-panelists were two distinguished writers I was friendly with: Walter Kirn and Mickey Kaus, then known as a liberal and a conservative. I only passingly knew Walter (who now works with my ex-husband) but I’d describe my friendship with Mickey as close in those days. We’d worked at Slate together in the 1990s, and had always stayed in touch; he’d attended my book party in the summer of 2016 where he admitted to being sympathetic to Trump on immigration. I had taken it lightly then. In the intervening months, since the botched Muslim ban and other early failures of Trump’s administration, surely Kirn and Kaus had seen what I had. They would, I was sure, join me in believing Trump was a catastrophe that we would have to endeavor to represent, satirize, oppose, and expose in language that didn’t turn into hysterical gibberish.

We did not agree. Walter Kirn, if I remember right, saw Trump as a laughable humbug in the lively red-white-and-blue tradition of P. T. Barnum. He wasn’t fussed. Mickey, on the other hand, thought there might be some upsides to Trump’s presidency, as he stood up for Americans whose livelihoods had been threatened by the dangerous immigrants that Trump had heartily promised to wall out. Antagonism of this staticky kind was surprising at a literary conference. But it was OK with me. I’d been doing Trumpcast for over a year, and I was accustomed to taking online MAGA punches involving words like cunt and death.

Walter, who told me on that day that he’d voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016, has moved right. He now posts to X about his zeal for Trump’s plan to destroy the civil service, which he elegantly calls the ancien regime, implying we have a French Revolution on our hands. That sounds pretty catastrophic. But he seems sanguine. If we’re using French, I’ll take the liberty of quoting my dad on the political horseshoe effect, in which the Sanders supporters become MAGAs: Les extremes se touchent.