No. of Recommendations: 4
Writing shortly before he died:
PHILIP ROTH: No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses”) could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.
When asked about his novel, "The Plot Against America" and its calamitous main character, a president who is "a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism" but also "an aeronautical Magellan, one of the earliest beacons of the age of aviation," Roth points out that...
Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.
