After winning an Emmy and garnering 20 million YouTube hits for his burlesque of Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, it was a shrewd move by actor Alec Baldwin to enlist the writer Kurt Andersen to help create a spoof memoir of the President’s first year.
In a recent piece for The Atlantic, “How America Lost Its Mind”, Andersen explains that he has been “paying close attention to Donald Trump for a long time”. When Trump was voted in a year ago, Andersen had just finishing writing Fantasyland, a revisionist history of America. In it, he traces a freaky line from Winthrop’s “city on a hill” visions to the 45th President via the Salem witch trials, Buffalo Bill, The Manchurian Candidate, Esalen, Thomas Pynchon, Mormonism and Anthony Robbins.
“People see our shocking Trump moment — this post-truth, ‘alternative facts’ moment,” he writes, “as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. But what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional for its entire history.” Greil Marcus, perhaps America’s greatest cultural critic, put forward a similar thesis in his masterly essay collection, The Shape of Things to Come.
A founding editor of the satirical magazine Spy from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, Andersen spent that period skewering Trump’s “lies, brutishness, and absurdity”. “It will require a struggle to make America reality-based again,” he says. And humour has a key role. “Satire gives a sense of community to those who share the view of this as a freakish and disconcerting time.”
It’s worth keeping all this in mind while reading You Can’t Spell America Without Me, but in truth Andersen and Baldwin’s faux-chronicle is above all an exercise in sheer daftness. All the predictable suspects — Russia, fake news, those absurd tweets, the hirings and firings, his bizarre relationships with Melania and Ivanka — are covered, but it’s in the expertly crafted asides, including a sidebar ranking every global leader by height, that the gold lies. Buying the audiobook — voiced by Baldwin — is in this case essential.
It starts off by looking back to when a young Trump first dreamt up expanding his “brand” into politics with his original consigliere, the mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, “It was in January 1986, the day the space shuttle blew up, so tragic, but I was in a fabulous mood.” He explains his decision to pen the book himself, rather than trust other writers, who in the past have included “a nice lady at the Trump Organisation, former ballerina, used to be gorgeous”. Looking back at his inauguration he reflects “becoming President really is forever, in a way marriage isn’t”. He wants to be sworn in to Queen’s “We Are the Champions”, “but Mike Pence literally pleaded with me not to do it, because it turns out the guy who sang it originally was gay”.
And so on. Iterating the many running gags would only ruin the fun. “There will be a moment when this will be over,” Baldwin has said. “When Trump will fade into ignominy, and take with him his ability to outstrip satire.” Will reality return to America? Until it does, books like this are ammunition.