THE ORIGINAL TRUMP? NO, IT’S JUST FAKE NEWS!

Yes, this 1935 portrayal of a demagogue in the White House is ‘eerily prescient’ – but only in places. Mostly, it’s a bit of a plod…

It Can’t Happen Here Sinclair Lewis Penguin Modern Classics €11.99 ★★★★★

Beside the counter of my local Waterstones lay a huge pile of a Penguin Modern Classic previously unknown to me: It

Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1935. What was it doing there, in this great quantity?

I picked up a copy and read the blurb. ‘A vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fearmongering demagogue runs for president of the United States – and wins. Sinclair Lewis’s chilling 1935 bestseller is the story of Buzz Windrip, who promises poor, angry voters that he will make America proud and prosperous once more but takes the country down a far darker path.’

It turns out that, for obvious reasons, the once-forgotten It Can’t Happen Here is currently riding high in the bestseller lists in the UK and America. The Guardian has described it as ‘eerily prescient’ and it’s not hard to see why.

The parallels between Buzz Windrip and You-Know-Who are, if not quite uncanny, then certainly striking. Windrip declares himself ‘on the side of the plain people and against all the tight old political machines’.

He is ‘a tireless traveller, a boisterous and humorous speaker’ and an ‘inspired guesser at what political doctrines the people would like’.

He promises to ‘deal with’ Mexico. He is deeply committed to building roads, and a great protectionist, determined to cut down on imports.

‘I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa and rubber, and so keep all our dollars at home.’

On a personal level, he likes getting involved in beauty contests.

He stands for election to the presidency in 1936, which means that, at the time it was written, the book was set just one year in the future. ‘In a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions,’ The New

York Times declares itself solidly against his type of populist campaign.

He couples an ability to appeal to the lowest common denominator with an instinctive belief in ‘the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars’. He loves big rallies, and rails against the lies of the press. He is anti-intellectual and his opponents are convinced he is deeply racist. Alongside the other stodgy candidates, Buzz Windrip has an undeniable charisma. He can be ‘ever so funny about solemn jaw-drooping opponents’. He refuses to be polite, and his coarseness gains him attention. He rounds on his political enemies as ‘the meanest, lowest, cowardliest gang of yellow-livered, back-slapping, hypocritical gun-toters, bomb-throwers, ballot-stealers, ledgerfakers, givers of bribes, suborners of perjury, scab-hirers and general lowdown crooks, liars and swindlers’. No intellectual, he couples this abuse with the simplest, crassest slogans. ‘The way to stop crime is to stop it,’ he declares, and his supporters love him for it. They are convinced by his insistence that his campaign is selfless.

‘I do want power, great, big imperial power,’ he tells a rally. ‘But not for myself – no – for you!’

His supporters are drawn from those he calls ‘The Forgotten Men’. At a rally for Windrip, they chant this song, to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy: The League of the Forgotten Men Don’t like to be forgotten They went to Washington and then They sang, ‘There’s something rotten!’ In his ghost-written book Zero Hour, Windrip rails against America’s decline and argues: ‘It is just not fair to ordinary folks – it just confuses them – to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people.’ Americans are, he says, in his homespun way, ‘the greatest race on the face of this old Earth’.

Against all expectations, Windrip sweeps to power, beating Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who makes an excuse not to attend the inauguration.

So far, so prescient. But no one, not even a Nobel Prize-winning novelist (and Sinclair Lewis was America’s first) can really look into the future and, the more you read, the more you feel slightly disappointed at the way present-day facts fall short of the prophecy.

You start by deciding to overlook the fact that, at 48, President Windrip is 22 years younger than President Trump and that, far from being tall with small hands and a wacky hairdo, he is more like Ross Perot, ‘almost a dwarf, yet with an enormous head, a bloodhound head, of huge ears, pendulous

‘And far from being tall with small hands and a wacky hairdo, he is… “almost a dwarf, yet with an enormous head, a bloodhound head, of huge ears, pendulous cheeks, mournful eyes”’

cheeks, mournful eyes’. And, unlike Trump, who is the cheerleader for private enterprise against the state, Windrip speedily implements the nationalisation of banks, water, mines, oil and transport, and promises every American a guaranteed minimum income of $5,000, which would be about $80,000 in today’s money. And, unlike Trump, he also wants to set a cap on the annual income of the very rich.

Sinclair wrote It Can’t Happen Here at amazing speed in the summer of 1935, less as a prophecy than as a warning. He wanted to show how the rise of Hitler in Germany might be duplicated in the USA, and to warn of the consequences.

The contemporary American politician closest to the Windrip character was Huey Long, the Democrat governor of Louisiana, a populist demagogue who, unlike Trump, was calling for massive wealth distribution and greater federal spending.

As fate would have it, Long was assassinated in September 1935, a month after he announced he was standing for the presidency and a few weeks before the first publication of It Can’t Happen Here.

Once Windrip is elected, roughly a third of the way into the book, he becomes ever more like Hitler and ever less like Trump.

Blacks and Jews are barred from voting, women are disbarred from employment, newspapers become propaganda sheets, opponents are murdered or placed in concentration camps, and Congress is stripped of its powers.

Dystopian novels tend to feature lone heroes fighting against the system, and this one is no exception. Doremus Jessup is the 60-year-old mild-mannered liberal editor of a smalltown newspaper in Vermont. Once Windrip comes to power, Jessup writes editorials against his fascist regime but, after being threatened with imprisonment, agrees to toe the line, and even serialises the president’s absurd book.

At the same time he secretly publishes tracts against the regime but he is caught and sentenced to 17 years in a concentration camp. Meanwhile, friends and family are being tortured and killed, and evil characters within the small-town community are rising to positions of power.

At the top of the regime, there are conspiracies galore and crazy new edicts are issued, some with a hint of the satire reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis’s best-known novel, the delightful Babbitt.

For instance, among the books outlawed are those of P G Wodehouse, ‘with his unscrupulous propaganda against the aristocratic tradition’.

It Can’t Happen Here is, incidentally, packed with contemporary references: Oswald Mosley, Katharine Hepburn, Agatha Christie and Albert Einstein are all mentioned and so too are various American politicians unknown to me other than by name.

Sadly, it must be said that, after the initial fun of spotting the similarities between Buzz Windrip and Donald Trump, It Can’t

Happen Here becomes a bit of a plod, its prose workmanlike but unexciting, its characters – apart from the sweet, slightly doddery hero – caricatures, its plot running along the old, familiar lines.

So it is probably more interesting as a period piece than as a prophecy or a call to arms.

Or will President Trump prove me wrong?