MAKE AMERICAN NOVELS ABOUT POLITICS FUNNY AGAIN BOOKS,
As “Make Russia Great Again” opens, Herbert Nutterman, the former general manager of the Trump Bloody Run Golf Club in Little Hot Pepper Virginia, has (despite his wife’s reservations) become the 45th president’s seventh chief of staff. With the 2020 election a few months away, the Administration is facing “a [expletive] storm”: impeachment, outrage over the president’s nomination of Roy Moore to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court-ordered release of Trump’s tax returns and terrorist attacks by the Kurdish “Death to America” Brigade.
Nutterman also learns that “Placid Reflux,” a supercomputer designed to deter and counteract foreign interference in American elections, has engineered the first round victory of Anatoli Zitkin, the Communist Party candidate, over Vladimir Putin, in Russia’s presidential contest. And Oleg Pishinsky, a Russian oligarch who controls the global supply of molybdenum, and allegedly murdered the Moscow bureau chief of the Washington Examinator, is threatening to release videos of Mr. Trump’s sexual “interactions” with the 18 finalists at the 2013 Miss Universe contest if the president does not get Congress to repeal legislation freezing his U.S. assets and barring him from entering the country.
A former speechwriter for Vice President George H. W. Bush, novelist, memoirist and humorist, Christopher Buckley is the author, among other books, of “Thank You for Smoking,” “Losing Mum and Pup” and “But Enough About You.” Some years after he published “The White House Mess,” a fictional memoir of a presidential chief of staff also named Herb, Mr. Buckley abandoned political satire because politics had “become selfsatirizing.” With “Make Russia Great Again,” Mr. Buckley has reneged on his pledge.
“Make Russia Great Again” may well stimulate some Never Trumpers to laugh with tears in their eyes. Although Nutterman admits the “optics are not optimal,” for example, he suggests that Trump’s male supporters might respond well to a “Make America Hard Again” spin following the release of the Pishinsky tapes. Women could be told the Miss Universe contestants hurled themselves at Trump and took “appalling liberties.” Evangelicals could be reminded that while he was not 100% perfect, Trump “was not a left-wing, gun confiscating, fossil fuel banning, transgender promoting, Mexican-hugging socialist who hates America.”
Following a “failing New York Times” report that when “Mike Pants” (who is so phlegmatic you could “slap him with a frozen halibut and he wouldn’t blink”) was in high school he flirted with Satanism, Nutterman wonders why the vice presidential background questionnaire didn’t include a box to check “if you have ever participated in demonic rituals, including, but not limited to, goat sacrifice, blood drinking, carving satanic-themed crop circles in cornfields.”
And yet, Mr. Buckley’s claim that politics has become self-satirizing has never been more true than it is now. “Make Russia Great Again” relies all too often on references (like Rudy Giuliani’s “buttdialing) lifted from the headlines, well-known character flaws, and stereotypes. One of Nutterman’s most vivid memories, we learn, is watching the president practice saying “molybdenum.” Mr. Trump rarely laughs, Nutterman tells us,
“unless he’s just been informed that someone he despises has been diagnosed with malignant tumors.”
“Jored” (Jared Kushner), according to Nutterman, looks like his own Madame Tussauds waxwork. “Squigg Lee Biskitt” (Lindsey Graham) called Trump “lower than alligator poo” in 2016, but attaches himself to the president “like a remora fish” after the election, his “chipmunk squeaks of praise motivated by shameless, unapologetic ‘slap yo mamma’ level ambition” to win a fourth term as South Carolina’s U.S. senator. Secretary of State Pompeo “likes to throw his weight around, and does not lack for weight.” And Nutterman’s portrait of “Salamander Neuderscreech” (Newt Gingrich) features the former Speaker’s arrogance, ambition, ample figure (which made it appear “he’d been snout-deep in the pasta and the macadamia nuts”), pudgy face, beady little eyes, and bared teeth that gave him “the look of a malevolent Pillsbury Doughboy.”
Satire, of course, is not always subtle. But as Christopher Buckley preaches to the choir, “Make Russia Great Again” may leave readers laughing self-righteously but not better informed, enlightened or challenged. And a fair number of Never Trumpers may apply the motto Mr. Buckley invents for the Democrats as their campaign theme to his book: “Come On …We Are So Much Better Than This!”