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If Trump Were a Fictional Character ...

Readers, inspired by a Bret Stephens column, offer their own ideas, turning to Sinclair Lewis, Cervantes, Voltaire and others.

Credit...Scott Menchin

To the Editor:

ReWhen Fiction Most Becomes Trump” (column, Dec. 28):

Bret Stephens cleverly analyzes how Shakespeare might tell the improbable tale of Donald Trump as both comedy and tragedy. Mr. Stephens compares Mr. Trump to Falstaff, although Mr. Trump and his caustic tweets hardly compare to Falstaff’s insults hurled toward Prince Hal: “you starveling, you elfskin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish! ... You tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bowcase, you vile standing tuck.”

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Credit...Scott Menchin

In his tragic examples, Mr. Stephens could have mentioned King Lear, who through the fog of his dementia still fancies himself “every inch a king.” One hopes that Mr. Trump will not descend into King Lear-ean madness, although one does wonder which acting cabinet chief will respond if King Donald asks, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

Methinks we’ll know that we’re in the final act of this tragedy when King Donald tweets about filial ingratitude. But will he throw his own children under the bus? That is the question.

Eileen Debold
Piscataway, N.J.

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Credit...Scott Menchin

To the Editor:

Bret Stephens is right that the greatest writers throughout history could have featured Donald Trump as a villain in their works.

One novelist who brought to life a fictional demagogue was Sinclair Lewis, the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his 1935 tale of a dictatorship in America, “It Can’t Happen Here,” Lewis imagined America under the iron heel of an authoritarian president named Buzz Windrip, a homegrown fascist who rallies his base with bellicose speeches, soaring promises and shifting facts.

Windrip and his supporters are challenged by a small-town newspaper editor, Doremus Jessup, who speaks words in fiction that still are relevant in fact today: “Where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”

If Sinclair Lewis were alive today, he would find plenty of material in Mr. Trump and the people who continue to support his presidency.

Ed Tant
Athens, Ga.

To the Editor:

In his short satirical tale “Zadig, or the Book of Fate,” Voltaire describes the fictitious great lord Irax: “The peacocks are not more vain, the doves not more voluptuous.” He is, we are told, “corrupted by vanity and voluptuousness” and “breathed nothing but false glory and false pleasures.”

Zadig, the prime minister of the kingdom, undertakes to rectify the bad behavior. He does this with the cooperation of a vast entourage of the court’s sycophants and via such an uninterrupted litany of praise for Irax for all the good qualities he lacked, that after five days Irax, exhausted and chastened, begged for it to stop.

President Trump does not appear to be exhausted or chastened.

Jerry Kavanagh
Pearl River, N.Y.

To the Editor:

In a time when the classics are nearly all forgotten by the average reader, I was heartened to read Bret Stephens’s imaginative column about how the classic writers might have portrayed Donald Trump and his minions. Missing, however, was the wonderful “Don Quixote,” by Cervantes.

Written at the turn of the 17th century, “Don Quixote” conjures a character who can only be seen as a premonition of the leadership we live with today. It is the story of a man who thinks he is something he is not and who cannot tell the difference between reality and illusion. When confronted with the evidence of his illusions, he simply dismisses the reality as enchantments.

While Don Quixote the character lacks the malevolence of Donald Trump the president, his misstatements and actions still cause embarrassment to himself (that he does not recognize) and sometimes tragedy for others. Cervantes wrote of Don Quixote, “He accommodated every thing he saw, with incredible facility, to the extravagant ravings of his disordered judgment.”

If that doesn’t sound like Donald Trump, I don’t know what does!

Jeffrey E. Green
Somerville, Mass.

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Credit...Scott Menchin

To the Editor:

Shakespearean comedy captures the unremitting follies of Donald Trump’s presidency at least as well the histories and tragedies that Bret Stephens cites. The virtuosically awful play-within-the-play staged by the “mechanicals” in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is especially apt.

It features a redundancy-prone character named Wall and a fumbling cast that can’t keep its lines straight. Center stage is Bottom, who so craves attention that he tries to play all the parts, overplays his own outrageously, and doesn’t even notice when (in a prank by meddling fairies) his human head is replaced by that of an ass. Watching the performance bemusedly is Duke Theseus (Robert Mueller?).

In the Bard’s words: “Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall, / Show me thy chink[!].”

Jamie Fumo
Tallahassee, Fla.
The writer is a professor of English at Florida State University.

To the Editor:

Bret Stephens’s discussion of fictional analogies to President Trump unfortunately omits perhaps the most prescient and powerful example: Alfred Jarry’s proto-Absurdist, scatological farce “King Ubu.” Jarry’s 1896 satire of absolute power combined with absolute greed is the perfect mirror for our own Trumpian age.

Ubu is a petulant, overgrown child craving attention and satisfaction of his appetites at any cost. Accompanied by his unscrupulous queen, Ubu combines primeval innocence and terrifying brutality, destroying followers and suspected rivals with equal alacrity. He is a cartoon villain come to life, devoid of psychological complexity and rational thought, his humanity reduced to a series of urges, appetites and desires.

Jarry’s subversiveness has long been hailed as a brilliant precursor to the Theater of the Absurd, in which logic was rendered meaningless on stage. It is time now to understand the play as a precursor to our increasingly dangerous times, in which order and reason have been gleefully breached in the name of absolute, unbridled power and obsessive greed.

Henry I. Schvey
St. Louis
The writer is a professor of drama and comparative literature at Washington University.

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Credit...Scott Menchin
A version of this article appears in print on  , Section SR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Trumpian Characters in Fiction. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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