Monday Motivation: “I got nicer everything” – D. Trump

Once, three or four years ago, I explored the possibility of creating a character like Donald Trump, then an unlikely candidate campaigning to become president of the United States.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, as Ted Kennedy might once have said.

Writers are happy to find inspiration wherever it pops up – and if that’s in a stadium in Tulsa, well, so be it. So here’s the prompt: Create a character inspired by the remarks that a politician makes to a highly partisan crowd. Ask yourself what this character wants. Where his satisfactions lie. What the nature of his closest relationships – with spouse, offspring, siblings, parents – might be. What he fears and what he relishes. What internal battles rage in a soul like your character’s.

Because this, as I’ve said often before, is what writers do. We make sense of the world and its inhabitants by entering into their lives, recreating their experiences, sharing the agony of their choices and the joy of their triumphs.

If we only sought to understand characters we admired, there’d be no shadows in our fictional world – and no challenges for us as writers.

Writers transcend what’s familiar and safe when they venture into the territory occupied by characters whose moral codes might be very different from their own – or who operate in terms of no codes but those that serve themselves.

In his two-book story of the Battle of Stalingrad – Stalingrad and Life and Fate – Vassily Grossman inhabited (among many others) the brain and the nerves of Adolf Hitler. If he’d done so simply to condemn the dictator, we’d have thought little of the exercise. But the fact is, he strove to write not sympathetically so much as accurately about what it might have felt like actually to be Hitler.

We don’t condemn Grossman for this, we applaud him. How else can one ever hope to explore the further reaches of the human project?

I’m not suggesting that Trump is a twenty-first-century Hitler – far from it. One characteristic that distinguishes them is that Trump’s appetites are much smaller than Adolf’s.

But here’s the fodder for that character I suggested you construct. It’s taken from the speech President Trump made at the first rally he held after he abandoned lockdown. Criticising the Democratic “elite”, he assured his audience that he was more elite than anybody.  This, very specifically, is what he said:

“I look better than them. Much more handsome. Got better hair than they do. I got nicer properties. I got nicer houses. I got nicer apartments. I got nicer everything.”

A challenge to keep you amused as lockdown – partial or complete – enters its fourth month.

Happy writing,

Richard