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Humor

If Trump Were a Fictional Character, These Would Be The Critiques

Jamie Canaves

Contributing Editor

Jamie Canavés is the Tailored Book Recommendations coordinator and Unusual Suspects mystery newsletter writer–in case you’re wondering what you do with a Liberal Arts degree. She’s never met a beach she didn’t like, always says yes to dessert, loves ‘80s nostalgia, all forms of entertainment, and can hold a conversation using only gifs. You can definitely talk books with her on Litsy and Goodreads. Depending on social media’s stability maybe also Twitter and Bluesky.

Do you find yourself wondering on a regular basis lately “Is this real? Or am I only dreaming?” and then getting the Bangles song stuck in your head for the rest of the day? Maybe you keep wondering how can we get back to the other world, the one that isn’t this upside down scary mess. Maybe you laugh hysterically at the sheer volume of bizarre news that doesn’t even feel anchored in reality sometimes. Or could we all have somehow found ourselves trapped inside a novel and we need to band together to figure out how to escape these pages and get back to our previous world? Except editors and readers wouldn’t accept Trump as a believable character–nor villain.

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Can you imagine the editors notes and readers comments if this were a novel and Trump were a fictional character? We did! Here’s what Rioters imagined would be editors notes and readers reviews:

“This character is one-dimensional. I don’t understand his motivation other than ‘to be evil’.”

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“Ayn Rand called, she wants her hero back.”

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“George Orwell says to say ‘I told you so.’”

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“Holden Caulfield thinks you’re a phony.”

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“All of his dialogue is in one sentence. Was that intentional?”

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“Melville grants you permission to shorten it to just DICK”

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“Is he supposed to be funny? He’s not funny. He’s just an incompetent Lex Luthor.”

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“Author needs to do some research and fact-checking on how governance works.”

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“We regret to say we will not be publishing this work. We wish you best of luck.”

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“The vocabulary is very limited and repetitive. People don’t talk like this. It makes me think of when Joey on Friends discovered the thesaurus–now that was at least funny.”

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“Why does this character only know like 5 words?”

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“Too many sentence fragments. Terrible.”

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“Does he not know how sentences work? Why doesn’t he know how sentences work?”

“This story has some structural issues. Bigly.”

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“Kudos on having the courage to write such a universally unlikable character.”

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“I think you went too far with an unreliable narrator. It’s really not believable.”

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“Some of the most poorly-executed humor ever written. Parody is supposed to at least be grounded in reality.”

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“Hasn’t this whole dystopia thing been done to death already?”

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“Umbridge wonders why Trump can pierce the glass ceiling better than she can.”

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“Eddie Izzard’s Voldemort is impressed. Someone is even worse at being evil than he is.”

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“I kept waiting for an alien invasion or giant talking insects to make this more realistic.”

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“Is this supposed to be political satire? It reads more like badly written science-fiction. Suggest the author read more diversely before attempting something as complex as satire.”

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