Hillary Clinton's novel about the dangers Trump unleashed isn't all fiction
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have both been writing fiction lately. Trump’s fictions come in the form of fantastical statements about last year’s presidential election, which he continues to claim was stolen from him. Clinton’s involvement with the genre has been more straightforward: This week, she and Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny published a thriller, “State of Terror,” in which a female secretary of state, Ellen Adams, must prevent an international crisis that could culminate in nuclear war.
How fictional is this work of fiction? Well, the nation is recovering from the “near-criminal incompetence” of ex-President Eric Dunn, who after leaving the White House has retired to a Florida estate hidden behind “tall gold gates.” The protagonist, Adams, is a media executive picked to be secretary of state by a president with whom she previously had an adversarial relationship, just as Barack Obama did before he nominated Clinton for the same post in 2009.
At one point, a former press secretary for Dunn who had been fired from his job laments, “Loyalty was the most important thing in that White House. Anyone who looked like they might say anything at all critical was let go.”
On Wednesday, Penny and Clinton hosted a book talk at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in the leafy northwest section of Washington, D.C. Although the event was conducted over Zoom, presumably because of coronavirus concerns, the location was a reminder of the brutal campaign that upended Clinton’s political career: Politics and Prose is just a few doors down from Comet Ping Pong, the pizzeria where, in late 2016, an adherent to the absurd conspiracy theory that she and other high-level Democrats were harvesting blood from abducted children showed up brandishing a semiautomatic rifle and intending to “investigate.”
A spoiler alert: The Middle East figures prominently in the book, but Clinton and Penny are too sensitive of both thriller cliché and today’s cultural politics to pin all of the novel’s villainy on the Arab world. The authors’ plot instead reflects a growing conviction among intelligence and national security officials that right-wing domestic extremists pose a greater threat than do foreign ones.
A first-time novelist, Clinton described “State of Terror” as “a kind of reflection on the trend lines,” which she made clear weren’t headed anywhere good. “It truly is a cautionary tale,” she said. “Because there is so much that is happening that is an attempt to really turn the clock back to undermine our institutions, to undermine the rule of law, to sort of impose a view about who is and isn’t ‘real American’ on the rest of us.”
She avoided mentioning Trump by name but could not help invoking the charged political environment that may be his most lasting contribution: “What are we doing? I mean, why are we politicizing a disease? Why are we arguing about lifesaving vaccines? Why are we trying to stop people from voting? What is going on?”
She lambasted the so-called patriots who seek to “return our country to the ‘real Americans,’” a reference to the pro-Trump forces that remain avidly at work. Shortly after the event, she took to Twitter to share an article by Democratic attorney Marc Elias on Republican threats to subvert the electoral process.
“I fear Democrats still aren’t taking this threat sufficiently seriously,” her message said.
The book does have some lighthearted elements, though: Off the Record, the real-life clubby hotel bar a short walk from the White House, comes in for frequent and generally affectionate mention. At a time before mask mandates and social distancing, before cocktails came in to-go pouches to be consumed during awkward Zoom happy hours, it was the kind of Washington establishment that symbolized the hermetic nature of power and influence, twin forces that the Clintons mastered better than just about anyone.
Clinton beamed into Wednesday’s book talk from her home in New York City’s northern suburbs, the same home to which she retreated after losing to Trump in 2016, emerging for walks in local woods like an ordinary suburbanite. Not that she will ever shed the trappings that, for better or worse, come with being one of the most powerful and well-connected people in the world. In the book’s acknowledgments, she describes how the idea for writing her first novel came from Bob Barnett, one of the most plugged-in attorneys in Washington. Barnett had gotten the idea, in Clinton’s telling, from publishing executive Stephen Rubin, who has published Trumpworld chronicler Michael Wolff. And Clinton’s husband, Bill, has written political thrillers too, in his case with writer James Patterson.
As Trump’s likely 2024 campaign ramps up, he becomes ever more difficult to avoid, as Clinton well recognizes. “This, sadly, is realistic,” she said of her new novel. “It’s very real.”
The warning may have to do with nuclear war but also with more subtle issues. Faced with mass upheaval, some people choose the easy answers offered by authoritarians. At one point in “State of Terror,” an Iranian leader wonders, “Given a choice between bedlam and a dictatorship, what do you think the American people will choose?”
The question goes unanswered.
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