A deep dive into the time of Trumpian magical realism
Nikki Barrowclough
December 12, 2025
If you remember, 2015 was a year of horror too. Beheadings, suicide bombings, deadly attacks in central Paris and other cities, the burning to death of a Jordanian pilot in a cage. In Sydney, accountant Curtis Cheng was shot dead outside the NSW Police headquarters by a teenage Islamic State wannabe.
At the end of that awful year, I wrote an opinion piece for this masthead about the imagination of writers in an age of terror, questioning whether novelists were now in a quandary about scenarios they’d dreamt up.
The French prime minister at the time of the Paris attacks, Manuel Valls, remarked: “The macabre imagination of the masterminds is limitless.” Fourteen years earlier, Ian McEwan, the English novelist, had said the opposite following the 9/11 attacks in the United States. He wrote in The Guardian that “a failure of the imagination” was among the hijackers’ crimes. They wouldn’t have been able to proceed if they’d imagined themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, he argued.
In contrast, America’s 9/11 Commission Report, made public in 2004, concluded that the most important failure leading to the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon “was one of imagination”. The national security adviser at the time, Condoleezza Rice, said that no one could have imagined planes being used as missiles.
As a child, I was constantly told I had a vivid imagination. Perhaps this rankled more than I realised. The result is an ongoing fascination with how often a lack of imagination is lamented on the international stage.
In September, this masthead’s Peter Hartcher wrote that The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies had found that European policymakers failed to foresee Vladimir Putin’s full invasion of Ukraine. The invasion “was just beyond imagination”, said one Dutch official.
A different kind of destructive force preoccupied American journalist Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, after the rancorous TV debate between Donald Trump and his rival for the presidency, Joe Biden, in September 2020.
“So many of the failures in the Trump age have been failures of imagination,” Stelter wrote. “Many, many people didn’t imagine that he could win and didn’t imagine that he would debase the office in all the ways he has … I failed to imagine that he would stoop to ‘enemy of the people’ rhetoric to wound the nation’s news media.”
Trump had only just got started. Even George Orwell might have blinked at the idea of conspiracy theorists and pro-Trump propagandists routing the Pentagon press corps. But they have. Pete Hegseth’s new policy restricting reporting provoked a walkout by the real journalists at the Pentagon, headquarters of the Department of Defence (sorry, the Department of War).
The irony is that, just this week, Trump trashed “decaying” Europe and its “weak” leaders in an interview with Politico, one of the news organisations evicted from the Pentagon. It was an “extremely unfriendly’ publication”, Trump told his interviewer, Politico’s White House bureau chief, Dasha Burns, thankfully without addressing her as “Piggy”, as he had Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey.
His assault on Europe followed the release of his National Security Strategy, which declared that Europe was facing “civilisational erasure” due to immigration, although even this has been trumped by the mind-boggling news that people visiting the US (yes, Australians too) must now provide five years of their phone numbers, 10 years of their email addresses, IP addresses, metadata from electronically submitted photos, biometrics and information about family members. Didn’t Edward Snowden leave any of that data behind?
Donald Rumsfeld would have said the future for “the fake news media” across the US was one of those “unknown unknowns”. And Trump’s threats against writers, as PEN America points out, are aimed at intimidating journalists and their publishers. (In September, a federal judge threw out his $US15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, four reporters and Penguin Random House, publisher of the book Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. In October, Trump refiled the lawsuit.)
Things aren’t at the stage – yet – when novelists in the US are grabbed off the streets by masked men. Six years ago, bestselling author Richard North Patterson suggested that Trump had rendered fiction redundant. Perhaps POTUS regards mere fiction writers as harmless.
There’s still the genre of fiction that has served those living in dictatorships well – namely, magical realism, a writer’s martial art – though perhaps novelists feel defeated by reality because it’s non-fiction writers who, in these Trumpian times, relish the fantastical.
This headline, “The imperial audacity of Trump’s magical thinking”, appeared on the London School of Economics and Political Science blog in 2019. Last year, in Foreign Affairs magazine, Peter D. Feaver, professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, wrote that Trump portrayed himself and his team as hard-nosed realists, “but what they offered was less realism than magical realism: a set of fanciful boasts and shallow nostrums”.
“What will fiction be like in the Trump era?” wondered writer Miranda France, back in 2017, in Prospectmagazine. Paying tribute to the Latin American novelists who created the genre, she wrote that railing against tyrannical leaders was the spur to invent new literary forms.
However, if Trump discovers that, unlike academics, novelists’ imaginations are regarded as hallowed ground, he might ask his on-again, off-again friend, the assassin Putin, for advice.
Trump’s first wife, Ivana, claimed her ex-husband kept a copy of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, in his bedside cabinet. No mention of books by the late Mario Vargas Llosa, who grew up under a military dictatorship, and once stood for president in his native Peru. He also won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010. Not the Peace Prize, Mr President, but hey. In Vargas Llosa’s book of essays, Making Waves, there’s a line that reads: “For almost every writer, memory is the starting point of fantasy, the springboard that launches the imagination on its unpredictable flight towards fiction.”
Today, with humanity imploding, and memories of the world before Trump starting to look surreal, instead of the other way around, and as we learn not to rule out anything any more – Nigel Farage’s Britain? Marine Le Pen’s France? Pauline Hanson’s Australia? Neo-Nazis in our state and territory parliaments? – those unpredictable flights towards fiction may end, as imaginations dry up and writers fall from the skies.
Nikki Barrowclough is a Sydney-based journalist and former staff writer on Good Weekend magazine.
