This essay explains why the election of Donald Trump in 2016 marks a literary historical event. In particular, I show how the liberal response to Trump, as well as Trump’s own persona, foregrounded an unsettling confusion between fiction and reality that led novelists to question the value of their craft. Focusing on a subset of what I call “Trump panic fiction”—novels that dramatize Trump’s election in the key of ontological alarm—I argue that literary depictions of Trump double as meditations on the relation between the evocative powers of art and the explanatory power of facts. To make sense of these meditations, I situate Trump panic fictions by Hari Kunzru, Ben Lerner, Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, and Ayad Akhtar within a longer history of US writers puzzling over the relation between writing and the real, a history that gained a new inflection when the critical acclaim of autofiction coincided with Trump’s “post-truth” presidency. Looking back to Lionel Trilling’s essay “Reality in America,” I claim that novelistic portrayals of Trump struggle to reinvent the liberal aesthetic for our current political moment.
