Fake Trump Alec Baldwin and longtime Trump watcher Kurt Anderson will pen a parody book channeling the president’s inner monologue. Titled You Can’t Spell America Without Me, the book is scheduled for publication by Penguin in November. Anderson, a novelist and the host of the public radio program Studio 360, will do most of the writing—”we have that arrangement whereby he doesn’t put on the wig, I don’t open up a Word document,” Baldwin told the Times, while Baldwin will channel his SNL character for the audiobook version. Anderson, who said the book would be “fantastic” and “sharp,” will also likely draw upon his experience as a founding editor of the satirical Spy magazine, which in the ’80s now famously referred to the then-real estate mogul as a “short-fingered vulgarian.”
It’s part of a tremendous wave of new books inspired by the Trump administration.
This month, Scott Dikkers, founding editor of the Onion, published Trump’s America: Buy This Book and Mexico Will Pay for It. Andrew Shaffer’s The Day of the Donald, published last summer, was a slapstick vision of the first two years of a Trump White House. Booker Prize winners have also incorporated Trump into their work: Howard Jacobson’s novella Pussy, forthcoming in Britain in April, is a fairy tale about an egoist who falls into a leadership position, and Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House, to be published in September, is said to include a character resembling the 45th president.
Last year, comedian Michael Ian Black and illustrator Marc Rosenthal published A Child’s First Book of Trump, a picture book that attempted to explain the man and the phenomenon. And last summer, Yuge! anthologized 30 years of Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strips lampooning Trump. Back in the ’80s, Trump blasted Doonesberry as “mediocre at best.”
