TRUMPLAND THEMES AND THE MID-WINTER BLUES
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
JANUARY 31, 2019


LINKING CHRISTIANITY WITH DONALD TRUMP – THIS IS A DISCUSSION ON HOW CHRISTIANS GET AROUND THE EXCEEDINGLY “WORLDLY” LIFE OF TRUMP AND COME TO HIS FOLD AS HIS SHEEP. A CHRISTIAN FRIEND OF MINE FROM HIGH SCHOOL SAID LAST YEAR THAT “GOD CAN USE PEOPLE FOR HIS PLANS WHO ARE NOT GOOD.” I SAID NOTHING.

YES, ALTERNET IS A LEFT-LEANING WEBSITE, BUT ONE WHICH PUBLISHES A GREAT DEAL OF IMPORTANT THINKING AND DISCUSSION. SEE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlterNet
AlterNet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AlterNet is a left-leaning website that was launched in 1998 by the non-profit now known as the Independent Media Institute.[5][6] In 2018, the website was acquired by owners of The Raw Story. Some AlterNet content is republished on Salon.[7]

Coverage

Coverage is divided into several special sections related to progressive news and culture, including News & Politics, World, Economy, Civil Liberties, Immigration, Reproductive Justice, Economy, Environment, Animal Rights, Food, Water, Books, Media and Culture, Belief, Drugs, Personal Health, Sex and Relationships, Vision, and Investigations.[8]

AlterNet publishes original content and also makes use of "alternative media", sourcing columns from Salon, Common Dreams, The Guardian, Consortiumnews, Truthdig, Truthout, TomDispatch, The Washington Spectator, Al Jazeera English, Center for Public Integrity, Democracy Now!, Waging Nonviolence, Asia Times, New America Media and Mother Jones.


https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/evangelical-historian-explains-how-christians-came-put-trump-ahead-jesus/
Evangelical historian explains how Christians came to put Trump ahead of Jesus
written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon January 28, 2019

“How do we reconcile the white evangelical politics of fear with the scriptural command to ‘fear not’?”

John Fea is an evangelical Christian and a historian. When Donald Trump was elected with 81 percent of the self-described white evangelical vote, Fea was both stunned and surprised. “As a historian studying religion and politics, I should have seen this coming,” he notes. Yet he did not. Which was why Fea ended up writing his new book, “Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.”

On its own terms, the book clearly succeeds in making sense for Fea and others like him, with potential for reaching wavering Trump supporters as well. He identifies and lucidly explores three fundamental flaws in evangelical thinking that have led them to embrace a leader who is wholly unfit by their own once-cherished moral standards, in pursuit of ends they cannot possibly achieve — restoring 1950s America via government action. In a key passage, Fea explains:

For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and nostalgia for a national past that may never have existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe they best explain the 81 percent.

Fear is Fea’s central concern, and the one most directly at odds with the Bible. “The Bible teaches that Christians are to fear God – and only God,” Fea writes. “All other forms of fear reflect a lack of faith, of failure to place one’s trust completely in the providential God who has promised to work all things out for good for those who love him.”

That’s a specific reference to Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” But this teaching seems lost on those who shout about God the loudest and the most, and it’s far from clear how Fea’s book can help change that. What it can perhaps do is help make sense of the evangelical majority for others, like Fea, who are in the minority within that world and already inclined toward finding another path.

“Despite God’s commands to trust him in times of despair, evangelicals have always been very fearful people,” he notes, “and they have built their understanding of political engagement around the anxiety they have felt amid times of social and cultural change.”

Fear is the subject of the first three chapters of “Believe Me.” They’re presented in reverse historical order — first come the 2016 primaries, then the shaping of the Christian-right playbook from the 1970s to the present, then a selective, episodic overview from colonial times to the modern era. The fourth chapter, dealing with power, examines the role of the “court evangelicals” who have come to support Trump, while his chapter exploring nostalgia examines its centrality in Trump’s fatally vague promise to “Make America Great Again.”

Fea’s first chapter is especially riveting for the light it sheds on how evangelicals came to support Trump when they had so many other superficially better-looking options to choose from. He argues convincingly that other GOP candidates did a superior job of courting evangelical voters by traditional means, after eight years of Obama had brought more change than they could handle — Marco Rubio with an impressive advisory council, Mike Huckabee with a track record and issue positions, Ben Carson with an appealing personal story, but most of all Ted Cruz, who “turned fear-mongering into an art form,” which should have trumped everyone else, especially given his father’s history as a popular apocalyptic preacher.

But collectively, Fea writes, they succeeded too well.

Between the summer of 2015 and start of the primary season in early 2016, they were able to diagnose the crisis that the United States was facing in a way that brought great anxiety and concern to American evangelicals. But their strategy backfired. … The evangelical candidates stoked fears of a world they seemed unfit to train. Desperate times call for a strongman, and if a strongman was needed, only Donald Trump would fit the bill.
It’s a powerful, convincing explanation — though incomplete, as I’ll return to below. But Fea is not content just reflecting on what has been. “I want to explore alternatives to the fear, the search for power, and in nostalgia,” Fea writes. “How do we reconcile the white evangelical politics of fear with the scriptural command to ‘fear not’?” he asks.

“What would it take to replace fear with Christian hope?” The answer he at least prepares the way for comes from an unlikely source — the black church, as reflected in the history, spirit, and legacy of the civil rights movement, which he turns to in the book’s concluding chapter. They model a contrasting triad of hope, humility and history that Fea highlights as providing a powerful alternative model, a road not taken by white evangelicals.

But because the preceding five chapters have been so insular, concerned with the white evangelical world, this solution has the feeling of deus ex machina. Fea himself provides no model for what it might mean or how it might work, until his seemingly belated epiphany. It’s an effective cri de coeur, though as serious sociological and theological critique, much less so. Toward the book’s end, he writes:

How might hope, humility, and history inform the way we white American evangelicals think about politics and other forms of public engagement? I hope that what I’ve written here might spur conversations and initiatives born out of possible answers to this question.

Yet for the white evangelical community as a whole to arrive where Fea wishes, it will have to confront its own dark shadows that Fea only lightly touches on — most crucially, all the centuries of unspeakable evil they’ve projected onto others, in pursuit of imagining themselves pure. For those outside that community, the definitional issue of race stands out for how gingerly Fea treats it, downplaying even Trump’s crucial conservative reinvention via birtherism. This is, after all, a book about white identity politics, one that skirts the most difficult aspects of that identity’s formation.

Most dramatically, as historian Seth Dowland noted in a recent critical essay for Christian Century, “American evangelicalism and the politics of whiteness,” the Civil War radically reshaped American religious identity. “The center of evangelicalism did not — could not — hold,” he writes. “The sectional crisis and Civil War divided American Protestants regionally and racially into three groups: northern white Protestants, southern white Protestants, and black Protestants. … The near-absence of black believers in white churches was the condition for the development of a distinctly white evangelicalism.”

Like Fea, Dowland admits that his own work didn’t prepare him for the rise of Trump, but he has adjusted his thinking more fundamentally:

What most distinguishes white American evangelicals from other Christians, other religious groups, and nonbelievers is not theology but politics. More than anything else, identifying as an evangelical in the United States denotes certain attitudes about American politics and usually indicates a white racial identity. It’s not that theology isn’t important to white evangelicals; it’s just not the primary thing that distinguishes them from other religious groups.

Fea’s book is about that theology, or rather about how fear, power and nostalgia underlie its faults and distortions. “Believe Me” is extremely compelling in that regard. But it is also cut off from the wider sweep of political history, from which white evangelicals have sought to distance themselves. Race is a submerged subject here, which only emerges distinctively toward the end. Yet, race remains such a central subject, so highly charged, that it’s difficult to fault Fea’s approach — save for his lack of attention to the role of white evangelicals in the abolitionist movement, and subsequent chapters of anti-racist struggle. There are committed anti-racist white evangelicals to this day, whose perspectives, unfortunately, Fea fails to register.

Earlier, I said that Fea’s explanation of Trump’s strong white evangelical support was incomplete. This is true in at least two ways. First, it leaves out the question how Trump became a credible option in the first place, due to his lead role in promoting birtherism, which was equal parts flat-out racism and tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. Fea makes no mention of Trump’s 2011 flirtation with running against Obama, which the then-president undercut by releasing his long-form birth certificate, after Trump had spent months building up toward a paranoid crescendo.

Nor does Fea discuss how Republican doubts about Obama’s citizenship actually increased by early 2012, despite that documentary proof. Neither Trump’s means of making himself a credible option nor evangelicals’ means of disregarding unwanted evidence receive the attention they deserve. Birtherism is hardly a lone example of fantastical, conspiratorial thinking in the annals of American evangelical or racist history — a theme whose absence should be noted.

More broadly, Trump’s omnipresent conspiracy theories meshed with long-standing evangelical responses to modernism and denigrations of professional expertise — which Christopher Douglas at Religion Dispatches has described accurately as “The Religious Origins of Fake News and ‘Alternative Facts’” — as well as older traditions of confabulation and fear, tracing back to colonial America.

As I discussed here in December 2015, conflicts with Native Americans gave rise to America’s first popular literary genre, the captivity narrative, which the influential Cotton Mather used to connect all his perceived enemies together — including “captivity by specters,” in cases of witchcraft — a master conspiracy-theory prototype. “The Puritans’ captivity fears were in some sense a matter of ‘envious reversal,’” I wrote, “a switching of roles of victim and aggressor. It was, after all, the Puritans who were capturing the Native Americans’ whole world, the entire continent on which they lived.”

These represent darker aspects of American history that Fea mostly downplays in his book, even though his third chapter ably discusses a range of fear-infused episodes since colonial times, while the fifth chapter pointedly highlights how Trump tends to suggest that America was greatest during some of the darkest periods of our history. What’s missing is an analysis of how these things reflect a cultivated set of beliefs and cultural practices that repeatedly produce similar responses.

Fea recognizes repeating patterns, but only vaguely. “Despite God’s commands to trust him in times of despair, evangelicals have always been very fearful people,” he notes, “and they have built their understanding of political engagement around the anxiety they have felt amid times of social and cultural change.” That connection between fear, change and political power-seeking is the crux of Fea’s critique, but it never becomes systematic. True to his evangelical roots, Fea seems far more comfortable expressing this in terms of individual failings, even as he clearly wants to press for more supportive broader norms.

Two sets of examples from his exploration of power are instructive. The first concerns its problematic nature, the second, his overview of who the “court evangelists” are. As Fea describes, the problem with the pursuit of power is both that it distracts from the primary concern of saving souls (“Mixing horse manure and ice cream,” a Baptist saying goes, “doesn’t do much to the manure, but it sure does ruin the ice cream”) and that it fails in what it purportedly sets out to achieve. What’s more, he notes, this view has been repeatedly endorsed by those who’ve learned the hard way. The examples are individually telling, but the movement as a whole never seems to learn — nor does Fea draw any comprehensive lessons.

First came Billy Graham, who Fea notes, “was the official spokesperson for American evangelicalism for more than five decades.” After 1968, “Graham’s relationship with Richard Nixon brought him closer to the world of presidential politics than he had ever been before,” but that ultimately proved disastrous when Nixon’s profanity-laced White House tapes were released — making Graham “physically sick” — after which Nixon resigned in disgrace. “Years later, Graham admitted that his relationship with the disgraced former president had ‘muffled those inner monitors that had warned me for years to stay out of partisan politics.’”

But while Graham may have learned a lesson, he couldn’t stop others from making similar mistakes. “Journalist Cal Thomas and evangelical pastor Ed Dobson were two of the Moral Majority’s most important staff members,” Fea notes, “But in 1999, Dobson and Thomas reflect soberly on their experience with Falwell and the Moral Majority in their book Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?‘ They concluded that the answer to the subtitle’s question was a definite ‘no.'” They didn’t abandon their views, but they “were forced to admit that the strategy they forged in the 1980s had failed.”

Finally, he cites the example of David Kuo, an evangelical political operative and speechwriter who served in George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. “Very early in his tenure at the White House Kuo realized that political power and Christian compassion seemed to not mix very well. His efforts at the office of faith-based and neighborhood partnerships were largely ignored unless they were an immediate benefit to Bush’s political fortunes.” His book of regrets was titled, “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.”

The fact that all these individual experiences have not had more of a systemic impact ought to be a matter of major concern for Fea. It underscores how white evangelicals’ individualistic outlook severely limits their capacity to learn wider lessons — a problem, he should note, that has not affected black evangelicals in the same way.

Fea’s overview of the “court evangelists” suffers from a similar analytical shortfall. He divides them into three camps: The old Christian right, preachers of the “prosperity gospel,” and those Fea identifies as “Independent Network Charismatics.” The first includes prominent names such as James Dobson and Jerry Falwell Jr., but Fea focuses attention on Robert Jeffers, a Dallas preacher less well known outside evangelical circles, whom Fea once debated on NPR’s “Interfaith Voices.”

During that exchange, Jeffers said, “Look, the godly principle here is that governments have one responsibility, and that is Romans 13 [which] says to avenge evildoers. God gives government the power of the sword, of capital punishment, of executing wrong-doers.” Fea notes what a dramatic shift this marks from Jeffers’ pre-Trump position. That specific example makes his argument concrete, but adds little in the way of broader understanding.

Regarding the prosperity gospel, Fea cites the work of historian Kate Bowler, writing, “Prosperity preachers teach that faith in God combined with positive thinking and an optimistic attitude will ultimately lead to monetary wealth, good health, and victory over the difficult circumstances of life.” His broader background descriptions are adequate, but his focus on one figure, Paula White, who has a long history with Trump, is not fleshed out much.

Fea mentions but does not elaborate on Trump’s youthful experience hearing sermons from Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” and never delves into how Trump’s own business practices have reflected the influence of such figures, such as this 2011 New York magazine story about Trump’s multi-level vitamin marketing scheme. The prosperity gospel is the utmost in individualism, while at the same time relying on a powerful and persuasive social environment, which Fea’s analysis does not include.

Then there are the Independent Network Charismatics — apparently this is the new evangelical term for what used to be called the New Apostolic Reformation movement. Sarah Palin was the first nationally prominent Republican to be associated with this movement, which primarily comes out of Pentecostalism, but has a long history of being branded as heretical or even pagan, going back to its post-World War II origins in the “Latter Rain” movement. Their profound theological break with 500 years of orthodox Protestantism — proclaiming themselves “prophets” and “apostles” with authority directly from God — does not make a ripple in Fea’s account.

In short, Fea’s individualist focus truncates his analysis repeatedly throughout his book, despite his clear understanding and concern for the importance of community. This does not detract from his stated intention in writing the book, to “spur conversations and initiatives born out of possible answers” to an important question: “How might hope, humility, and history inform the way we white American evangelicals think about politics and other forms of public engagement?” It merely underscores how much broader those conversations must be in order to bear fruit.



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DONALD TRUMP, TIME TRAVELER?

SOME CONSPIRACY THEORY FANS HAVE FOUND A SET OF CHILDREN’S NOVELS, TWO ACTUALLY, WHICH THEY BELIEVE ARE REFERRING TO DONALD TRUMP, AND THAT TRUMP IS A TIME TRAVELER. IT’S A COINCIDENCE ON THE NAME TRUMP, OF COURSE, BUT THAT DOESN’T STOP PEOPLE FROM GETTING INTO THINGS LIKE THIS. THIS IS TOO TRULY “DAFT” FOR ME, BUT EITHER PEOPLE BELIEVE IT OR THEY ENJOY PLAYING ALONG WITH THE JOKE. AS FOR THE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS, I THINK IT IS THE LATTER. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO LOVE LIES, SPOOKY LIES, OUTRAGEOUS LIES, AND YES, MALICIOUS LIES, THE MORE HURTFUL THE BETTER. I BELIEVE TRUMP MAY BE ONE OF THAT SORT. READ THIS ARTICLE BY POLITICO ABOUT BARON TRUMP AND THE INTERNET PHENOMENON. DOES TRUMP SEE HIMSELF IN SOME SUCH FANTASTICAL LIGHT, PERHAPS? DID HE READ THESE BOOKS AS A CHILD? INTERESTING THOUGHT.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/07/baron-trump-novels-victorian-215689
BOOK CLUB
Trump Is the Star of These Bizarre Victorian Novels
And the Internet is losing its mind.
By JAIME FULLER October 07, 2017

The first thing to know about Baron Trump is that he can’t stop talking about his brain. While meeting with the Russian government, he talks about his glorious gray matter. As foreign women fall for him, he mentions his superior intelligence before casting them off. He once sued his tutors, alleging that they owed him money for everything he had taught them. He won.

This Trump does not exist, except in the dusty stacks of a library, digital archive or Reddit thread near you. He’s not a member of the first family, but instead the entirely fictional protagonist of a series of somewhat satirical Victorian novels for kids.


In July, a flock of internet detectives discovered the books. The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulger was published in 1889, and quickly forgotten thereafter, as was its sequel, Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Adventure. They are not timeless, and were quickly overshadowed by more compelling contemporary entries in the fanciful-travel-stories-for-children genre, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Wizard of Oz. Their author, lawyer Ingersoll Lockwood, appears in history mostly for his role in a financial tangle that occurred in the aftermath of an elderly woman's death on the railroad tracks near Philadelphia.

The most pertinent detail for modern readers, of course, is that his books are Trump-adjacent, a coincidence that somehow led a few web denizens to conclude that they were not a mere curiosity, but compelling proof that our president might just be a time traveler.

In these books, the young German protagonist, Wilhelm Heinrich Sebastian Von Troomp, better known as Baron Trump, travels around and under the globe with his dog Bulger, meeting residents of as-of-yet undiscovered lands before arriving back home at Castle Trump. Trump is precocious, restless, and prone to get in trouble, with a brain so big that his head has grown to twice the normal size—a fact that, as we have seen, he mentions often. No one tells Trump that his belief that he looks great in traditional Chinese garb—his uniform for both volumes—is unwarranted.

Lockwood’s books are spring break meets Carmen Sandiego meets Jabberwocky; at the start of each story, Trump sets out eager to find new civilizations—and manages to get distracted by more than one lady along the way. One of the first places he visits in Travels and Adventures is the land of the toothless and nearly weightless Wind Eaters, who inflate to beach-ball size after a meal. They are generous hosts until Trump starts a fire. The intrigued Wind Eaters draw near, and promptly explode after the air they have ingested expands thanks to the flames. As Captain Go-Whizz, “a sort of leader among them,” chases the murderer, the dog Bulger bites one of the Wind Eaters until he deflates like a punctured balloon. The pair eventually escape, leaving the briefly betrothed Princess Pouf-fah without a mate, and Chief Ztwish-Ztwish and Queen Phew-yoo with many a funeral to plan.

Cover-Image.jpg
This sequence of events—anthropological study, jilting, disaster, escape—is repeated for much of the two books, like when Trump meets the Man Hoppers, who have biker calves and puny T-rex arms, and soon runs away from their crying princess after first acquiring a book with centuries of priceless knowledge. A variation on this plot recurs when Trump visits the Round Bodies. (Perhaps a wandering life such as his was inevitable; as the book explains, he was born in the land of the Melodious Sneezers, whose alphabets consists of achoos of different length and tone.) Marvelous Underground Adventure is a slight twist on the theme, as all the societies are found deep below the dirt in Russia: the land of Transparent Folk, the ant people, and the Happy Forgetters, who dread remembering anything and will, like history, forget Baron Trump soon after he goes above ground.

Suzan Alteri, curator of the Baldwin Collection of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida, could only say that the titles are “really strange. I can’t think of a better word than that.” They are not well-known in the world of children’s books. Alteri hadn’t heard of them until I asked her for a comment.

One Baron Trump reviewer wrote in 1891, “The author labors through three hundred pages of fantastic and grotesque narrative, now and then striking a spark of wit; but the sparks emit little light and no warmth, and one has to fumble for the story.” That’s, if anything, too generous: There are plenty of things that were better left forgotten in the 19th century that people are determined to keep alive in 2017. Baron Trump seems to be one of them.

The Little Baron discharges his tutors. They leave the Baronial hall in high dudgeon. The three weary judges as they appeared at the close of my suit against my tutors.
"The Little Baron discharges his tutors. They leave the Baronial hall in high dudgeon." | "The three weary judges as they appeared at the close of my suit against my tutors."

And yet these strange little travelogues were unearthed, for the sole reason that they, like everything else that manages to inhale our attention spans lately, are about a Trump. Although his name almost mirrors the youngest of the Trump children (in Lockwood’s book, “Baron” is, of course, a title) the character seems eerily like an archetype modeled off the oldest of the clan, or at least an approximation of what he sees in the mirror. “The simple-minded peasantry,” the narrator notes in Marvelous Underground Adventure, “came to look upon him as half-bigwig and half-magician.” The young protagonist lives in a building called Trump—and did we mention that he is so smart that one might assume he went to Wharton? Like the real Trump, our fictional hero is skilled at inspiring nearly every person he meets to greet him with a personalized insult—including Little Man Lump, Little Man All Head, Man Tongs, Flip-Flop, Sir Pendulum Legs, stunted misshapen thing, and great-great-great-great grandson of a barbarian. The fictional Trump, too, greatly prefers familiar comfort foods to trying cuisine from elsewhere. The similarities do not extend much further; this Trump does not mind shaking hands and is willing to sleep somewhere other than Castle Trump.

But because nothing can simply be a coincidence nowadays, these weird tomes quickly became evidence to some wags that our president might be a time traveler. “There’s a very distinct chance,” one YouTube vlogger explained before unfurling his theory this summer, “that I am losing my goddamn mind right now. This cannot be real.” What if, he wondered, Nicola Tesla had shared time travel research with Trump’s MIT-grad uncle, setting off a chain of events that led to both the 2016 election and the publication of these books? “Although the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming, I still believe this is complete horseshit.” one commenter noted. Nevertheless, the video has more than 46,000 views.

Three portraits showing the wonderful growth of my brain.
"Three portraits showing the wonderful growth of my brain."

More proof was found on Reddit, where a user noticed that the villain in the Super Mario Bros. movie looks strangely like Donald Trump, and that he tries to “take over Earth by merging their parallel dimension with ours.” Biff Tannen, the casino-owning, bimbo-loving villain in the Back to the Future movies, of all things, acts like our current president. Add it all up, and it either equals time travel or definitive proof that evidence for anything can be found on the internet.

This is not the first time time travel and the presidency have been precariously linked. Last year, a man who claimed to be a time traveler, Seattle lawyer Andrew Basiago, made an improbable and little-noted White House bid. (He will allegedly win either the presidency or the vice-presidency before 2024.) Philosopher John Hospers, who won one electoral vote in 1972, once posed the question, “Is it logically possible to go back in time—say, to 3000 B.C., and help the Egyptians build the pyramids? We must be very careful about this one.” In 2003, an op-ed writer in Asheville wondered if George W. Bush was the first time-traveling president, and in 1989 Spy magazine even jokingly noted that there was something fishy about how Donald Trump, “a man of obviously limited abilities, became fabulously wealthy buying real estate in just the right places at just the right time.” Someone took the time to self-publish a book on Amazon about an alternate reality in which Al Gore won the presidency—and is a time traveler. Obsessing over the intricacies of messing with history is not limited to chief executives. For the July 1941 issue of Weird Tales, former Massachusetts state Senator Roger Sherman Hoar wrote a short story titled, “I Killed Hitler,” in which the narrator travels back to 1899 with the help of a mysterious swami and strangles young Adolph, only to find himself transformed into the dictator when he returns to the present.

princess-chrytallina.jpg
President Donald Trump, who tends to describe the world in lazy and ominous vagueness that allows people to give one sentence an endless number of interpretations, has been accused of predicting both 9/11 and the current tensions with North Korea. His Twitter feed seems to bend the rules of physics to its will, each of his tweets opposed by an equal and opposite sentiment from the recent past. It is freakishly easy to discover a Trump tweet for any occasion, many have noted, as if @realdonaldtrump were a visitor from the future sent to warn us about the real Donald Trump.

The connections go deeper, as they are wont to do in the dust bunnies under the cabinet of good conspiracy theories. Ingersoll also wrote a satirical novella titled 1900: Or the Last President, which begins on a Tuesday in November, “a terrible night for the great city of New York.” Anarchists and socialists have laid siege to a hotel on Fifth Avenue, screaming, “death to the rich man.” In a few months, the president appoints a man named Pence to the cabinet. America seems to be crumbling.

As the internet dug into the digitized underworld of out-of-print novels, the plot seemed to thicken. What if the author possessed the technology to jump through history, instead of our president? What if Lockwood were a modern-day Nostradamus? (He would be joining a veritable pantheon of prognosticators; a Google search of “modern-day Nostradamus” shows that Ann Coulter, Michael Moore, Bill O'Reilly and—yep—Donald Trump share this distinction.)

For others, the books are just an opportunity to “troll on a level we’ve never seen before,” as pro-Trump filmmaker Leigh Scott put it on an Indiegogo fundraising appeal. He has been trying to raise money to make a movie of the Lockwood’s novels, turning “Baron Trump into a fantasy icon like Harry Potter, Dorothy Gale or Alice,” and making the first “motion picture meme,” potentially subbing out the Lockwood books’ phrenology mentions with a guest appearance from Pepe the Frog. His least compelling argument for the Little Baron Trump movie is his belief that Hollywood would jump at the opportunity to option a book in the public domain about Little Chelsea Clinton, a theory that makes considerably less sense than the idea that Donald Trump is a time traveler.


There are, of course, simpler explanations for this sort of historical déjà vu. As Joseph Mazur writes in Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidence, “coincidences are omnipresent.” Only a few years after the Baron Trump books came out, a novella called Futility told the story of an unsinkable sinking ocean liner called the Titan. Jules Verne wrote about space cannons being launched in Florida nearly 100 years before the Kennedy Space Center was built. Some people are convinced that Tom Clancy predicted 9/11. And regarding Donald Trump, it truly isn’t that hard to find coincidences that you could interpret as foreshadowing 2017 in the 19th century. I spent less than five minutes searching “Donald Trump” in the Library of Congress’s newspaper archive and found a headline from 1897 that read, “President Trump Will Preside.”

The cherry-picked Lockwood titles might seem revelatory, but when seen among the rest of his work, he doesn’t look terribly prescient. Does the author’s decision to start a club called Union of the Titans, with a membership limited to men taller than 6’2”, reveal that he knew that several presidents, including the current one, would qualify? No, it does not. It is not clear what his many thoughts about George Washington’s lack of a love life say about the present. The Wonderful Deeds and Doings of Little Giant Boab and his Talking Raven Tabib and the Extraordinary Experiences of Little Captain Doppelkopp also do not seem to say much about the future.

"True portraits of Bulgur and me: I as I appeared in my oriental dress." | "Home again! This time for a good, long rest."

Besides, books always reveal far more about the place they were born than whatever future might await them. “We tend to think of these books as coming out of nowhere,” Alteri says, “but they relate to the history of the time.” The Baron Trump books would not exist without the children made hungry for adventure stories by the publication of Alice in Wonderland in 1865, or a country starting to look outward and meet new cultures, before deciding its own was supreme. The reviews of the book see them as a charming, fun-size version of Baron Munchausen’s adventures, which explains Trump’s title, his destination of Russia and the strangeness of the territories he visits. Lockwood’s short story The Last President is steeped in paranoia over the gold standard and fears about what would happen to a country still cleft by civil war. If anything, Lockwood’s works are disquieting because their mood of anxiety and reprisal of old battles feels so familiar.

You don’t need to believe in time travel to worry about that, though. Our own incarnation of Trump taught us that lesson all on his own.