I don’t think Tom Wolfe has ever written a profile of a politician. Now that he has turned to fiction, it is unlikely that he will ever do so. What would a Wolfean political profile look like? If it weren’t for National Review’s Kevin Williamson, we might never know. In the current (August 10) issue, Kevin writes about Trump in the feature article “The art of the grotesque.” NR has now placed the article online under the title “Donald Trump and the American id.”
If you are a Trump fan, you will want to skip it; Kevin is quite harsh about Trump’s current admirers. If you have a curious or an irreverent attitude to him, however, you will probably both learn something from it and enjoy it. I think you will also get some idea of what Wolfe would have done in his heyday with a colorful celebrity/politician in the aspirational mode, though Wolfe would likely have done it with more italics and exclamation points.
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