The Windrip Prophecy

by David Benjamin

“An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks—it just confuses them—to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people.” —Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, Zero Hour

“I love the poorly educated.” —Donald Trump

MADISON, Wis.—While re-reading It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopia of an America seduced by the homespun fascism of a malignant narcissist named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, I kept noticing parallels—prophecies?—between the novel’s “Buzzocracy” and the recurring nightmare of the Orange Jesus in the White House. But I wondered if I was straining to find similarities.

After all, Lewis spared Windrip the aggravation of federal judges who’ve been a sort of legal-eagle RAF, Spitfiring Trump’s blitzkrieg of kingly bombshells. But then, on page 64, a fictional Oval Office proclamation from Buzz forecasts the judicial prostration of Donald Trump’s sextet of Court jesters:

“… the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President … ”

In other words, Trump v. United States.

There has never been a Speaker of the House more craven than Mike Johnson, who attained his gavel by agreeing to play dead if a single Trump loyalist demands a vote for his removal. Or, as Buzz put the case, “The Executive has got to have a free hand and move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths … ”

In other words, One Big Beautiful Bill.

Trump and Buzz both put women on a pedestal—so they can look up their skirts. They’re shameless philanderers whose wives are accessories, shuffled into the background and compelled to take a vow of silence. Buzz’s aide, Lee Sarason, Machiavellian forebear to Trump whisperer Stephen Miller, puts this arrangement bluntly: “No potential dictator ought to have a visible wife.”

Trump, of course, has admitted to being a predator, his pussy-grabbing boast validated by the $5 million verdict against him for sexual abusing (the judge called it rape) E. Jean Carroll. This makes it hard to explain the adulation for Trump among evangelical Christian gals. They overlook his page-one infidelities, his beauty-pageant voyeurism, his porn-star jones and his personal friendship with at least three convicted pedophiles (Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and the oft-overlooked George Nader) because he’s all for Motherhood. Trump has proposed a replenishment of white America by giving out a $5,000 “baby bonus” for every birth and a “motherhood medal” for women with six or more children.

Buzz codifies this “Peace Through Joy” ideal in the twelfth tenet of his “Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Man”—or, in today’s context, “Donald Trump’s Feminist Manifesto.” It reads, “All women now employed shall, as rapidly as possible, except in such peculiarly feminine spheres of activity as nursing and beauty parlors, be assisted in returning to their incomparably sacred duties as home-makers and as mothers of strong, honorable future Citizens.”

Berzelius Windrip, a man more eloquent than Trump because he was written into existence by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, explained concisely why Donald glories in reneging on treaties and imposing tariffs willy-nilly—on France, Japan, China, icebergs and penguins. Quoth Buzz: “I guess some of the things I said … about the United States only wanting peace and freedom from all foreign entanglements. No! What I’d really like us to do would be to come out and tell the whole world: ‘Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own excuse!’”

Among the most vivid Trump parallels in It Can’t Happen Here is the confusion of he novel’s protagonist, a smalltown journalist named Doremus Jessup. He’s mystified by Buzz’s “power of bewitching large audiences. [He] was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store …”

On stage, in a Tilt-a-Whirl stream of consciousness, Buzz would “coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”

Familiar?

Trump’s power of mass delusion was never more manifest than in a 2024 campaign speech at the right-wing CPAC conference, during which he called his own Republican party a rabble of “freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots and fools.” He declared his first term a “miracle” and brought the audience into his orbit by reciting a litany of the enemies of the Common Man: “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state … We will cast out the communists … We will beat the Democrats. We will rout the fake news media … and we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all … In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

This was a cult-service sermon, addressed to acolytes who had fortified their contempt for politics with religious fervor for a self-made, self-proclaimed messiah. Sinclair Lewis called Buzz (or Trump) a “Professional Common Man.”

“Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man … But he was the Common Man twenty times magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised their hands to him in worship.”

In other words, no one expected him to do anything. They just wanted him to be.

Safely ensconced in the White House, Buzz—like Trump—forsook his erstwhile populism and preferred to caucus with the high and the mighty, the servile and shameless. Windrip’s army of storm troopers, the protectors of his fragile glory, were called Minute Men. Trump’s forces, decked out in body armor, balaclavas, nightsticks and AR-15s, don’t have a cute nickname, just a dozen meaningless acronyms that they seem to trade around for fun—ICE, DHS, FBI—or, in most cases, no”distinguishing characteristics.”

No IDs, no logos, no faces or tattoos, no stinking badges.

Like the poster boy for the Trump regime of “forcible disappearance,” Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a man as “common” as any American neighbor has ever been—Doremus is eventually yanked into a concentration camp. He’s beaten, starved and blackmailed into playing along—lest he lose his wife, family, home, life—meekly agreeing that Buzz’s America is “a proud, rich land again.”

Familiar?

Whether Buzz or Donald, fiction or reality, the happy ending is a self-ordained President for Life gazing imperiously at a polity of Doremus Jessups, who “like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous to go willingly to exile or dungeon or chopping block—particularly when they ‘had wives and families to support.’”

Wait for it.