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By Pamela Newton

For those of us feeling befuddled and dismayed by the current state of American political leadership, is it more comforting or more painful to realize that the British novelist Anthony Trollope wrote a precise handbook to Donald Trump 145 years ago? The comfort comes from the idea that we are not the only ones in history to be subjected to such a leader—although, in this case, Trump’s predecessor is a fictional character, Augustus Melmotte, whose exploits are at the center of Trollope’s 1875 novel The Way We Live Now. The pain comes from the idea that maybe we could have prevented Trump’s rise if we were paying better attention to Victorian literature. Who knew?

Either way, it’s a little depressing to realize that “the way we live now” is still the way we live now. Trollope’s novel details the rise of a crook, a liar, a corrupt businessman and real-estate dealer, who essentially invents a phony version of himself and sells it to the British voters, getting elected to Parliament in spite of his total lack of political knowledge, intelligence, or decorum. What he does have is personal dynamism and a lot of money—although his wealth turns out to be another one of his lies. He manages to find support among the working class, in spite of being glaringly not one of them, and is a member of the Conservative party to boot, who traditionally haven’t looked out much for the working class.

His political cronies see that people are drawn to Melmotte and so they prop him up, even if they’re disgusted by the man revealed to them behind the scenes. They go to great lengths to hide his shady financial past and bury his reputation, sticking to one story about him in public and another in private when they conspire together. All of this is achieved in an atmosphere of petty political rivalries and factional media coverage (in this case, warring newspapers). You can open to almost any point in this 800-page tome and find a description of a political situation that looks uncannily like the United States today.

I read the novel during a month-long trip visiting friends in Europe in the summer of 2018. My European friends kept commiserating with me about my president, wondering how it could have happened and what people were going to do about it now, and I kept pointing to this big 19th-century novel I was lugging around with me, saying, “It’s all in here! The whole thing is predicted in here!” They gave me curious smiles and went back to their online news platforms. I felt like some modern Cassandra with an oracle in my pocket that no one else believed in. I was left to marvel privately at Trollope’s prescience and to try to understand his message.

So is there anything we could have learned if we had been reading Trollope more closely during the 2016 presidential campaign? And is there anything we can still learn by doing what English teachers tell us to do and go back to the text? Here are seven lessons I’ve culled from Trollope, drawn from seven excerpts from the novel (though I could easily cite 70 more), some of which it’s simply too late to heed. Sigh. Perhaps future generations can do a better job with their Trollope the next time a Melmottian figure begins to rear its ugly head. Or perhaps we can learn something in time for the 2020 vote.

1. “But his speaking in public did not of itself inspire much confidence. He had very little to say when he attempted to explain the political principles on which he intended to act. After a little he confined himself to remarks on the personal attacks made on him by the other side.…Let them prove it. He defied them to prove it.…Such accusations as these were mere lies till they were proved.…As soon as the election was over all speakers and writers would be indicted for libel.”

The Lesson: Beware politicians who don’t talk of politics but rather of personal vendettas. If public figures are obsessed with the slights against them, it indicates both that they have nothing of substance to talk about and that they may be petty egomaniacs. Melmotte’s/Trump’s attacks on others and litigious self-defenses are pure distraction and deflection, and in both cases their insistence that everything negative said about them is a lie should be, for voters, a flaming red flag.

2. “Lord Alfred had been much afflicted that morning. He had spent some hours with his friend, either going about the borough in the open carriage, or standing just behind him at meetings, or sitting close to him in committee-rooms—and had been nauseated with Melmotte.…But he was true to his party. Melmotte was not the first vulgar man whom the Conservatives had taken by the hand, and patted on the back, and told that he was a god.”

The Lesson: Politicians in positions of power will do almost anything to maintain their power—or at least their party’s power—even if it means getting behind someone they fundamentally don’t believe in or don’t even like. In fact, it works best with someone spineless and simple enough to believe the flattery of his party leaders, because then he can be more easily used as a kind of pawn or puppet to achieve their ends. Needless to say, these ends probably have little to do with the welfare of the people being governed.

3. “Rumours, therefore, of his past frauds, rumour also as to the instability of his presumed fortune, were as current as those which declared him to be by far the richest man in England.”

The Lesson: Trump isn’t as rich as he says he is. The rumors (or rumours) are true.

4. “It was supposed that the working classes were in favour of Melmotte, partly from their love of a man who spends a great deal of money, partly from the belief that he was being ill-used—partly, no doubt, from the occult sympathy which is felt for crime, when the crime committed is injurious to the upper classes.”

The Lesson: When Trump was campaigning, members of our country’s working class were (rightfully) angry at Washington, perceiving that they had been left out of too many political equations and that they were still stuck at the bottom of the social ladder. As others have noted over the last few years, an angry and disenfranchised population is a vulnerable one—vulnerable especially to ideologues and strongmen, and to the idea that that they are pulling one over on those who have oppressed them. See Germany in the 1930s for another historical precedent.

5. “You think Melmotte will turn out a failure.”

“A failure! Of course he’s a failure, whether rich or poor—a miserable imposition, a hollow vulgar fraud from beginning to end—too insignificant for you and me to talk of, were it not that his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age.”

The Lesson: The problem is not ultimately one man but rather the way that man is a sign of the times, of the culture and the moment that produced him. The significance of a figure like Trump is that he shows us the worst in ourselves—that he embodies the zeitgeist, or perhaps the zeitgeist chewed up and spit back in our faces. Trump didn’t give rise to a degenerate age; a degenerate age gave rise to Trump.

6. “Fraud and dishonesty had been the very principle of his life, and had so become a part of his blood and bones that even in this extremity of his misery he made no question within himself as to his right judgment in regard to them. Not to cheat, not to be a scoundrel, not to live more luxuriously than others by cheating more brilliantly, was a condition of things to which his mind had never turned itself.”

The Lesson: Even when Melmotte has been brought low, has been exposed as a liar and a cheat, he only looks for ways to get out of his predicament and never has any kind of moral or personal reckoning. A show of loss of faith in a public figure, like, say, an impeachment trial, does nothing to humble such a man or cause even a moment of self-reflection—it only gives him a trickier maze to have to find his way out of. In other words, don’t hold out hope for redemption. Trump will not change.

7. “Perhaps the most remarkable circumstance in the career of this remarkable man was the fact that he came almost to believe in himself.”

The Lesson: This one is pretty self-explanatory. But the hidden lesson in it, I think, is that the most dangerous fraud, the one who can never be trusted, is the one who has forgotten he’s a fraud. He lies habitually and with abandon, as easily as breathing, because he has long ago lost touch with what the truth even is.

We are nearing—I hope and also feel in my bones—the end of the Trump era, but it is still unknown whether Trump’s fate will mirror his fictional doppelganger’s. In the end of Trollope’s novel, Melmotte is thoroughly disgraced, all his sins coming to light in quick succession, and his elaborate schemes, all woven together in a web of mutually connected deceit, unraveling around him. In a final act of desperation—spoiler alert!—he downs a vial of poison.

I don’t wish suicide on Trump; I only wish that the political suicide he is committing every day would finally take effect. But the one quality of Trump’s that doesn’t seem to be reflected in Melmotte is his miraculous invincibility, his vulcanized shell that somehow refracts every act or word or deed that should weaken him politically—including, or even especially, the ones launched by himself—and leaves him somehow unscathed. Maybe his closest advisors are reading Trollope, too, and they’re heeding a different set of lessons. (There is no chance Trump is reading Trollope, in spite of the fact that he appears to be modeling himself on it.)

But I also remind myself that Melmotte seemed to be getting away with everything right until the bitter end. Perhaps this means there’s a chance that Trump, too, is headed for an ignoble end, befitting his character. (Let’s just hope he belly flops before the 2020 election.) Just before he poisons himself, when his reputation and political career are ruined, Melmotte goes out with a bang by showing up drunk in Parliament—“even he, with all the world now gone from him…was able to spend the last moments of his freedom in making a reputation at any rate for audacity”—and then, in a final move that can only be called Trumpian, stands up to make a speech, but “he had forgotten in his audacity that words are needed for the making of a speech,” and he remains silent for several moments, before falling on top of another Conservative party member. Enough said.

Pamela Newton has written about books, theater, politics, and personal history for publications including American Theatre, The New York Times Magazine, Time Out New York, O the Oprah Magazine, and the Huffington Post. She teaches writing at Yale University and Cooper Union.