The most audacious satire of them all
The most audacious satire of them all
Narrative Architecture #3: Mark Doten's "Trump Sky Alpha" (it's funny I promise)
This is the third chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Mark Doten’s “button-pushing” dystopian satire, Trump Sky Alpha—a novel in which a fictionalized President Trump presides over a fleet of world-traveling zeppelins before ushering in a nuclear holocaust (Gray Wolf Books, 2019). Somehow, the book is pretty damn funny and illuminating about our current political predicament.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
“It’s a commonplace that no one could satirize Trump,” novelist Edmund White wrote in his dust jacket praise of Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha, adding, “But Mark Doten has done it in this scathing, hectic portrayal of the end of the world.” To this I would agree. Doten’s novel succeeds at satirizing the most difficult subject in American history: the president whose political career was fueled on the recurring schadenfreude of his ludicrous bigotry, corruption, and incompetence.
Trump Sky Alpha’s story, an expansion of a short story Doten published in Guernica, is built around a slightly-more dystopian reality than the one we have in fact occupied: a world in which (a fictionalized version of) Donald J. Trump is not only president, but one where he operates a fleet of zeppelins that fly around the world and broadcast his speeches and tweets. (These airships are named Trump Sky Alpha, Trump Sky Beta, etc.) In the midst of an international crisis, Trump pushes the nuclear button, and the existing world order is destroyed. In the shattered remains of the USA (apparently the new president is, per chain-of-succession rules, a surviving Steve Mnuchin), a journalist named Rachel is hired by the nationalized New York Times to write a feature story about Internet memes in the time of Trump. Her investigation leads her into a confrontation with the hacker-terrorist Birdcrash, responsible for the crisis which instigated Trump’s Armageddon fiasco.
Rachel’s story is the least essential component of Trump Sky Alpha. Though her story was actually the original part of the short story upon which the novel is based, in the novel her plot seems to exist only to join two tantalizing sections of the novel—the whirlwind, stream of consciousness opening which strives to document the moments just before Trump pushes the nuclear button—and the climactic chapter, a speech entirely in Trump’s voice. Though it is a strategy that many have attempted, perhaps Doten comes closest to capturing and making fun of the collective insanity of the Trump era.
The opening of Trump Sky Alpha depicts the last moments of American history, just as Trump decides to do the unthinkable. This opening section, consisting of four stream-of-consciousness, run-on sentences which comprise 21 pages, is flashy. It is not sustainable. And perhaps that’s the point. That in these pages, we see a society so swamped in the 24-hour news cycle that no one can process what is happening or really understand how quickly Trump hijacked American society. Doten’s book is hard to excerpt, since every Trump-voiced section evokes Trump’s peripatetic rhetoric. As with the real person, the fictional Trump mentions a detail, forgets about it, and comes back to it in a more shocking and unpleasant way than readers might expect.
In a telling example, Doten’s narrator chronicles how the demographics of the passengers on the Trump blimps gradually changed from GOP opportunists to the particular brand of Trump ilk: models, out-of-work actors, etc. (paralleling the evolution of rotating cast of horror-show PR in his communications corps, from Sean Spicer, to Scaramucci, to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Hope Hicks, and Kaileigh McEnany, as the careerist GOP class was gradually replaced by increasingly model-esque caricatures of Trump’s childish and antiquated view of international relations):
…the glamorous passengers who filled the flights were increasingly good-looking, they were attentive and well groomed, Look at these crowds, Trump would say, beaming, just look at all of you beautiful people, could you ever imagine anything more beautiful than this, and the passengers were indeed becoming more and more beautiful, it was often models now, and out-of-work actors, and then came another dynamic shift, the move to mix passengers with “modern dress” and “traditional garb,” this custom had started the day Trump cheerfully complimented the mix of modern dress and traditional garb in a flight on the middle East, the thawbs and agals of the men, then wondered out loud the next week why more countries didn’t do that, both modern dress and traditional garb, it really gave him a kick, he loved a good traditional garb, and he pointed out a pair of Indian women in saris…” (16)
Though Doten’s sentences are run-ons, the commas in lieu of periods add to the frenzy of the passage, of the maddening way an inane Trump comment is taken seriously by the media and official policy is thereafter based around a comment clearly improvised (“he loved a good traditional garb,” / so they started wearing saris).
By the end of this section, after Ivanka has vomited on live television, and Pence has been smacked down by Trump after a bid to take over in the (largely unspecified) moment of crisis, Trump jumps on Trump Sky Alpha and heads for Trump Tower New York, where a band of rioters is breaking through the barricade and marching for Trump’s rooftop zeppelin-pad. As the nuclear missiles start skirting the air, Doten writes:
…there was a humming awareness, a panic that they were watching, just watching, the world end, and wasn’t there something they could do, but it was too many, there were too many different strategies, there were too many shouts, and too many sudden silences, there were murmurs and side conversations and cries for consensus, but they were all locked into their own roles, each of the individual human animals that had been brought into that room by life and chance and skill and theft, they were in the room, just there, a small mass of people had no idea what to do, individually or collectively, and Trump had already announced it, the big option, right there on the livestream, to the whole world, to all our allies and enemies, and around the world protocols and contingency plans were going into effect, there just wasn’t any time, just no way to wiggle out of the moment, to say sorry, to say stop, to say we fucked up, nothing to be done, there might have been a chance, to resist, there must have been, but that moment was lost somewhere, it had slipped away—where had all the little moments been? there must have been so many chances to not be where we were—but this is where we were…. (21-22)
So much of living in the Trump era was [was?] spent trying to understand when the adults in the room allowed Trump to happen. How the GOP, Fox News, and the liberal media caved to his spectacle, giving him the airtime to say more and more outrageous things, how the sheer accumulation of scandals inoculates him to the backlash of them. This moment which Doten chronicles is literally every day of real-life Trump, anticipating the indignities of January 6, 2021 and the figure’s many post-presidency indictments (while Doten was writing before January 6!). In the novel, Doten heightens the Trump spectacle to Def-Con-1, and correctly predicts the lack of willpower by those remaining in power to do anything.
At one point in this section, Trump’s blimp is attacked and apparently destroyed, and the narrator’s collective voice declares:
everyone was watching an instant that seemed to float, the whole world floating, in that suspended moment, the death of Trump, the end of the Trump era, finally, and would we be able to recover… but as the fireball dissipated, as the smoke cleared, it was still chugging along, the aircraft, and here he was, Trump, he was still there, still going, no longer piloting a full zeppelin…his face like a Creamsicle in the dirt… (20)
Trump’s miraculous survival is a hilariously raucous moment in TSA as it apes how he has faced so many scandals which would doom any normal politician and emerged unscathed with his cartoon-like “Creamsicle” face.
Which brings me to Trump Sky Alpha’s escalating flourishes toward the end of the novel—in particular, an extended passage said to be Trump’s final speech aboard Trump Sky Alpha before the president’s blimp is shot down near Mar-A-Lago. In Doten’s construction, we start off with typical Trumpisms about “cyber” and “the generals” before it dovetails into a horrific conversation about the “beautiful” (268) nuclear codes he has access to:
I really need to thank the generals—can I take a moment to thank the generals? These generals we’ve got, they are amazing, and they’ve said to me, We’re so glad it’s you. In every single branch of the military we have, we have these generals, and what a job they are doing. What an amazing job. And what they’re saying to me is that this is a very small little bomb that’s being used over there, a small nuclear device, and what we used, and can use, it’s so much bigger. Would I be up here if it was any real danger? You run down the line with what’s happening in these places around the world. These are almost all very small little bombs, and even the ones that are a little more serious, even those, ours are much, much bigger, so people can understand that we are in control of the situation, and everything that’s happened in these last hours, well, we are going to have a very, very successful number of days. (248)
This passage completely embodies what Trump would say in this situation. As the coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated, he would play down the threat by relying on his usual rhetorical crutches (“the generals”).
But apparently Doten decided that just a mere aping of Trump’s language would not suit the dramatic and thematic needs of the novel. So Doten’s Trump slides into surreal language, saying things the real Trump would never (or is incapable of saying), but honing into his unhealthy obsession with Ivanka and the artifice of gold: “A father could cut open his daughter or really just open a door in her side and find the beauty inside, and find that everything is gold in there, like clockwork” (262). This metaphor, horrifying on many levels, is expanded in the following extension of the gold motif:
“I dreamed of Heron of Alexandria, who boiled his daughter’s body and chopped up the corpse into little bits, and he made a fabulous new family of clockwork and bone and gold, and set it free in the world, and that family, that family has been making their way ever since, it’s true, through all the centuries.” (264)
The real Trump, of course, would not know Heron of Alexandria from Frederick Douglass. But in this metaphor Doten assigns Trump as a sort of Midas figure (and avoiding Midas because the comparison would be too on-the-nose). It’s hard to know what to make of this gold-and clockwork motif, except that it demonstrates Doten reaching for the poetic in a figure incapable of poetry. Still, Doten’s mastery of Trump’s language and his insight into the condition of the Trump era make his satire successful. His novel shows the possibility that you can combine satire with glimpses of a poetic world—a flash of understanding that can help illuminate some of the secrets to the chaos that have defined our time.
References
Mark Doten. Trump Sky Alpha: A Novel (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2019).