A few days ago, my imagination converged in a disturbing way with Donald Trump’s. After the president posted an AI-generated video of himself piloting a fighter plane and releasing a flood of excrement onto thousands of demonstrators below, I heard from several people who had read my new novel, The Emergency, which will be published next month. They pointed out the resemblance of the video to a scene, near the novel’s end, in which human feces become a primitive weapon of civil war. Somewhere down in the dark, well below conscious thought, I had managed to intuit just how far the demonic urge in American politics to violate every taboo might go. Or perhaps the White House had gotten hold of an Advance Reader’s Copy.

The uncanny meld between my mind and Trump’s was a little sickening. It was as if this master conjurer had pulled a trick on me, saying: I’ll always beat you. I can always go lower. Back in the early ’60s—a time we now think of as relatively sane—Philip Roth observed: “You can’t write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.” But I wasn’t trying to compete with reality. I didn’t write a novel to mirror or predict the course of American politics—if anything, the opposite. I wanted to get away from reality.

For a quarter century, I’ve been a journalist, and to be honest, I had begun to lose faith in my trade. The year 2021 marked a turning point in the history of facts: from poor health to near death. The insurrection of January 6 happened before our eyes and produced about three news cycles of almost universal horror before that consensus began to succumb to the assault of partisan revisions and elisions, lies, alternative facts, and conspiracy t