NOVEMBER 2024

For this pre–Election Day issue of the newsletter, we’ve got an update on my current book project, a few thoughts about the presidential election, and some publication news.

Tristan 4 America

My new book, Tristan 4 America, is, fittingly and coincidentally, set in the 2024 presidential election, as my friends in the literary world learned in my September “writers-only” newsletter. In short, the book is a progressive manifesto woven into a tense political thriller. As I explained in that September newsletter, I actually got some immediate interest from a very fine publisher—who, alas, informed me a few weeks ago that they had decided to pass on the book. This has left me doing three things:

The first is to consider self-publishing the book. As all the published authors out there know, the process of securing a contract with a publisher, even a small, independent publisher, and then working through the publication process, takes many months. Since one of the huge advantages of self-publishing is that it takes much, much less time, I’m researching that option now.

Second, I’m awaiting a response from another publisher to whom I submitted the manuscript, and I’ll be submitting it to more. The immediate interest the first time around has given me confidence that the book might find a home, and I will always prefer traditional publishing to self-publishing, so fingers crossed!

And third, I’ve begun work on the sequel to the book, which I see as the first in a three-part series. That, of course, is not only the fun part, but in fact the whole reason we writers do this writing thing—that is, to write!

Anyway, stay tuned for more on all of that in future newsletters.

Donald Trump: Useful Idiot

This quick commentary on the 2024 election isn’t about polls or issues or garbage trucks. It’s about something that has been eating at me for many months as I’ve observed this maddeningly close contest.

One of the things about Donald Trump that is most confounding to me is the fact that he is a tabula rasa for many voters. Rather than thinking of him as an actual presidential candidate with concrete ideas and plans (as they would for Kamala Harris, or any Democrat, for that matter), they see him as little more than an avatar onto which they can project their deepest personal frustrations and aspirations.

Trump proclaims, “On Day One, I will begin the largest forced deportation program in the history of our country,” and these voters say, There’s no way he’ll actually do that.

He says, “I will impose whatever tariffs are required, 100%, 200%...1,000%...,” and these voters say, He’s not serious, and besides, they won’t let him do that.

Setting aside the fact that no, there is no magical “they” who will constrain a demagogue, and yes, he actually will do those things, the irony of ironies is, the reason voters are able to use Trump as an avatar this way is that Trump is a constant, prodigious liar. Nothing he ever says is ever meant to be the truth because he literally never speaks the truth, and he never has. Because there is no semblance of truth, and no presumption of truth of any kind by anyone listening to Trump, even voters who don’t harbor Trump’s racist, misogynistic, xenophobic passions are able to convince themselves that he will do what they want him to do, that he will bring down the prices of milk and gas, that he will improve their lot in life and keep them safe, that he will somehow outfox the billionaire class and those conniving, antagonistic foreign leaders. They’ve long since stopped listening to or watching Donald Trump because doing so might shake them from their painstakingly constructed fantasy. To use a favorite Trumpism: Everyone knows Donald Trump is lazy, he’s stupid, he has no idea how the government works, and he cares only about himself and his financial fortunes, with no regard for anyone else—not you, not his fellow Republicans, not his advisors or lawyers or staff, not even his own family.

We can say all this until we’re blue in the face, we can scream it from the rooftops, but for many voters, it won’t matter. Because Donald Trump is actually just a bit player in their decision to vote for Donald Trump. Their decision is rooted in their own general disaffection, dissatisfaction, and desperation, much of it brought on by flaws in the system and all of it inflamed by Trump, his surrogates, and the antigovernment GOP. And that is the true horror of this election for me: the purveyors of paranoia and apathy have been at it for 40 years now, and they seem to have finally found their useful idiot. Heaven help us if he were to actually win.

Publication News

Happily, I do have a couple of pieces hitting the interwebs in the coming weeks and months: Later this month, I have a personal essay coming out in the online journal Merion West. It’s titled “Winds of the Great Shame,” and it’s an exploration of the various dimensions, good and bad, of my Irish Catholic heritage, prompted by my mother’s death in 2019 and by her well-worn copy of Leon Uris’s 1976 novel Trinity. And in January, I have a review of Ellen Birkett-Morris’s wonderful novel Beware the Tall Grass coming out in the Heavy Feather Review. If you miss either of these, fear not, I will post links in upcoming newsletters.

Now, if you haven’t already done so, get out and vote!

In case you missed them, previous editions of the Bruce Overby newsletter can be viewed online here.

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