Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows that Stephen King is one of my favorite authors. And one of my very favorite books from King is “The Dead Zone.”
Originally, I saw the movie as a kid, or possibly as a teenager. Years and years later, as an adult, I read the book, which I have not read twice, and loved both times. There is just so much about the novel to love. A man, Johnny Smith, who can read the future by touching people, an ability he only gets after surviving a horrific accident. And the main villain that he realizes may become the next Hitler is a politician with a very unconventional style that appeals to people. This is Greg Stillson, and during one of Stillson’s unorthodox political rallies that has received so much attention, Johnny manages to shake Stillson’s hand, and sees a bleak future, when Stillson has risen to the presidency, and starts World War III.
For the rest of the novel (and the movie), Johnny wrestles with what to do with this knowledge, and he asks his most trusted friend, his doctor, a Holocaust survivor, about what he would do if he knew about Adolf Hitler before World War II broke out. The doctor answers that he would have no choice but to kill him. And that is exactly what Johnny decides he needs to do, which is what he sets out to do towards the end of the novel.
It is an excellent and thought-provoking book, on many levels. The original move was well done, as well. Later, it became a television series, and while I watched the first few episodes or so, I cannot claim that I am overly familiar with the series. Maybe I should watch it in it’s entirety. But honestly, there is no recollection of a Greg Stillson in that series in my memory, although they surely had one.
But I digress. The fictional novel sounded an alarm to the very real possibility that a populist nutcase might someday rise of the White House. Perhaps at the time (the novel came out in the late seventies), that might have then seemed like a remote possibility. However, in 2016, we saw the rise of an all too real extremist candidate who indeed was elected to the nation’s highest office. That man was Donald Trump, and he reminded many people – including yours truly – of King’s fictional Greg Stillson.
In the novel, and the movie, Stillson is dismissed as a ridiculous figure, at least at first. They take him as a joke initially. He says crazy stuff that nobody would believe…until he generates quite an enthusiastic following. People at his rallies cry out his name, repeatedly.
“Still….son! Still….son!”
And in real life, Donald Trump reminded a lot of people of the seemingly improbable rise of Greg Stillson.
Stillson is clearly crazy in the novel. We learn that right away, when we are first introduced to him. He is a salesman somewhere in the Midwest, and he is selling Bibles. He comes to an empty house, where he is attacked by a dog, but he repeatedly kicks him and, in a fit of rage, ultimately beats the dog to death. Then, he tries to regain some kind of self-control after this, and tries to convince himself that he is not crazy. This is our introduction to Greg Stillson.
Most of us were introduced to Donald Trump decades before he ever first ran for the White House for the 2012 presidential campaign, something that Trump himself clearly wanted people to forget, claiming that 2016 was his first (and successful) run for the White House. But Trump did run back then, and he bowed out quickly, his campaign fizzling incredibly quickly. Perhaps his long established reputation as a scam artist and shameless opportunist preceded him. When he tried again, announcing his candidacy in 2015, he descended from his fancy escalator at Trump Tower in Manhattan, claimed that he was always greedy (repeating this word, emphasizing it) before promising that he would now be greedy in the interests of the country, and attacking Mexican immigrants in the country as rapists and criminals, generating an enormous amount of attention. Before long, Trump became like a circus sideshow, and Trump rallies drew, among others, the kinds of dregs of society that many found alarming.
Like Stillson, though, Trump was dismissed as a ridiculous figure. He was seen as a joke, and not taken seriously. I myself have long believed that someone like Stillson would be coming, would win the White House at some point. Admittedly, I also dismissed Trump at first, because he seemed like such a joke. Also, it seemed improbable at the time that a shamelessly selfish and narcissistic, shallow New York billionaire who was obviously not particularly Christian would win such loyal support from Christian Evangelicals. But that is exactly what happened, even if it still sometimes is shocking to think about.
King describes his character Stillson in the video below. He says that “he’s a huckster from the word ‘go’.” Does that not also describe Donald Trump with eerie accuracy? King goes on, suggesting that “in that sense, he’s got a lot of that Trump genome in him.”
There are other similarities between Stillson and Trump. Bikers surround Stillson, and staunchly support him. Protect him. Again, does this not remind you of somebody in real life these days?
Stillson promises that when he gets to Washington, “we” (he always identifies himself with his supporters and uses the collective “we”) will have a chance to throw the bums out, and there would be a roar of approval from the crowd.
Sound familiar?
A few decades later, Trump virtually promised the same, claiming that “we” are going to drain the swamp. Whenever Trump said this, he received a huge ovation. The fact that Trump is an elitist billionaire who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and has never really had to work hard a single day in his life is something that he successfully makes them conveniently forget. Trump has managed to build a myth about himself, that he took what I heard some people refer to as a “small loan” of one million dollars (at the time, of course, a million dollars was pretty much a fortune), even though the reality is that he received a whole lot more than that from his father. This mythology has it that Trump is simply a genius, that he has the Midas touch, having turned a modest loan into a financial empire. And if he can do that for himself, this unspoken myth that so many believe implies, then just imagine what he can and will do for the country!
Frankly, common sense would tell you that Trump received a whole lot more help than merely some “small loan” of one million. First of all, again, one million is a lot of money today, but it was an absolute fortune for back when Trump allegedly received it. In fact, though, reporters have discovered since that Trump was receiving an income of $200,000 per year at age three, before he probably even knew how to walk and talk properly. Plus, he had his father’s business connections. Also, that family name of Trump. And perhaps to his credit, the spoiled Trump had a sense of entitlement that made him, indeed, shrewd, and he did capably manipulate people enough that he was able to build a financial empire. The fact that he did so, and gained a reputation as a con artist also seems to be something that he and his loyal supporters all too conveniently overlook. Somehow, his supporters were convinced that he somehow could relate to them, that he understood them, and vice versa.
King says that he did not necessarily predict the rise of Donald Trump while writing the Dead Zone. However, he says that he does understand that the American people “have always had a real attraction to outsiders with the same kind of right-wing, America-first policy. And if that reminds people of Trump, I can’t be sorry because it was a character that I wrote. It was a boogeyman of mine, and I never wanted to see him actually on the American political scene. But we do seem to have a Greg Stillson as President of the United States.”
Now, fast-forward to 2020. Trump is the incumbent president. He came fairly lose to starting World War III, arguably, on a few occasions. He played fast and loose with the threat of the nuclear button, boasting that he has a bigger button than Kim Jung-un, whom Trump nicknamed “little Rocket Man,” and that his works. He threatened to wipe North Korea off the map at one point. Later, he made the same vague threat towards Iran. Then, earlier this year, he launched what many around the world viewed as an attack on Iran, when he assassinated an Iranian official on Iraqi soil, angering both nations. There was outrage at his recklessness around the world, and his actions were universally condemned.
But remember, 2020 is an election year. Perhaps by sheer luck, we managed to avoid a catastrophic war with this man in charge. Now, we have a chance to throw this bum out of office, after enduring now almost four years of what can only be described as a disastrous presidency. There was a global pandemic, but the United States has far and away the most confirmed cases of, as well as deaths from, Covid-19. The economy crashed, and tens of millions of Americans are now out of work, with most of those joining the numbers (which had already numbered in the tens of millions) who cannot afford healthcare. There have been riots due to racial tensions, and Trump has not only done nothing to calm those tensions, but in fact, he has actively made matters far worse. By an overwhelming number, most Americans believe that Trump has actively done more to divide the country, rather than unite it. In fact, most Americans agree that the country is going in the wrong direction, and many fear that we are losing our very democracy. Many of those people also feel that Trump has accelerated this erosion of democracy like no one else probably could have done in the past few years.
We have had four years of Trump, and we know what he is about now. We know that the past four years have not been some magical time of stunning success. He has not delivered on his promise of winning to the point that we would get tired of winning in this country, and that he would refuse to stop winning even when people begged him. Frankly, I still believe that he simply misread the teleprompter, that it was supposed to read “whining.” Because indeed, there has been a whole lot of whining on a whole lot of fronts with him. And sure enough, even when people keep urging him to stop all of the whining, he just flat out refuses. Surely, this must have been what he meant. Because the country surely has not been winning much of anything lately, with Trump in charge.
So we have a second chance. This was not guaranteed, frankly. Indeed, we might have had a major, major war, with Trump in charge. And with the emergency, some still fear that Trump may cancel the upcoming election, especially since polls presently have him trailing Biden by a significant margin. But cancelling an election might be something that Trump, bold as he always is with such actions, likely would not get away with. That means we have this chance – perhaps the last chance – to send him packing, and put the nightmare of this pseudo-dictatorial presidency behind us. Frankly, it should have remained as a work of fiction by Stephen King, but we came too close to that in reality. Let us at least put it in our past, and relegate this nightmare administration as a dark chapter in our history that we should never repeat. Let us learn a lesson from this grim reality that maybe we should have learned from the nightmare scenario from the desk of the King of Horror over four decades ago.
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