Make Russia Great Again by Christopher Buckley

Published by Simon & Schuster on July 14, 2020

I hurried to finish Make Russia Great Again because after the election it might lose its relevance entirely. While other novels have taken shots at a fictional Trump, it seems doubtful that any of them will be remembered after Trump is gone. Making fun of Trump is the nightly sport of talk show hosts, but they’ll move on in January if Biden wins. I suspect readers will do the same. Nobody wants to revisit a nightmare.

As the (not so failing) New York Times noted, the difficulty with satirizing the Trump administration is that reality outpaces fiction. By the time this book made it to market, Trump had found new ways to self-destruct that even the most masterful satirist would have been unable to imagine.

Make Russia Great Again takes place shortly before the 2020 election. Some characters (like Trump and Pompeo) are real, others are thinly disguised. Sean Hannity is Seamus Colonnity, Ivanka is Ivunka and she’s married to Jored, Pence is Pants, Graham is Biskitt, etc.

The novel’s narrator is Herbert K. Nutterman, who rose through the management ranks at various Trump properties before Trump tapped him to become the new chief of staff. Two storylines, other than the upcoming election, drive the plot. First, an American computer program called Placid Reflex autonomously hacked the Russian election and gave the Communist candidate a landslide victory in the first round of voting. Putin isn’t pleased but doesn’t immediately suspect Trump who is, after all, in Putin’s pocket.

Second, a Russian oligarch and Trump buddy named Oleg Pishinsky is widely suspected of causing the demise of an American journalist who investigated his molybdenum empire and other shady endeavors. Responding to those suspicions, Congress passed a law that disadvantages Oleg’s desire to sell molybdenum to the United States. Oleg wants Trump to get it rescinded. If Trump says no, Oleg will release videos of Trump having sex with each contestant of Miss Universe 2013 after promising each the crown. Oleg also did away with a contestant who wasn’t satisfied with being paid off, a crime that might look bad for Trump. Unfortunately for Trump, Congress isn’t buying his pitch that the US has a desperate need for molybdenum, an element that Trump can’t pronounce.

There are moments of genuine humor in the novel. I particularly enjoyed Trump’s response when the videos begin to leak. He changes “Make America Great Again” to “Make America Hard Again,” an improvement that his loyal base embraces. The Evangelicals, of course, look away without wavering in their support.

While the story is fun, some of Nutterman’s observations — about, for example, the “liberal mainstream media” obsession with reporting true facts rather than alternative facts — fall flat because they really aren’t satirical at all. Much of the book depicts Trump as he is, without the exaggeration that defines satire. Trump and his echo chamber entourage might be clownish but they aren’t all that funny.

The book does have a prescient quality, if only because Trump is predictable. Without knowing who the Democratic nominees would be, Buckley has the president condemning them as socialists, a label that Trump and uninformed inhabitants of the fringe have tried without success to pin on Biden. Since Buckley didn’t know who the candidates would be, Buckley has Trump calling them Loser One and Loser Two — which is admittedly Trumpish.

The book was written before the pandemic (which, Trump just assured us, is over), a fact that detracts from both its relevance and its satirical punch. Trump’s real sins are much worse than the sins Buckley imagines, a reality that compromises the ability to laugh at Trump’s foibles.

Having said that, Make Russia Great Again does deliver a steady diet of chuckles and an occasional full-bellied laugh. Trump’s fans won’t like it and might even hold a book burning, although that would require them to actually buy the book, which seems unlikely. If Trump wins reelection, readers who want to laugh after they finish crying might want to spend time with it. If Trump is defeated, the book might have value as nostalgia. As political satire, however, it is only a mild success.

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