Donald Trump just lost the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. On Tuesday, more than 400 literary luminaries — including Stephen King, Dave Eggers, Amy Tan, Junot Díaz, and Cheryl Strayed — signed on to “An Open Letter to the American People” decrying the Donald’s candidacy. Here’s the CliffsNotes version:
Because, as writers, we are particularly aware of the many ways that language can be abused in the name of power;
Because we believe that any democracy worthy of the name rests on pluralism, welcomes principled disagreement, and achieves consensus through reasoned debate;
Because American history, despite periods of nativism and bigotry, has from the first been a grand experiment in bringing people of different backgrounds together, not pitting them against one another…we, the undersigned, as a matter of conscience, oppose, unequivocally, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump for the Presidency of the United States.
The letter was published on Lit Hub, alongside an essay by Iowa writer Lyz Lenz that likens Trump to the Faulkner character Flem Snopes, an allusion certain to resonate with swing voters in Cuyahoga County.
Of course, just because Trumpists aren’t especially likely to be swayed by Lenz’s essay or Dave Eggers’s disapproval doesn’t mean writers shouldn’t lend their voices to the cause of anti-fascism. And who knows? Maybe somewhere, out in the heart of Real America, there’s a tearful man in a “Make America Great Again” T-shirt staring at his dog-eared copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and thinking, I gotta give Crooked Hillary another look.
