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 w

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