(A review of Trump Rant by Chris Agee, first published by Cassandra Voices)

“Trump Inhabits Trumpistan”, writes Chris Agee in his rampaging poetic satire, Trump Rant: “Trump Is the Wolf of Washington”. Written over a four-year period from 2017 onwards, and arranged as an expanding series of mock-newspaper headlines, Agee’s book begins as an act of stinging personal portraiture and ends as a thorough-going investigation of America itself – which appears, over the course of the poem, as both an empire in decline and a dysfunctional democracy in crisis. “Trumpian Fever”, Agee writes, “Continually Reminds Me of the Civil War Build-up of the 1850s”. As Agee recognises, and as Mark Twain likewise knew, the past and present have a habit of rhyming through the flux.

A US-born Irish citizen, based in Belfast, Agee is singularly sensitive to the totalitarian impulses and tribal resentments that the title-figure – a “Beacon of Malevolence” – has proven adept at mobilising, both in and out of political office. “Trump Is Ten Times Worse Than Nixon”, he insists, reminding us that the current Republican nominee for president “Openly Supported the Kenosha Shooter”, Kyle Rittenhouse, in 2020. Such precedents alter the civic atmosphere, toxifying public politics, possibly beyond repair. The Trumpian era, Agee suggests, is defined by ruthlessness, for “Trump” at heart “Is a Political Cutthroat”: a charismatic leader with brash demogogic tendencies, brazenly echoing white nationalist discourses in his bloated ascent to political power. “Trump Is Malcolm X’s “American Nightmare””, we’re informed: a proposition that feels at once historically grounded and chillingly prophetic. 

In this respect, the Rant may bear a resemblance to the work of Allen Ginsberg, combining oratorical force with a deep-running sense of cultural urgency. “Trump Is the Real Plot Against America”, Agee declares, “Trump Is a Mouth Who Loves Mouthing”. It should be said that part of the appeal of Trump Rant – what stops it from being merely abrasive and makes it, instead, thought-provoking and often funny – is its fizzing sense of how ludicrous Trump can be. It’s possible, indeed, that when faced with the former president’s one-man circus-show, laughter may be the sanest response. “Trump Is Impossible To Imagine as a Scuba-diver”, Agee quips, and any honest observer would struggle to disagree.

“Trump Speaks No Languages (Not Even English)”, he continues, and we begin to understand the complex blend of fixation and anger that propels Trump Rant along its hurricane-course. Whereas Trump wields language like an ugly weapon, scattering falsehoods and distortions whenever he speaks, Agee, a poet, is using his words to hold up an accusing mirror to power itself. “Trump”, he suggests, “Is The Corrupted Dream”. The Rant, by contrast, might be thought of as a visceral attempt to re-galvanise the original promise – of language as a mode of truthful speech, and of the United States as a vibrant democratic republic (or what Langston Hughes called, with painful justice, the “land that never has been yet”).

With his Democratic rivals staunchly committed to neoliberalism at home and genocide abroad, and his own party plunging ever deeper into a sludge-pit of weaponised nativism, toxic conspiracy culture and personality-worship, as a political figure Trump in 2024 seems as peculiarly emblematic as he has ever been: both homegrown product and representative man, incarnating the feral aggression and strange emptiness of American capitalism. “Trump Is a Tacky Gatsby Bamboozling the National Nick (We’ve Read It All Before!)”, Agee writes, and the tarnished nature of America’s self-mythology seems all the more polluting; the rot too rampant to be reversed.

For all its declarative zest and referential range, Agee’s book is saturated with political dread: we read it in the shadow of things to come.