An Interview with Writer Ben Greenman

“History is larger than people: this is one thing I don’t know if Trump understands, at a fundamental level.”

Ben Greenman has a restless mind. You can sense it in conversation with him: the way he makes connections, not simply across dimensions, but arrowing straight through them. He marries politics, literature, and pop culture with the enviable, subtle ease of an author capable of dissecting both the latest Congressional debacle and current Billboard charts. His body of work reflects this insatiable curiosity: on the Greenman side of the shelf, “adapted and celebritized” versions of Chekhov stories featuring contemporary VIPs jostle for space with his current-event musicals written for McSweeney’s, alongside collaborative works with musicians such as ?uestlove, Brian Wilson, and George Clinton.

Greenman’s latest offering, Don Quixotic, is a fictional portrait of Donald Trump, told via a series of close, personal vignettes. It is neither a lambasting nor a strict lampooning of the current president; Greenman believes that enough of these versions have been, and continue to be, launched daily in both the press and the public. Rather than villainize the man, Don Quixotic attempts to humanize him, or at least to understand what makes him human. The stories, each less than a page long, read alternately like press releases, Calvino-esque musings on how to reconcile views of the same thing from multiple angles, and bizarrely familiar fever-dreams of a nation in turmoil. It is a peculiar, delightful read. It does not seek to convert the skeptical or reassure the fervent; it offers neither the knee-jerk criticism nor the fawning equivocation that have so far characterized the Trump presidency. Rather, it provides the type of insights into Trump that have been glaringly absent in most discourse surrounding his presidency: insights into what drives him, what feeds him, and what he feeds upon.

I spoke with Greenman this summer, over FaceTime and across the International Date Line, about Don Quixotic, politics and people in the age of the Internet, and leaving a legacy for the history-readers of the future.

—Stephanie Pushaw

I. PROBING A BRAIN AT INTERVALS OVER TIME

THE BELIEVER: Don Quixotic gives us a side to Donald Trump we rarely see, albeit a fictionalized one; it’s an attempt to dig underneath the celebrity and get to the man. What spurred this approach towards considering his inner life?

BEN GREENMAN: I think as a culture, we tend to deny famous people emotional complexity. In a way, we force them to serve us. So when one of them actually does become a public servant, the wires inevitably cross. Trump ought to be be more transparent than he...