Writing for the American Conservative, Charles F. McElwee III asks, “Did John Updike Foresee the Trump Era?”

“Revisiting Updike’s Rabbit novels is a rendezvous with prescience, for no collection of postwar fiction could help us better understand how working-class populism—in the form of Donald Trump—prevailed on Election Day 2016,” he writes.

“Although Rabbit supported Humphrey in 1968, he later has a ‘Reagan Democrat’ conversion, voting for George H.W. Bush in the final novel. If anything, he’s the fictional embodiment of a political prototype, a cross-party coalition infuriated by the loss of what communities like Brewer once symbolized: economic prosperity and a shot at a stable middle-class American life. The Rabbit novels could serve as the fictional companion to any social-policy book by Charles Murray,” McElwee writes. “The realism of Updike’s characters and plot lines is a tribute to Updike’s understanding of this durable voting bloc, one that determined Hillary Clinton’s fate.”

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