In which I check in with AI William Faulkner on current events

I suddenly got the idea yesterday to ask Microsoft’s Copilot AI function, which constantly begs me to use it, “Write two paragraphs in the style of William Faulkner summarizing the confused thinking of President Donald Trump during his second Presidential term.”

To which Copilot cheerfully replied, “Certainly, Bruce. Here's a Faulkner-inspired take—dense, winding, and raw with psychological texture.“

Opinions may vary on the result. But for me - Faulkner has been my favorite writer for most of my life - it sounds more like an impression of Hunter Thompson on acid:

In those latter days when the light turned amber and the corridors of power swelled with echo and murmurs of men once loyal, now dubious, he stood among them—his mind not quiet, never quiet, a storm of grandeur laced with suspicion, claiming the past and mortgaging the future as though it were one continual press conference broadcast to the silence of loyal watchers, blurred not by fact but by fervor, the truth becoming elastic, stretched taut across golf carts and teleprompters, where one decision canceled the next like the tide of some misshapen campaign forever running toward a second victory, the memory of the first swollen with grievance, sealed not with triumph but with the insistence of its own retelling. He thought in pronouncements, loops of certainty that defied chronology, that bent history backward to resemble a mirror held not for reflection but for reassurance, a flash of self made myth.

And so in those hallways half-lit by flickering screens and advisors grown weary not from battle but from translating impulse into governance, he persisted—speech a slurry of conviction and contradiction, of tweets and treaties tangled like weeds around the solemn pillars of precedent. Time did not move forward for him, it circled—a carousel of enemies fabricated and emboldened, allies praised and dismissed, loyalty a currency whose inflation matched the rhetoric, unanchored and shifting, while beneath it all beat that unyielding need, not for legacy but for immediacy, for spectacle, for the applause that washed away doubt like rain off marbled stone. His thoughts did not progress but revolved, a constellation where he was both axis and observer, bewildered by the stars but naming them nonetheless.

But even I would have to admit that it’s cute.

Still, the actual Faulkner would have worked in a dog peeing on Trump’s leg into the account. In his novel The Mansion (1959), he has a dog pee on the leg of a demagogic rightwing, Clarence Snopes in the novel, possibly modeled on the notorious Mississippi racist Senator Theordore Bilbo. (1) And he would have included a reference to the depravity of Trump’s political mentor, Roy Cohn, lawyer for Joe McCarthy and the New York Mob and also the federal prosecutor of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

So I asked Copilot to work in Roy Cohn. The result was an improvement:

He remembered him, not as a man but as a force, an echo housed within marble offices and whispered threats, slick-haired and unrepentant, teaching that victory was not earned but seized, seized without apology, seized with the snarl of litigation and the grin of deflection. Roy, they said his name like a warning, like an instruction, and Trump carried him, not in memory but in method—deny everything, admit nothing, counterattack always. And so from the rose garden to the rally stage he ruled not in policy but in posture, a stance learned long ago at Cohn’s knee, where power was an unyielding theater and loyalty a blade honed against truth. The Constitution was not a document but a foil, a thing to maneuver around, to suspend beneath executive will, shaped not by governance but by combat’s geometry, each line drawn not for clarity but for control.

By the second term the lessons were not lessons—they were instincts, ancient and immediate, lived not in strategy but reflex, and it showed in the selection of men not for merit but for allegiance, the appointment of chaos as doctrine, the embrace of spectacle as shield. The nation did not move by consensus but by will, a singular will projected outward with Roy’s voice embedded, scratchy and spectral, nudging from a past that refused to stay buried. And as dissent blossomed like mold across the marble floors he strode not to explain but to dominate, to reroute history through litigation and repetition, the gospel of Cohn alive in the vitriol, in the absolution denied to others yet claimed for the self, the empire a mirror not of the people but of the mentor—merciless, theatrical, unrepentant.

Notes:

(1) Adams, Percy (1964): Humor as Structure and Theme in Faulkner's Trilogy. Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 5:3, 211. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1207358>