Deconstructing Roth’s The Plot against America: The Making of the President Donald Trump

Abstract

This article deals with deconstructing both Philip Roth and Donald Trump’s rhetoric in an attempt to self-performance by reproducing the fundamental history and knowledge within the multicultural Plot Against America. It also seeks to examine Roth’s too-true vision on Trump’s rise as a product of the American heritage of racism, sexism, and to uncover the alternate history as a way to self-manifestation, while concurrently subverting its validity by showing how such an approach is inadequate in reaching the self-making. By historicizing the anti-Semitic discourse, Roth doubts and influences the “traps of history”, mainly when dealing with the Jewish minority, as well as Trump does by his anti-immigrant and racist positions (xenophobia), in order to generate a transgressive space for his fictional Lindbergh. Moreover, “economic anxiety” has become a notorious term for articulating Trump’s discourse; even when his campaigns clear call to racism are acknowledged; it was accepted that this racism is caused by economics rather than by a revival of white nationalism. In spite of the explicit racism and nationalism that has always been the milestone of Trump’s campaign, within Roth’s novel, it isn’t just the media that distorts the essence of Lindbergh’s appeal to the public; most of the Jews disavows that virulent anti-Semitism has taken hold of the United States.