Writing exercise: take a story and flip it (or 'Is Trump a tool for Satan?*')
*of course Trump isn't. Satan isn't real.
A week ago, a registered Republican tried to assassinate former US President Donald Trump. In the time since then, many Republicans have said that God saved Trump.
I don’t believe in God or the Devil, but I’m a horror writer and I do believe in the power of stories to shape our view of the world. So, when I hear ‘God saved him’, my first instinct is to ask: ‘What if it wasn’t God, but instead it was Satan?’
It’s no more preposterous to argue Trump is an agent of Satan (or even the anti-Christ himself) than to propose Trump is a tool of God.
This an example of taking a story and flipping it.
I’m going to dig into this alternate interpretation of Trump’s position, showing how we can find evidence to support an alternative story, before returning to the writing exercise.
If you want to skip straight to the writing exercise, scroll down to the next title text.
Fancy diving into the premise of Trump being Satan’s tool? Let’s go!
Between Trump’s cheating across multiple marriages, blatant greed, mistreatment of staff and others, endorsements of violence towards opponents (political and social) and enemies, and literally thousands of confirmed lies and deceptions, it’s easy to argue he’s Satan’s candidate rather than playing for God’s team.
After all, this is within a week of a missile striking a children’s hospital in Kyiv, and Trump nominating a vice-president who would likely recommended capitulating to Russia. If this is God moving in mysterious ways, The Almighty appears to be okay with killing children and the Lord should have a word with Republicans and other right-wing politicians who think aborting literally less-than-a-handful of fetal cells is murder.
If Satan is the power behind Trump’s assassin’s near-miss, and Trump is the anti-Christ, then Old Scratch would naturally want to deceive Christians into thinking this is all God’s plan.
Getting worshippers to turn from Christ and instead worship Trump as a King Cyrus-style anointed-one, “whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him” (Isiah 45:1), creating a cult of messianic personality, sounds like exactly the kind of shenanigans the Dark Prince would delight in. The 2024 Republican National Convention, with the holy evocations of God’s will for Trump to win in November 2024, could be hilarious to the Father of Lies.
Which behavior aligns more with God or Satan: when shot and injured among a crowd, do you 1) check on whether anyone else is injured, or 2) pump your fist in the air and mouth ‘fight fight fight’ (and then tell your secret service agents ‘let me get my shoes, let me get my shoes’)? Which shows an instinct towards Christ-like compassion and which leans towards Satanic violence?
But, of course, none of this is true. Neither God nor Satan exist.
As the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro said: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Despite thousands of years of looking, we’ve no facts proving the existence of either God or the Lord of the Flies: there are no facts, only feelings.
The shooter was not an agent of supernatural evil or good. He was just a registered-Republican guy—described as Conservative-leaning by his schoolmates—who thought that violence would achieve something.
We might never find out what exactly he thought would happen if Trump died. Maybe he thought killing Trump would spark a holy war, or guarantee Republican success, or would save souls (somehow), or save America (through various routes and perspectives), or maybe he just thought his name would live in history books forever. On the last one, he’s probably right, but everything else literally missed.
It should go without saying that assassination isn’t okay. I vehemently disagree with violence as a tool for achieving peace.
I also vehemently disagree with pretty much everything Trump stands for and dearly hope he doesn’t return to The White House in 2025. I want him democratically defeated, again.
The two following things can, and are, true at the same time:
Trump does not deserve to be assassinated
Trump is an awful person and dangerous leader
He’s been a bad husband, a genuinely icky father, and ran a chaotic presidency surrounded by criminals. That doesn’t mean he deserves to be shot, but it should discount him from being considered a King Cyrus-like hand of God.
The impact of a second term for Trump won’t only be on the US: his lack of care for environmental causes, at a crucial time in history, may tip the scales of the planet into a spiral that no human survives. The would-be assassin’s infamy won’t last long if the world becomes barely-or-completely unlivable for humans.
In short, if God/Satan are real then there is insufficient evidence that Trump is working on behalf of God, and much more consistent evidence that he is aligned with The Great Dragon.
Of course, there’s zero evidence of God or The Fallen Star, but Trump’s practical and moral failings are facts, and they don’t care about feelings.
… But this is a horror writing newsletter, and my point is this…
If I were to write a ‘what if’ story, this would be a fantastic place to start.
There is plenty of circumstantial evidence to support the alternate Satanic theory of Trump’s survival, and we could have fun working out ways in which others might discover Trump’s secret alignment with the King of the Bottomless Pit.
Working out the consequences of this discovery could be the underpinning of a great story.
The writing exercise: take a story and flip it
Take an accepted truth and turn it on its head:
What if the Wicked Witch of the West wasn’t actually evil?
In Wicked, the known events of The Wizard of Oz are reframed from a new perspective.What if Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy and there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy?
JFK convinced the world that a crackpot theory might have some basis in a sinister fact (partly by inventing new ‘facts’).What if Father Christmas isn’t all peace and presents but instead has a history of warfare and bloodshed?
I thoroughly enjoyed Violent Night, and maybe you will too.… Or what if the son of an apparently God-fearing family is the anti-Christ who is being placed in the presidency by a Satanic cult?
The ‘what if the president is the anti-Christ’ plot I’ve described above seemed both far out and terrifyingly possible in The Omen series, and retains its chills today.
Write your own version:
What if [accepted truth] is actually wrong and instead [inverse]?
Here are some questions to help you dig into the idea:
What evidence could support this secret backstory?
Who would be the most interesting PoV (point of view) character for the story?
What do they want and how does it conflict with the motives of the deception?
How do they discover the truth?
Do they reveal or join the deception?
What would it take for the world to believe them?
What does it say about the world that such deception is possible? (What is the theme of your story?)
—
As I said at the start of all this, I believe stories are very powerful. They shape our reality.
When a story with no basis in fact is spread as truth, it is a very dangerous thing.
Use the power of storytelling wisely, and try to remain aware when others are using it against you and your interests.
I’ll be back next week with something new (and hopefully not related to Trump).
See you next time!
Mata xxx
P.S. I’m leaving the comments turned on for all on this post (as I usually do) but if it becomes a mess I’ll turn them off.
P.P.S. Once again, violence is not the solution to conflict.
P.P.S. Neither God nor the Devil have anything to do with Trump, in general or specifically relating to the assassination attempt. He was incredibly fortunate, and that happens sometimes. Near misses happen every day.
What if God is a child dreaming all this up while asleep in a remote corner of a parallel universe? Will she remember us when she wakes up? What if we are a multi-faceted universal entity experiencing itself as it navigates through spacetimes forever? Will a man's ripped ear fragment ever be found in another space and time and become an object of worship by the masses of a planet named Maga?
I think the mainstream press has a really hard time writing about Trump. They want to write about him in normal, political, policy-based terms but that sort of thing just doesn't apply to him. After the assassination attempt, a lot of press outlets wrote about their expectations of a "changed" man -- a calmer, more unifying politician -- and his initial speech at the convention gave a little bit of that and the papers were full of headlines about "unity" and "healing"... and then he went back to his usual divisive rhetoric and meandering stories full of grievances, and the press just don't know how to react. They haven't figured out how to write about him in nearly a decade of coverage: all the stories they are used to telling about politicians just don't fit, no matter how hard they try. And, as you say, storytelling is powerful, but dangerous when it has no basis in truth... and the press just don't seem to be able to tell the truth about Trump. It's been so weird to see the press just plain old failing for so long at this point.