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Let’s Acknowledge President Trump as Our Nation’s Poet Laureate

Someone needs to get Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker a copy of Rob Long’s Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse. It might help them take themselves less seriously, and take Trump more seriously for what he really is—the nation’s unacknowledged poet laureate.

You might know Rob Long as the guy who wrote the TV series Cheers and writes for National Review.  He’s presently a producer on the sitcom Kevin Can Wait. But though he’s been nominated for Emmys and Golden Globes, Bigly is his masterwork. The idea is simple, the execution superb: take statements by Donald Trump, set them as free verse (with appropriate editorial notes), provide a dedicatory haiku by Milo (which is brilliant), stir in a foreword by Toby Young (author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People), and add prefatory note and afterword by yours truly to bookend the whole thing, and you have the one book (exactly stocking stuffer size incidentally, with a flamboyant Christmas Red cover) that could bring this country back together.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Mark Steyn has to say about Bigly:

Poets, wrote Shelley, are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ Big deal. But now for the first time ever a poet is the Leader of the Free World, and he’s even more totally unacknowledged—by Democrats, the media, Lena Dunham, Deep State leakers, and other losers. This superb collection of winning verse, brilliantly edited by Rog Long, spans the decades from the early “Table at Le Cirque” to my personal favorite “The Mantle of Anger.”

Mark goes on to call it a “dazzlingly anthology.” And he’s not alone. James Delingpole of Breitbart (who took a degree in English Literature at Oxford) also ranks Trump highly as a poet. He says of Bigly, “More lyrical than Walt Whitman, pithier than Robert Frost—and making a heck of a lot more sense than Emily Dickinson, this book should be required reading for every literature major on campus.”

I second that—and would add this: if we really want to win the battle of ideas, we need to get this into the hands of every literature major on campus. If we really want members of Congress to put aside their petty squabbling and recognize that they are dealing with a man who is not only president of the United States, not only a hugely successful businessman, and a wonderful family man, but a poet the likes of which this country has not seen since…well, ever, we need to make sure that every member of Congress has a copy of Bigly.

Trump does not need to be psychoanalyzed, as some of his crazier critics say. He needs to be appreciated as a literary figure; his statements parsed for their literary merit. For Trump is a man of profound literary sensibilities, which, while they inform his politics, transcend them too. If your own family is a house divided over Trump, this book can be a bridge, it can provide healing, and it can make the world a better place.

And isn’t that what we all want?

I reckon—and think you will too—that we all want Bigly.


H.W. Crocker III is the bestselling author of the comic novel The Old Limey and the forthcoming comic novel Armstrong, the untold story, because it’s untrue, of how General George Armstrong Custer survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn to become a gun fire hire (good causes only) allied with a troupe of can-can dancers, Chinese acrobats, a rebel-flag-eyepatch-wearing Southern gambler, and a multilingual Crow scout. You’ll want that book too eventually.

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