There’s a good argument that It Can’t Happen Here is remembered largely for its fantastic title, a bitter little four-word story in its own right. But as a number of people have pointed out, it’s not hard to draw parallels with Trump. Lewis’ demagogue is Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a charismatic populist who encourages struggling white Americans to blame their misfortunes on minorities. Windrip makes attractive promises that are both vague and probably impossible — in this case, promising all Americans an annual stipend whose numbers inflate on the campaign trail. His rallies, attended by a loyal militia called the Minute Men, regularly end in violence. And through it all, the upper class insists that he’s a secret moderate, appealing to popular anger to win votes. Then he’s elected president, and America devolves into a nation of manufactured wars, mass destitution, and concentration camps.

The American public is either venal, naive,or Authoritarian

Lewis was a keen satirist, and It Can’t Happen Here is full of weird comic touches like an extreme version of the misspelled signs that Trump is periodically called out for: Windrip’s anti-intellectual administration accidentally copies the communists’ five-pointed star for its insignia, convinced that the Soviet flag’s star has six points, and hurriedly changes it months later when somebody finally notices. Lewis' worst jabs, though, are at the American populace that voted him in, its members either venal or sadistically authoritarian. The book questions its protagonist’s moderate and complacent middle-class liberalism and mocks the elite’s naïveté, but both compare favorably against the crude sentimentality of the easily duped masses. Lewis himself displays a certain amount of the classism that Trump’s critics are sometimes accused of — the most loathsome villain isn’t Windrip or a member of his inner circle, but the protagonist’s stupid, lazy, and power-hungry handyman.

In some ways, though, It Can’t Happen Here is an uneasy fit for current populist rhetoric. For one thing, Trump doesn’t bank on the "professional common man" folksiness that Windrip exudes — it was George W. Bush, the favored Windrip analogue before him, who played up his image as an affable Texas cowboy. Where Trump is a singular figure, Windrip is portrayed as the figurehead for a calculating and manipulative advisor, who eventually gets tired of his cultivated ignorance and deposes him.

And the Trump campaign has been, if anything, unusually secular. Sinclair Lewis never actually made the famous claim that "when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross," but religion is inextricable from his dystopia. Windrip wins the presidency with help from a Methodist version of Roman Catholic pundit Father Coughlin, and his platform bars non-believers from law, medicine, and teaching. He takes a complementarian view of gender, forcing women out of work to promote the "incomparably sacred duties" of homemaking and childbearing.

Christianity was once inextricable from all-American oppression

The "anti-religious totalitarian state" motif has its own place in dystopian science fiction, whether in allegories for Communism like Ayn Rand’s Anthem or the End Times predictions of Left Behind. But literature’s specifically patriotic, all-American version of fascism often treats Americanism as synonymous with Christianity. Sometimes this evolves into the outright theocracy of books like The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents. But it’s present to a lesser extent even in Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, perhaps the most measured and ambiguous vision of American fascism ever written.

The Plot Against America starts with nearly the same premise as It Can’t Happen Here: as Hitler and Mussolini gain power in Europe, America elects a charming racist and anti-Semite, in this case a fictionalized Charles Lindbergh. But the practical consequences of his prejudice are unclear. He’s unsettlingly comfortable with high-ranking Nazis, but his platform is a reasonably sympathetic pacifist isolationism. To present-day readers, he’s on the wrong side of history, but most of the book is spent anticipating the fallout of having a Nazi sympathizer in the White House.