Watching this process as a fiction writer made me sort of, well, crazy. To write a novel, I would sit down at my desk and enter an imaginary world in which, out of predisposition and necessity, I wholly believed. The characters I wrote about became, in that moment, as real to me as family. I’ve spent a bit of time pondering whether the drive to create fiction emanates from psychic scars: the need to distance oneself from reality, or to assert a control unavailable in real life, or to resolve conflicts in more satisfying ways than actual experience affords. In particular, I understood from the get-go that one of my most popular characters, an American president, reflected my human desire to somehow resurrect Robert Kennedy.

But when I got up from my desk, real people awaited me. I saw my kids as the distinctive individuals they were, not as self-projections in a tableau of wish fulfillment. My career may have reflected some form of psychic adjustment, but it was also a means of sending my daughters and sons to the college of their own choosing. Because I never confused my fictions with my life, I remained, at least arguably, sane—not least because I understood the ineradicable boundary between me and an external world driven by other people and their needs.

To me, Donald Trump was more than the prototypical protagonist of a psychological novel—he was a fiction writer run amok, the hero of his own impermeable drama, resentful of editors who would prune his imaginings. He feels little need to heed advice, or to learn anything much from anyone. Most of what he says is provisional, ever subject to change, and based on nothing but his transient and subjective needs.

But the crucial difference between Trump and a novelist is that his fancies are not confined to the page, and Americans can’t put them back on the shelf.

Like any other best-selling novelist, I had publicists who helped me. But Trump has an army: the media, particularly cable news. In the run-up to his nomination, cable gave Trump $3 billion in free media—effectively, a sustained infomercial consisting of his rallies and rambling press conferences. This open microphone made him unique among all candidates.

Trump used it like a novelist would—to re-create himself as a fictional archetype, the lonely sheriff who drives the bad guys out of town. In his acceptance speech, he proclaimed, “I alone can fix it,” then amplified this in an inaugural address in which he portrayed himself as a gunslinger rescuing a cartoon country. He evoked a national dystopia: cities awash in carnage; sclerotic schools; shuttered factories; predatory nonwhites; the crooked denizens of swampland Washington. Like Gulliver amid the Lilliputians, Trump’s America was a helpless giant tied down by tormentors at home and abroad.

But at last Donald Trump had arrived, the solitary symbol of salvation. Simply by virtue of his inauguration, the supposed carnage “will stop right here, and stop right now,” and “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no more.” All the problems of a complex society, however exaggerated, would evanesce overnight. As Ernest Hemingway wrote to climax perhaps his greatest work of fiction, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”