WASHINGTON — So it’s a few days before the election last November — just a few more days, surely, before Donald J. Trump would return to his golden tower to start a niche TV venture and fill a sagging Twitter feed with exclamation-pointed despair — and a book agent goes to his client with an idea: How about something on the Trump White House That Wasn’t?

The writer — Steve Israel, then a Democratic congressman from New York, now at work on his third political satire — whips up a proposal, “Trumplandia.” Plot lines include a furtive meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, overnight social media rockets fired from Mar-a-Lago and a top administration post for Ben Carson, now the secretary of housing and urban development, who once suggested through a surrogate that he was not qualified to run a federal agency.

“Highly implausible,” the agent said of the pitch then.

“My pen name could have been Nostradamus,” Mr. Israel says now.

Many classes of Washingtonian have struggled with these first six months in President Trump’s thrall: senators, fact-checkers, people who enjoy sleep. But in a city so enchanted by its own history, so practiced in projecting a seen-it-all nonchalance, it has been a particularly trying time for a certain kind of storytelling swamp creature.