“Nobody in this country can tell a president of the United States that his mind is sick.” That’s the blunt assessment of the defense secretary in Night of Camp David, a political thriller from 1965 that stands to be rescued from an undeserved obscurity by its republication this month.

The coal-black front cover of the new edition is unadorned apart from one line, in white block letters: “What would happen if the president of the USA went stark-raving mad?”

The book plunges into the quandary faced by Jim MacVeagh, a junior senator from Iowa when he realizes, based on private midnight conversations at the Maryland country retreat of the title, that the president, an otherwise heroic Democrat, has grown dangerously paranoid and hatched unhinged ideas about remaking the international order.

The prospect of a commander-in-chief who has lost command of reality is terrifying to MacVeagh, and to a select group of high-level governmental officials who eventually are brought into the know.

“With all these nukes, push buttons and go-codes, we just can’t afford any presidential ‘hiatus from normality,’ if I can phrase it that way,” says one character.

What should they do? Consult a psychiatrist? Mount some kind of coup? Maybe invoke the 25th amendment, which was in the process of being ratified when the book was first published and which provides for the removal of a president from office in case of incapacity?

It’s a compelling premise, luring the reader through a maze of disorienting what-ifs. But can the dark notion of a clinically insane president be expected to speak to audiences in 2018, a half-century after the book was first published?

Kidding! While the name Donald Trump goes unmentioned in the Vintage press materials, the decision to bring the book back into print was blowing in the wind. Earlier this fall, Vintage publisher Anne Messitte saw a cable news spot about the book delivered by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, and the journalist Bob Woodward separately mentioned the book in an interview about Fear, his non-fiction chronicle of the Trump administration.

“Not only was I entertained and amused by reading the book for the first time this year – I did not read it in the 60s,” Messitte told the Guardian, “I just felt that it was a book that needed to come back into print to be part of the escapism and conversation of our current political moment.

“I read it more broadly as an imagined political satire” than a book about Trump, she said. “It’s political fiction, a thriller about what would happen if the government was not functioning the way people expected it to.”

Fletcher Knebel, ‘the grandfather of the modern political thriller’. Photograph: Alex Gotfryd

Written by the late journalist Fletcher Knebel – “the grandfather of the modern political thriller”, in the appraisal of critic Terry Teachout – Night of Camp David was originally published in the stream of Washington suspense novels that surged after the Cuban missile crisis. Many of those books – Seven Days in May, Fail Safe, Advise and Consent and The President’s Plane Is Missing – became movies that still populate lists of the best cold war thrillers.

Night of Camp David was not made into a film, perhaps because the book’s basic premise – “Wouldn’t it be scary if one of the fallible humans in charge of nuclear war went insane?” – had exploded on to the big screen just one year prior, in Doctor Strangelove.

Part of the sport of reading Night of Camp David today is measuring the distance between the presidential conduct that freaked out the fictional senator MacVeagh and the conduct of the current White House occupant.

It does not detract from, and in fact depending on one’s cast of humor it might add to, the book’s entertainment value to say that Knebel’s imagination of what a dangerously unwell president might act like in private pales in comparison with what Trump does and says for all the world to see.

The president in Night of Camp David rants to MacVeagh that he wants federal agents to surveil all US phone calls, wishes to pursue a union with Canada and believes a shadowy cabal is out to get him.

“It is sheer folly to have that man anywhere near the command and control machinery,” remarks the defense secretary, Sidney Karper. “It might lead to wholesale murder.”

But what would Karper make of Trump? The current president has seen crowds where none exist, deployed troops to answer no threat, attacked national institutions – the military, the justice department, the judiciary, the vote, the rule of law, the press – tried to prosecute his political enemies, elevated bigots, oppressed minorities, praised despots while insulting global allies and wreaked diplomatic havoc from North Korea to Canada.

Photograph: Vintage

He stays up half the night watching TV and tweeting about it, then wakes up early to tweet some more, in what must be the most remarkable public diary of insecurity, petty vindictiveness, duplicity and scattershot focus by a major head of state in history.

(Also, he might be president because of a deal his campaign made with Russia, and he might still be beholden in some secret way to that country.)

Present-day concerns about whether the nuclear codes have fallen into the wrong hands are sufficient that the commander of US Strategic Command, General John Hyten, was asked point blank in a November hearing about what he would do if ordered to launch a nuclear strike.

“I provide advice to the president,” Hyten said. “He’ll tell me what to do, and if it’s illegal, guess what’s going to happen? I’m going to say, ‘Mr President, that’s illegal.’ Guess what he’s going to do? He’s going to say, ‘What would be legal?’ And we’ll come up with options of a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that’s the way it works. It’s not that complicated.”

It’s not that complicated.

It’s a testament to Knebel’s skill that Night of Camp David remains thrilling, even for a reader in Trump’s America. But the question inevitably arises (sorry) as to whether life has surpassed fiction. Consider the fact that while audiences in the 1960s surged to Washington fiction, the bestseller lists today are stacked with non-fiction, from Woodward’s book to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury to Stormy Daniels’ Full Disclosure to Luke Harding’s Collusion.

Messitte said it appeared that readers were picking up Night of Camp David alongside non-fiction books.

“We looked at the early pre-sale of Fletcher Knebel, it’s being co-purchased online by people who are really looking for non-fiction,” she said. “So one of the questions we have is, is this a special work of fiction that’s going to cross over and appeal to that non-fiction audience that we know has been so strong.”

With Robert Mueller closing in and the president feeling increasingly cornered, there’s no telling what plot twists are to come or how the current tale will end.

As MacVeagh tells his wife: “Martha, this is the most frightening thing that’s happened in this country in a long while.”