From the moment Donald Trump announced he was running for president, the flood of words about the orange-faced reality-TV star and alleged property billionaire has been incessant. And it only increased after he actually became president. But those words have been factual, or at least purport to be factual, no matter how absurd and unbelievable the Trump story has often appeared. What no one has done is write fiction about this most fictional of real-life characters. Until now.

I thought he’d be shot or impeached before his inauguration

In record time, Howard Jacobson has produced a satirical novel, Pussy, that is flagrantly inspired by the 45th president of the United States of America. He started writing in the early hours of 9 November, just as it became clear that Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton.

“I woke in the middle of the night,” he tells me, “and it was like a goblin sitting on my chest, something evil, like a Goya drawing. And I said to Jenny [his wife], ‘I’ve got a bad feeling.’”

He put the radio on and his fears were confirmed. Already alarmed and angered by the Brexit vote, and infuriated by Trump’s campaign, he didn’t know how to express his frustration. For years he had poured such feelings into his column for the Independent, but that had disappeared with the newspaper. He was a writer with a subject and nowhere to give vent to the thoughts boiling within him.

“And Jenny said, well write a novel of some kind. We didn’t go back to sleep. We had coffee. At five in the morning I was sitting at my desk starting. I had no idea.”

In the event he decided to write a pastiche of the 18th-century satirical novel – Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Voltaire’s Candide being the most obvious influences.

“I just saw it and knew what to do,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I’ve achieved it. I haven’t got any idea.”

Pussy traces the rise of a spoilt obnoxious princeling called Fracussus who lacks “a sweet nature, a generous disposition, an ability to accept criticism, a sense of the ridiculous, quick apprehension, and a way with words”. He spends his isolated childhood watching reality TV shows and thinking of women as sex workers, before a tutor takes him on an educational tour through strange neighbouring lands.

Jacobson wrote it in a great rush, completing it in a matter of weeks, ever fearful that history would overtake him. “I thought he’d be shot or impeached before his inauguration. And then I thought every novelist in the world will be writing something, and that would be a good thing, but I wanted to be the first.”

If other novelists were clamouring to write about Trump, they’ve kept quiet about it. It looks like Jacobson has the field to himself, at least for a while. But the question is, can Trump be satirised, and if he can, what effect might it have? After all, Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, John Oliver et al gave it their best and most entertaining shot, but only seemed to empower the beast they were trying to take down.

Satire is forever having its obituary written and it’s obligatory in any discussion to mention Tom Lehrer’s famous quote that satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize. But Jacobson dismisses the premise that satire needs to be effective.

“You don’t do it to do any good. I don’t assume this is going to bring commonwealths down. You do it partly to vex. There’s that great line that Swift has to Pope, ‘The chief end in my labours is to vex the world rather than divert it’. But if all it does is give a few of us pleasure, well, that’s not nothing. That’s its own consolation.”

‘You don’t do it to do any good… you do it partly to vex.’ Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Jacobson was once described as resembling “God after a bad day at the bookmaker”. His is a face that calls out not just for the keen eye of photographer, but the brush of a Rembrandt or a Raphael. It’s full of light and darkness, a sad-eyed, inquisitive expression and a brilliant, mood-altering smile. The one thing his face doesn’t do is sit still, even when he’s at his most composed.

We’re talking in his large, light-filled Soho loft. With its spiral staircase and two-storey bookcases, it’s a writer’s urban fantasy. But the lovely domestic arrangements, a happy marriage – his third – and the satisfaction of winning the Man Booker prize in 2010 with The Finkler Question have done little to quell his natural ability to be riled by the world. A quality, he feels, that is not entirely shared at the moment by fellow writers and intellectuals.

“There is an anger and a contempt, and underlying it all a fear of what it might come to. I just don’t think it’s angry enough. I think there’s a little too much understanding of what it is. They say you’ve got to understand the people in the rust belt. My position is I don’t care how grievously you feel about something, you’re still obliged to make an intelligent decision.”

If Jacobson has an alter-ego in Pussy it is that of Fracussus’s tutor, Professor Probius. Unlike Candide’s Professor Pangloss, he does not believe all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. He is ironic, world-weary and a little embittered, having fallen victim to the righteous indignation of politically correct campus students.

No, I don’t accept the will of the people. That ‘get over it’ thing – ooh I want to kill anybody who says get over it

He seems to speak for Jacobson when he warns that the besetting sin of our times is to assume sophisticated motivations in fools. “Liberals,” says Probius, “find it so hard to bear the space we see in the minds and hearts of the ignorant that we fill it with our own compunctions. We are only this far from maintaining that the stupid are more intelligent than the clever.”

Jacobson views Trump as a triumph of the stupid, a symbol of the rejection of expertise and elitism, two concepts that the novelist feels are in danger of being deemed unacceptable in the new paradigm. One of Trump’s great successes was to make articulacy and erudition appear inherently suspect. This has been a growing trend, particularly in America, for many years, but there’s little doubt that with his tweets and fact-free assertions, Trump has set a new low standard of debate, beneath which others may feel compelled to sink.

In one sense, what Trump represents may feel more personal to writers, particularly those who enjoy language as much as Jacobson, because he has launched a kind of war on words. Aided by the shrunken attention span of social media, he has made a virtue of bullish ignorance and incoherent simplicity. As a corollary, any sign of subtlety or sophistication has become tantamount in the minds of many voters to being untrustworthy, even dangerous.

So the well-turned sentence, the thoughtful allusion, and all the gifts that writers hold dear have become a devalued currency. Intelligence is going out of fashion. And Jacobson has no intention of being a passive witness.

“People say, ‘All right, he’s not an orator’, as though what one is asking him to be is a poet or Demosthenes. But we’re talking about the nature of language, how it liberates you from the mass of prejudices and ugly feelings that even the best of us have. Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it’s the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan.”

“It’s anger-making,” he continues, now fully worked up. “There mustn’t be a moment when we turn on the TV and think there’s Trump in the White House – that must never feel normal. I feel the same way that Brexit should never feel normal. You should go on and on and never shut up. No, I don’t accept the will of the people. No, I will never accept the will of the people. Don’t call me a Remoaner. That ‘get over it’ thing – ooh, I want to kill anybody who says get over it. Why should I get over it? I’ve actually not met anyone who is as angry as I am about it.”

I tell him that he normally has a head start.

“In the anger stakes?” he laughs. “I don’t know how to take that. Well it certainly appears so here. And I’m not over it. I thought I’d write this and calm would return and I’d return to the novel I stopped writing in order to do this. But I’m not. I’ve been to two parties this week and I’m ranting. I’m buttonholing people. I was at a leftie party the other night and I heard myself ranting not just about Trump, but Corbyn.”

Several real-life characters turn up as caricatures in Pussy, among them Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Vladimir Putin. All are disguised and, as befits the fairytale-type story, given different names. But Corbyn gets a mention as Corbyn. Jacobson writes, through the prism of Prince Fracassus’s parents, about the “murderous, killing-them-softly quietism of Corbynism”.

He is surprised when I remind him of this quote. He thought he hadn’t referred to any real British politicians directly. But it was important to him to put Farage and Johnson, whom he calls “really frightening”, in there along with Trump and, as it turns out, Corbyn.

“I wanted it to be about the whole caboodle, because they’re all in something together.”

If they are in anything then it’s a growing discontent with liberal democracy. It’s a sub-theme of Jacobson’s book, how liberal democracy is consuming itself. Probius loses his job after he is accused by students of “making a virtue of possessing expert knowledge”.

Jacobson believes left and right have swapped clothes, and the result is that on both sides expertise is now seen as a provocation. And there is a sense,which is not completely manufactured, that while Trump and his ilk are busy whipping up hatred and division, the liberal side of the argument has got sidetracked by the endless posturing of identity politics and intersectional victimhood.

Jacobson believes the two are not unrelated. The more that liberal discourse has retreated into a safe space of policed opinions, the more ground it has allowed the Trumps of the world in which to flourish. But how to persuade people otherwise when the traditional means of persuasion – a superior argument – no longer seems to hold much weight?

Jacobson is as stumped as the rest of us by that question.

“I think there is a sense in the writing of the book that among the fall guys and the victims is me. The writer of this is himself a victim in this world, trying to find a high-toned voice. I do feel superannuated a lot of the time now.”

Still, even if the means of persuasion are now under threat, Jacobson remains determined to persuade.

“It’s why I am a writer,” he says. “I wouldn’t suppose for one moment that there’s a single one of Trump’s voters that would be anything but confirmed in their beliefs. Pussy isn’t going to persuade anyone who’s already persuaded otherwise.”

In which case, isn’t there a price to be paid if persuasion is your game, a motivating factor behind why you write?

“I suppose you can end up very rancid,” he says. “I think one of the main reasons I write is to do better than ranting. The ranting is the opinion and the writing is not the opinion. I always say that people’s opinions are the worst things about them. The words demand a dignity. A prejudiced opinion would not look good on the page. Intolerance is aesthetically unpleasing.”

There are many aesthetic pleasures to be had in Pussy. If Trump’s presidency is a source of continuing anxiety, then among its very few benefits is that it has moved one of our finest comic writers to write an elegantly savage satire of a man who defies satire.

• Pussy by Howard Jacobson is published by Vintage (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99