Philip Roth on Donald Trump

I was pleased to see that Philip Roth may have read my 10/22/16 post about the Presidential debates, in which I quoted Melville’s The Confidence-Man.  Here is what Roth said in the Jan. 30, 2017 “The New Yorker:”

Trump is just a con artist.  The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel – Melville’s last – that could just as well have been called The Art of the Scam…. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.  But whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is:  ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.