Unable to cope with President Donald Trump's death by natural causes, his followers will instead take to the streets and riot, believing his passing was the result of a "deep state" plot.
That is the premise of a new novel by popular author Kurt Andersen, co-founder of Spy magazine, which will likely set off the president's die-hard supporters, according to a new report from the Daily Beast.
Andersen's fictional depiction of Trump's demise — and the violent chaos that follows — reads like a dark prediction of where the country could head. The novel "The Breakup" imagines a 2035 scenario where Trump, celebrating his 89th birthday at Trump Tower, suffers a massive stroke while descending his golden escalator.
But the president's fictional death is just the beginning. MAGA followers, gathered to commemorate both Trump's birthday and the 20th anniversary of his first campaign, immediately reject the official cause of death.
Instead, they blame assassination by the "deep state" — a conspiracy theory requiring no evidence to gain traction among his true believers. The mourning quickly transforms into rage.
"It's the first spectacular piece of violence, spontaneous violence that then results a year later in an uprising, in a, in a true right-wing uprising, terrorist uprising," Andersen told The Daily Beast's Joanna Coles.
What makes Andersen's dystopian scenario particularly unsettling is how plausible it now seems, he elaborated. When he began writing the novel, the premise felt like an exaggeration. Now it reads like a prediction.
"I was basically done when he took off," Andersen said of Trump's 2024 victory. "Almost done when he took office."
Trump's second term forced Andersen to substantially darken his manuscript. "It required me to go through and darken the backstory… more horrible and nightmarish than I had had them in the earlier draft," he said.
"The horror show of this term, the nightmare beyond what I expected," Andersen reflected. "In the last year and a half, in the last three years since I began writing this book, it has become much less far-fetched than it seemed when I began."
