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. 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? It’s a compelling premise, luring the reader through a maze of disorienting what-ifs. 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? “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. 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. 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.
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