Tony Kushner on why he wouldn't write a Trump or Reagan character: "There's no core coherence"

How many times, over Donald Trump’s many long years in the public eye, have you thought his behavior was simply too cartoonishly villainous to believe? (If the answer is “none times,” um, feel free to stop reading.) Award-winning playwright and screenwriter of The Fablemans Tony Kushner prefers his bad guys with a little more substance, which is why you won’t find any Trump (or Ronald Reagan) stand-ins in his work.

Speaking with Slash Film about his screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical film, Kushner reflects, “I’ve always felt like, I don’t know how you would write a character if you can’t understand the way the character self-ideates. How does the person straddle their own contradictions? I mean, unless they’re psychotic, in which case they don’t have to do that.” He adds, “This is why I don’t think I really want to write Donald Trump as a character. I didn’t want to write Ronald Reagan as a character, because I don’t think there’s any core coherence and I don’t think they bother with it.”

“Your character lacks core coherence”—now that’s a playwright burn if there ever was one. Kushner acknowledges that the “danger” of writing more substantive villains is that “it can lead you into a place where you’re writing Nazis and trying to make people feel sorry for them.” Thankfully, that is not the case with The Fablemans’ bad guys, who are merely high school bullies.

As such, Kushner has no problems making those characters three-dimensional, because “most people, including people who behave pretty despicably, you have to think, ‘How does this person understand him or herself and what’s their internal ego ideal?’” He explains. “How do they explain the moments to themselves when they fail to live up to either their own standards or what we would consider more generally shared standards of decency and good behavior?” No, Donald Trump doesn’t seem like the kind to worry about living up to a shared standard of decency. It’s excellent advice for writers, though!