The seeds of books germinate in both well-lit and shadowy imaginative spaces. In this way, books exhibit an affinity with the dreams Sigmund Freud studied in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), where he learned that identifying the “background thoughts” from which dream symbols emerge, particularly those intricate or bizarre images resistant to quick explanation, was hardly a simple task. The search for their origins led him to free association, a process in which a patient focuses on specific images, not on a complete dream narrative, and to the conclusion that “interpretation en detail and not en masse” better enables an investigator to uncover the overdetermined nature of dream images—their provenance in several sources, not just one. Like dreams, books often arise from an untidy jumble of places: an archive of prior cultural texts (scrivened, visual, aural); major social, scientific and historical developments; and the imprints of individual experiences, large and small, etched on a writer's memory. Some of these are transformative or, in the worst of cases, traumatic—a stunning success or mortifying failure, a once-in-a-century pandemic and a pitched medical battle to vanquish it—while others are tethered to the banalities of everyday life that, surprisingly, demand expression. Such is the case with From the “Troubles” to Trumpism.

As a student of Irish history and culture for over forty years, I have enjoyed numerous opportunities to visit Ireland and Northern Ireland, and written about both, most often discussing literature, drama and theatrical production. This engagement constitutes one source of the pages that follow but, again, there are others. One in particular motivates the political bristle of this book: recent socio-political discord in America, particularly that associated with the presidential election of 2020, the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the shocking state of affairs (and indictments) prefatory to the 2024 elections.

There is an incisive exchange about history and collective memory in Bernard MacLaverty's Cal, a novel (and, later, film) set during the Troubles complete with Orange Lodge parades, deadly ambushes and the firebombing of Catholic homes. Over his career, MacLaverty has written several novels and short stories portraying in often excruciating detail the emotional toll of living through such violence, with Cal being, arguably, the most poignant. When discussing the novel, critics often point to similarities between the dilemma of its main characters and that of Shakespeare's “star-crossed” lovers Romeo and Juliet, as its protagonist Cal McCrystal (McCluskey in later printings), an unemployed, working-class Catholic, falls in love with Marcella Morton, the young widow of a Protestant policeman in whose murder Cal was complicit. In this “love across the barricades” story, as in Shakespeare's play, a sense of tragic foreboding is occasionally relieved by glimmers of possibility—for example, when Cal finds fulfilling work on the Morton family farm and makes a new home there to be near Marcella. His days of living on the dole may be over, and his new job hints at a better future. Unlike the protagonists of Romeo and Juliet whose fates are tied to family lineages and histories they cannot alter, Cal seems convinced that he possesses the agency to escape his connection to sectarian violence. Sadly, in the novel's closing scene, his arrest and imminent punishment destroy any possibility of a future with Marcella. But the question remains unanswered, to recall Haines's observation in James Joyce's Ulysses, of how “history is to blame” for Cal's fate. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps historical memory and the at times nefarious uses to which history is put are the culprits (Figure 6).

Unlike Cal, MacLaverty's later novel Grace Notes (1997) develops tensions between memory and aspiration that lead to a happier, even refulgent conclusion. The novel begins with a fledgling composer, Catherine McKenna, returning to Northern Ireland from Scotland to attend her father's funeral. At the cemetery where he is interred, she passes the grave of a boy she once knew who “gave his life for Ireland,” as an inscription beneath his name on his headstone clarifies. Reading the epitaph, Catherine wonders what musical composition might best represent the militant nationalism for which her former classmate sacrificed his life.

In the same spring that John Hume's seminal article appeared in the Irish Times (May 1964) advocating for nonviolent means of addressing a growing crisis in Northern Ireland, Wendell Berry published his first book of poetry. Accompanied by stunning illustrations, the book was comprised of a single elegy, “November Twenty Six Nineteen Sixty Three,” which first appeared the previous December in The Nation. At the same time, profound social change was occurring in Ireland, Northern Ireland and America that would redefine the relationships between all three—and between all three and Britain.

In America on October 1, 1962, after the governor of Mississippi defied a Supreme Court order and a riot ensued that required the National Guard to subdue, James Meredith became the first African American to matriculate at the University of Mississippi. Some 250,000 civil rights marchers traveled to Washington the following August, where Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech reverberated through the Lincoln Memorial. In the summer of 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, with the Voting Rights Act signed into law a year later. The impact of these events was enormous, and it was not confined to America.

Acknowledgments

The story of American investment in Ireland that Charles Haughey related to the Economic Club of New York in May 1982 must have amazed many listeners. Because, as Tim Sablik of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond characterizes it, the implementation of tight monetary policy to contain soaring inflation between July 1981 and November 1982 ignited the “worst economic downturn” since the Great Depression. Here, “downturn” denotes the “largest cumulative business cycle decline of employment and output” in America's post-World War II period (Goodfriend and King, 1). When Paul Volcker was named Chairman of the Federal Reserve on August 6, 1979, inflation had already risen to over 13% and the unemployment rate stood at 7.5% as manufacturing, residential construction and automobile sales languished. In the latter two sectors, unemployment reached levels of 22% and 24%, respectively, and mortgage rates in 1981 climbed to 18.63% in October. By 1989, they were still over 10%. However, eventually Volcker and the “Reagan recovery” brought inflation under control. During the president's two terms, the Standard and Poor 500 Index more than doubled; new jobs were created, and mortgage rates came down (though, speaking from personal experience, a 30-year fixed mortgage of nearly 12% in 1985 was hardly a panacea for first-time homebuyers). As economists Marvin Goodfriend and Robert King put it, Volcker's eventual victory over inflation made the “inflation peak” of early 1980 “stand out dramatically in the U.S. experience” (1).

It was a blustery July night in Galway, as if somehow November had finagled a new home on the calendar and banished summer for the remainder of 2017. Savoring the warmth of a banquet hall on the NUI-Galway campus, members of the Eugene O’Neill International Society and their guests gathered to dine; to honor Jessica Lange and Gabriel Byrne for their star turns in O’Neill's plays, particularly in Long Day's Journey into Night in 2016; and to enjoy President Michael D. Higgins's account of memorable evenings in the theatre viewing O’Neill's masterworks. Sitting with my wife, daughter and fellow banqueters—and having enjoyed speaking with President Higgins before—I recalled President Mary Robinson's learned remarks twenty-five years earlier at a convocation of Joyceans at Trinity College in Dublin. Irish presidents are expected to be well-read. And, much like a president's words, his or her reading matters.

Listening to President Higgins, my American friends and I felt more than a twinge of envy that our Irish colleagues could claim such a cultured man as their leader (fifteen months later, they reclaimed him when he won a second seven-year term). More than a published poet and theatregoer, Higgins is also a perceptive commentator on modern Irish literature, revising his 2012 remarks at a Dublin conference dedicated to Bernard Shaw's work to introduce the anthology Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland (2020).

On June 17, 2022, Donald Trump addressed the “Road to Majority” conference in Nashville, Tennessee, organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition. In addition to the former president, other featured speakers included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, then GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel, televangelist and senior pastor at the First Baptist Church in Dallas Dr. Robert Jeffress, and radio show host Michael Medved. With the exception of Medved, whom a 2016 Politico article dubbed the only “vehemently anti-Donald Trump” host at Salem Media (Gold, “Michael Medved”), the roster of keynote speakers confirmed the pro- Trump tone of the meeting as reported on the Coalition's website: “Evangelical activists reinforce[d] Trump's dominance of the GOP” and gave the former president a “warm reception” ( June 21, 2022). In his remarks, Trump attacked the Select Committee on January 6, particularly its finding that he pressured Vice President Mike Pence either to return electors’ votes to the states or declare the 2020 presidential election invalid. As the Committee's hearings continued into the fall of 2022 and a flurry of indictments followed in 2023, other revelations caused defendant Trump—and much of the nation—even greater consternation.

On her June 6, 2019, show, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow characterized Donald Trump's visit to Ireland as “a careening circus of pratfall embarrassments.” Most of the wince-inducing mortifications surfaced in the president's meeting with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar the preceding day during which Trump's ignorance and hubris were on full display. But the trip also exhibited more than low comedy. In the context of American presidents’ appearances in Ireland—Joe Biden's trip to Ireland in 2023 marked the seventh such occurrence—Trump's stay was uniquely disturbing and ironic, especially so given Peter Keegan's vision in Bernard Shaw's John Bull's Other Island of a tranquil and beautiful country transmogrified by the “bustle” of tourists populating expensive hotels and playing golf assisted by child caddies. Prior to his arrival in Shannon, members of fifty political, human rights and anti-racism organizations that formed the Stop Trump Ireland coalition organized to protest his visit. The coalition includes Friends of the Irish Environment, which collected 100,000 signatures for a petition decrying the methods used by the Trump International Golf Club in Doonbeg to prevent erosion.

Such disdain, even outrage, is not unprecedented, as not every American president has basked in the Céad Mile Fáilte (100,000 welcomes) extended to Presidents Kennedy and Obama from huge audiences in Dublin, or felt the “rousing enthusiasm” Bill Clinton, the first president to visit Northern Ireland while in office, enjoyed in Belfast (Mitchell, Making Peace, 26). Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in, respectively, 1970 and 1984, were greeted warmly in the homes of their ancestors but, as I have described, demonstrators in Dublin hurled eggs at Nixon while others burned his effigy at the American embassy. In an impromptu ceremony, eight graduates of Galway's University College set fire to their degrees, and three holders of an honorary doctorate of law degrees returned or “de-conferred” them, in response to Reagan's receipt of his honorary degree (Booth, “Reagan Booed”).

A growing number of Americans fear that Trumpism may ignite a civil war and, as I have mentioned, for some the war has already begun. This grim thesis became more plausible after the FBI's August 8, 2022 recovery of classified documents from Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club, which prompted many of his supporters to clamor for revenge. But they couldn't agree on what form the vengeance should take, or even what to call it. Apparently forgetting their disgust with the “Defund the Police” mantra heard during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, some congressional Republicans embarked upon a “Defund the FBI” crusade. Ever entrepreneurial when it comes to funding opportunities, Trump's “Save America” PAC sought to extract more money from donors by sending some more than 100 email solicitations in the days after the search featuring such taglines as “THEY BROKE INTO MY HOME” and “They’re coming after YOU” (Garcia, “Trump Supporters”). But in the contest over formulating indignant responses to the search of Mar-a-Lago, “civil war” seemed to garner the most attention, although in the dark corners of cyberspace sentiments like “Fuck a Civil War. Give them a REVOLUTION” attracted their share of support as well.

Part One: Dr. No and the Grim Reaper

As fans of Ian Fleming's redoubtable spy know, Dr. Julius No is James Bond's adversary in Doctor No (1958), a novel that when adapted as a film in 1962 launched the most enduring franchise in the history of Western cinema. Since then, and for the most part, films chronicling Bond's adventures— as well as novels by John Gardner, Anthony Horowitz, Sebastian Faulks and others after Fleming's untimely passing in 1964—have flourished, and such phrases as “shaken, not stirred” and “Bond girls” are now part of our vernacular. So, too, are the names of some of Fleming's villains, with “Dr. No” used to lampoon dour politicians hostile to socially progressive legislation. In Northern Ireland and America, the press has employed “Dr. No” as a nickname for Ian Paisley, the late fundamentalist minister and founder of Northern Ireland's DUP and Senator Mitch McConnell, also known as “The Grim Reaper” and “Darth Vader,” among other sobriquets. For the most part, McConnell seems amused by these inventions; only “Moscow Mitch,” a reference to his indifference to Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, appears to annoy him because of its implication that he is an “asset” of the Kremlin (Hulse, “Moscow Mitch”). Both men's capacity for negativism, the most obvious reason for these names, motivates my juxtaposition of them with Fleming's arch-villain—and with each other.

Outlining the Sisyphean labors of brokering the Good Friday Agreement, George Mitchell in Making Peace suggests such a comparison when recounting Paisley's recalcitrance during nearly two years of negotiations (which were preceded by some six months of painstaking preparatory work). On occasion, this abrasiveness serves as a structuring motif in Mitchell's narrative. In a chapter entitled “No. No. No. No,” inspired by Paisley's outburst at the inaugural meeting of the parties tasked with negotiating the Agreement, Mitchell recalls the DUP leader's “blistering attack” on the British and Irish governments for foisting an American senator on the group.

My twin brother and I were born in Springfield, Illinois, the “Land of Lincoln,” and celebrated our ninth birthdays three months before John F. Kennedy's election as president in November 1960. But even though we watched the evening news attentively on a fuzzy black-and-white television with our parents—a “mixed marriage” of a Protestant father and Catholic mother—neither of us quite understood why the election seemed to matter so much. A few weeks later on Thanksgiving morning, our view got clearer. The day began with helping our mother and grandmother, a secondgeneration Irish American, prepare for the traditional feast. Our jobs included tearing a mound of stiff, day-old bread into stuffing for the turkey, polishing silverware and carrying plates and other necessities to the table. This year was different, though, because not long after we started our chores mother and grandmother, cooking at the stove, began laughing and crying softly at the same time. I remember asking, “Mom, what's wrong? Did something bad happen?” With a smile she reassured us, “No, boys. These are tears of joy, because grandmother never thought she would live to see an Irish Catholic president in the White House. Now she will.”