To explore more of “Our Year of Trump,” a look at how our city has dealt with 12 exhausting months, click here.
It was the great cliché of 2016: If someone had written the year as a novel—a reality-show tycoon violates every rule of political decorum and becomes President—it would have been panned for being ludicrous. If anything, the 2017 sequel was even more far-fetched: The victory, it turned out, may have been aided by a foreign power. Now a prosecutor was on the case, with the presidency hanging in the balance. As 2018 looms, we decided to take our own stab at the story. We asked a handful of fiction writers—from different backgrounds and genres—to each write a story set in the new year. Can their scenarios manage to be stranger than life? Check back in a year. Stories edited by Howard Means.
These stories appear in the December 2017 issue of Washingtonian.
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In the bunker after the apocalypse—or was it?
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It’s 2018, and someone in Crawford, Texas, thinks he has the secret to a GOP comeback.
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A novelist gets a call from the president: “write a book tearing me apart.”
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A trip to see the White House Christmas Tree—and answer some questions from men in suits.
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A presidential offer to a forgotten constituency—at a price.
Howard Means is a former Washingtonian senior editor whose first article for the magazine appeared 40 years ago. The author of ten books, he now lives in rural Virginia.
