In our collective struggle to explain what ails the nation, we’ve developed an annoying habit of finding predictions of Trump in 20th century fiction. It was, back in innocent 2015, a lesser Sinclair Lewis novel about a populist-turned-fascist military takeover of America that foretold the dystopia brewing all around us. Since then, the male chauvinist theocracy of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale has reigned—even spawning an update aimed at the #MeToo era. And, of course, everything is “Orwellian.”

Like stoned teenagers transfixed by a late-night History Channel special on the Bible Code or the predictions of Nostradamus, we’re convinced that if only we’d paid attention to the signs, we’d have seen President Trump coming. If only we’d kept, say, Fletcher Knebel’s 1965 political thriller Night of Camp David, about a freshman senator’s backroom campaign to unseat a dangerously paranoid president, in print all these years! If only that one had been the vehicle for Burt Lancaster to play a seething sociopath, then perhaps we’d be prepared.