Novelist Bret Easton Ellis has lamented “hysteria” over President Trump and described Michelle Obama’s comment that “when they go low, we go high” as “breathlessly condescending”.
“The hysteria over Trump is what I am talking about. It’s not about his policies or supposed racism. It’s about what I see as an overreaction to Trump,” Ellis said in an interview with the New Yorker. He said: “It’s not just the left. There seems to have been this hysterical overreaction that can be solved with voting him out of office.”
Ellis was talking about new book White, in which the Michelle Obama comment appears.
The author, who rose to prominence with Less than Zero, American Psycho, and The Rules of Attraction, was asked about the outrage over Trump calling Mexicans criminals and rapists. Ellis said he was more “bothered by people using that one thing two years later” in discourse surrounding the president.
“I was forced to care based on how it was covered and how people have reacted. Sure, you can be hysterical, or you can wait and vote him out of office,” Ellis said.
“They might very well vote him out. I hope they do, so we have some sense of normalcy in this household,” Ellis said referring to his live-in boyfriend, who he describes as a “Democratic, socialist-bordering-on-communist millennial.”
