George Saunders on Trump and Mystery

In July, he published his months-long attempt to understand Trump supporters and how they came to invest so much in a highly divisive, unconventional candidate. When he mentioned this project at the Festival of Faith & Writing in Grand Rapids, Mich., in April, he was met with excited “oooh”s: Saunders seems both a natural and a jarringly wrong fit to capture this election season. Perhaps the writer best ready to chronicle the already-absurd, and the one most willing to take it seriously, Saunders — at this moment in 2016 — may also be a kinder national narrator than we deserve.