Feminist thriller incites readers ‘To Kill the President’

“Sam Bourne” is the pseudonym of Jonathan Freedland, a senior editor at the Guardian, as Nic Cohen, another Guardian employee, revealed. The plea to kill Donald Trump, is presented as a “fiction thriller”, but not very convincingly.

The weekly Guardian columnist and BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history presenter, was awarded the Orwell special prize for journalism in 2014, and is regarded by “progressives” as an astute propagandist. But Freedland’s latest attempt rather suggests sheer desperation.

His tale which reads like Guardian headlines about Trump, concludes that representatives of the Washington Deep State have decided that the only “safe option” was to assassinate their commander-in-chief.

In Freedland’s book, US officials scramble to stop their president from ordering a nuclear strike after North Korea mocked his manhood. According to Cohen this is a very “realistic” description of the Trump White House, as “everyone knows the North Koreans would retaliate by reducing Seoul to rubble,” except of course Trump himself.

Freedland hoping his feminist incitement will sell

He suggests that Trump suffers from “long-term mental sickness mutating into a dark madness” according to Cohen. And because “the world’s most powerful man lives in the grey area between the sociopathic and the psychopathic”, no violent leftist fantasy Freedland can dream up, seems too far-fetched.

A female White House legal aide spots a plot to murder the recently elected president who, though never named, seems familiar, after unexpectedly winning an election against a cheating female Democrat. The explicitly feminist thriller, is Maggie Costello’s quandary about whether to stop her deeply misogynist boss, the president, from being shot.

Freedland also focuses on Steve Bannon, which he portrays as the ultimate anti-feminist “antisemite”. Bannon is someone who “delights in acting in bad faith” in order “to intimidate and disconcert” Jews.

Reading Freedland’s terrible book, it is obvious to see why the genre has become exhausted. While intelligence agencies battle Islamist extremism, the majority of Hollywood thriller writers believe the only acceptable villain is a Russian.

Also, commercial reasons shape the plotlines. A thriller with an Arab monarchy or the Chinese state as the enemy, would never be screened abroad. Leftists would therefore rather focus on “racism” and “anti-Muslim bigotry” and now also on their ultimate favourite fantasy on how to kill Trump.

Paranoia is presented as “realism” and as Freedland’s plot grows more violent, Trump and Bannon’s ambitions are presented as more “dictatorial”. While inciting the reader to murder, the author may have instead accomplished his own ethical downfall.