Stephen King's Prediction for the Trump Administration Is More Terrifying Than Any of His Books

From Esquire

On Sunday, the president went on a hateful twitter tirade against congresswomen of color, his latest openly racist statements in a decades-long history of bigotry. That same day, fears of his promised raids on undocumented immigrants left city parks and markets quiet, as families spent the summer Sunday at home for fear of being rounded up by ICE. Legendary horror writer Stephen King took to Twitter with a grim forecast of what he fears might be next for America.

"First, you stoke hatred and fear of minorities," he wrote. "Then you round them up and put them in camps. Next, you send out raiding parties to get those who have been driven into hiding. The armbands come next right?"

The best-selling author has has long been a staunch Trump administration critic, and regularly vents his outrage at the ever-spiraling horrors of the Trump era on social media. His outspoken critiques have found the writer blocked by the president on Twitter—a move that a federal appeals court last week ruled was unconstitutional.

King’s 1979 novel The Dead Zone offered an eerie prediction of the Trump presidency. The book’s villain, Greg Stillson, is a real estate swindler who makes a rapid political rise as a fire-breathing demagogue backed by a cadre of bikers who enforce violent orders at his rallies. Stillson's political rise threatens to end in a nuclear bomb-fueled third World War.

In a video interview with NowThis last week, King discussed the similarities between Trump and his forty-year-old fictional character. “Do you think that the Trump presidency is scarier than a Stephen King novel?” the interviewer asked. “The short answer to that is yes,” replied King. “Yes, I do.”

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