Michiko Kakutani

“For most of us, art is supposed to do something more than simply mirror the confusions of the world.”

“One of the things I wanted to do in 'The Death of Truth' was explore some of the larger social and political dynamics that fueled the rise of Trump and brought America to the point where a t...”

“If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump - a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses,...”

“Trump tapped into a lot of middle-class and working-class disillusion with the political establishment and into economic worries and resentments that ballooned in the wake of the 2008 financ...”

“Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what...”

“President Trump not only lies with astonishing temerity and abandon, but those lies connect into equally false narratives that gin up the worst fears and prejudices of his base.”

“My mother's family was among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast who were dispatched to internment camps during World War II.”

“Indeed, 'The Second Plane' is such a weak, risible, and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism,...”

“With his mendacity and increasingly virulent attacks on immigrants, Muslims, women, the press, the judiciary, the intelligence services, the F.B.I. - any group or institution that he finds t...”