Thompson played up this aspect of his legacy more than anyone else. Look at the cover photo for Gonzo Papers, Volume 3: Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream (1990): he crouches, pointing a handgun at a typewriter. It’s his cynicism – admittedly, an exquisite, formidable cynicism – which is celebrated today.
That hazy Thompsonian surface, that blurring of truth and fiction, helped create the media landscape that produced a leader like Donald Trump. Though there is no explicit relationship between them – and Thompson would likely have weighed Trump as contemptuously as he did Nixon – the Maga pyrotechnics of visceral communication, liberal provocation, and a willingness to bend reality to fit their presentation of facts aren’t all that far from gonzo – gonzo as a “spirit” that broadcasts varnished truths. This has also allowed Maga to colonise Thompson’s freak vote. If in 1972 those alienated youths, conspiracy theorists and dissenters from authority pulled themselves on to electoral rolls for the “far out” ideas of McGovern, that same demographic now follows Trump. And from their pockets of the internet they arbitrate the new age of the crank.
Yet Hunter S Thompson’s diagnosis of the psychology of America also allows us to understand today’s US administration in a longer national context – a country that, as we know in the age of Trump, swerves erratically between deal-making, sabre-rattling and regime-changing, that is as susceptible to imperialism as it is to isolationism. His work shows us that, rather than a bronze aberration in the otherwise unblemished advancement of US liberal democracy, the current president and his Maga-world are just another little punt further up the field to the goal line of American extremism.