In a way, the chapter is a diversion from the main story, but in another way, it’s the heart of the book, allowing us to understand Jack’s introspectiveness and self-doubt, and why he finds Willie, a man of supreme self-belief, strangely appealing. While at the time Trump’s election seemed like an unprecedented phenomenon, Stark’s story shows the lasting appeal of the strong-man leader in times of economic turmoil. It also introduces into the novel an explanation of the ways in which one person's actions affect other people and ripple outward from the center, touching both the present and the future.

In one of his climactic speeches, he charms a crowd, then incites them, and ends by promising “buckets of blood” and shouting: “Give me a meat-axe! Even the book’s title All the King’s Men, while a direct quote from the Humpty Dumpty fable, also acts as a reference to Long’s campaign song ‘ Every Man a King’. Gathering and updating information about these books is more an art than a science, and new identication criteria and points of issue are sometimes discovered that may contradict currently accepted identification points.

He’s a populist who addresses to the redneck voters and who got genuinely angry when children died in the collapse of a school due to poor workmanship.

The bad consists of the situations he must work in and the manipulation of people he must do to get them to do what he wants, which he deems the good. And we see played out in detail the corruption at the heart of politics – how a man who starts out full of good intention and moral purpose cuts a little corner here, exerts a little pressure there, sucks up to the rich, all initially to achieve his pet projects for the benefit of his constituents; until suddenly he finds he has become the kind of crooked, manipulative, self-justifying politician he once despised and intended to destroy. The doctor, enraged by Willie's affair with Anne and his manipulation of medical contracts, assassinates the governor.Political polarisation and the dehumanising of one’s opponents infects Warren’s world, much as it ripped apart Western liberal democracies. For all of Warren’s flaunted cynicism about politics, at his core he thrills to a Progressive/Populist vision of politics as a struggle of “the people versus the interests. It’s uncomfortable because Willie the politician’s worst sins are not those of bad speeches, poor legislative ideas, or ineptitude. Caught between the post-Christmas blues and the happy warmth of Trinity, the term can sometimes feel like an endless period of waiting and misery.