Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

One can only wonder what Hunter S. Thompson would have made of the Trump “lovefests”

The late Hunter S. Thompson, inventor of the subjective and acid Gonzo Journalism, had a turn of phrase and an eye for the absurd. His classic is 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a wild, hallucinogenic journey fueled by an arsenal of drugs causing our hero’s perceptions to become increasingly warped, leading to visions of oversized, grotesque lizards.

He took a similar sensitivity to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, in which he followed the chaotic 1972 US presidential campaign, providing an unfiltered, darkly humorous, deeply personal and often exaggerated perspective. Ask Questions Later would pay good money to hire Thompson to do a sequel today, if we could — and we would ask him to deploy the same tools, minus the exaggeration. It simply is no longer necessary.

I won’t pretend with false equivalence. The Kamala Harris campaign is a little bit boring, like the candidate herself not too rhetorically inspiring, but it is basically standard issue (other than her bizarre coronation in place of a disastrously aging incumbent who actually won the primaries). Nay — the campaign that Thompson would need to cover is that of Donald Trump.

He could bring to this coverage the foundational wisdom that drove him in the 1970s. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, he said. This has obviously occurred already, all over the map. His true gift was prescience: There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment. Good Lord! How they most assuredly have.

Here are just a few recent moments that I’d love Thompson to have covered the Gonzo way.