Last summer, long before we knew the country’s fate, the New Yorker sent the country’s preeminent satirist to the Trump campaign trail. George Saunders came back with a characteristically incisive dispatch, one which ended on a rumination about America’s fragility.

Now, as the short story writer and national treasure does press for his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, he’s been discussing the new administration nearly as much as the book.

The novel, for the record, has been described almost uniformly as surreal and brilliant—a tale of the night that President Abraham Lincoln buried his son Willie, as told by the ghosts in the Georgetown graveyard.

Saunders visited the District on Monday, speaking to hundreds at a Politics and Prose event, where he took part in a dramatic reading and addressed the country’s political climate.

“I don’t think the current mess we’re in is separate from how we’ve allowed the artistic mode of thought to degrade,” he told the crowd, launching a vigorous defense of the arts.

“I feel like saying to young artists: it’s time to double down on our belief of art as sacred. We have to fight against the materialism in our culture. We have to fight against the sort of aggressive banality that seems to be so current,” Saunders said. “And I would also say I’m not going to let this Trump movement take away the best part of myself and I’m not going to let it take away my best writing years.”

To that end, he debuted an untitled poem—which he’s taken to calling Trump L’oeil. Saunders downplayed its form as “Seussian doggerel” before launching into 17 stanzas that perfectly encapsulate the “fragile egomaniac” in power and the resistance that it calls for. “For goodness, peace, and decency / Were never heaven-sent; / And each of us must now become / our own alt-President.”

TRUMP L’OEIL

A fragile egomaniac
Has taken up the reins,
Obsessed with size, defensive,
and unmoved by others’ pains.

He seems to think that saying A
While B is clearly true,
Will cause the truth of B to wane
And make A true, to you.

He stomps his foot and with his hand
He does that little chopper,
Then calls all things “amazing,”
As he tells another whopper.

What is it that he wants so much?
What wound must he assuage?
With all these lies and posturing,
and all that pent-up rage?

When all is said and done, it seems,
The thing he wants is MORE.
Enough to finally satisfy
some raging inner war.

Everything’s unfair to him,
So “sad,” so “overrated”;
Whatever gifts the world can give?
Insulting and belated.

If some of you who voted
For this vain and flailing man
Are noting now some meanness
In his attitude and plan:

It’s fine, it’s great, we welcome you!
Please come on back and aid us
In switching off the Kellyannes,
Who nightly serenade us

With tricky sliding caveats
And puzzling odd denials
With scary twisted Orwell riffs
And sunny prom queen smiles.

In other times and places
This dopey gong has sounded
To claim that truth’s negotiable
And that we’re all surrounded

By enemies! By enemies!
By horror and by hate,
By refugees who want us dead,
And liberals sleeping late.

But what if, in the end, my friends,
What seems most true is true:
The president is like himself,
And not like me and you?

A famous guy for all these years
An ego in a bubble,
Who learned that great attention
Could be got by causing trouble?

And craving said attention,
Scuttled out in its pursuit,
The working man’s defender,
In a fine Brioni suit.

Speak out, rise up, correct and shout,
Be stubborn and satirical
Resist, rebuff, demand the truth,
Be positive and lyrical.

Your country needs you now, for sure
Your country needs your power.
It needs you like a fragile thing
In some uncertain hour.

For goodness, peace, and decency
Were never heaven-sent;
And each of us must now become
our own alt-President.