What would Orwell have made of Trump?

As far as we know, George Orwell never visited America. This is a great pity. What a joy it would be for a biographer to find in some provincial attic the long-lost diaries of his travels around the segregated South, or his acid reflections on working as a scriptwriter in late 1930s Hollywood.

I think the best indication of how he thought of the United States is to be found in his essay Raffles and Miss Blandish. In this, he contrasts E.W. Hornung’s light-hearted tales of the cricket-playing gentleman thief Arthur Raffles and James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a violent crime thriller of the late 1930s, set in the USA, which became notorious — and successful — in Britain during world war two. Oddly enough it is technically English. As Orwell notes, it is ‘written in the American language,’ but ‘the author, an Englishman who has (I believe) never been in the United States, seems to have made a complete mental transference to the American underworld.