David Simon Adapting Philip Roth’s 'The Plot Against America'

HBO has remained quiet about the future of “The Deucefollowing the allegations of sexual misconduct against the series’ twinned star, James Franco. But that show’s co-creator David Simon isn’t going to sit around waiting for an answer, because he’s got another big project on his plate.

In a New York Times profile of acclaimed author Philip Roth, it’s revealed that David Simon is hard at work on a six-part, miniseries adaptation of “The Plot Against America.” If you thought “The Man In The High Castle” served all your Nazi alternate history needs, get ready because this story imagines what might’ve happened if Lindbergh became President and came to an agreement with Hitler who has conquered Europe. Here’s the book synopsis:

This may be alternative history, but it is chillingly and convincingly realistic in its portrayal. The reader watches, horrified yet totally absorbed, as America spirals down the path toward fascism.

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. 

What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family — and for a million such families all over the country — during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.

You can practically hear the buttons being pushed and the parallels being drawn to a certain man who is currently in the White House, but Roth says there is one key distinction between his book and current day politics.

“However prescient ‘The Plot Against America’ might seem to you, there is surely one enormous difference between the political circumstances I invent there for the U.S. in 1940 and the political calamity that dismays us so today. It’s the difference in stature between a President Lindbergh and a President Trump. Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency,” the author explained. “Lindbergh, historically, was the courageous young pilot who in 1927, for the first time, flew nonstop across the Atlantic, from Long Island to Paris. He did it in 33.5 hours in a single-seat, single-engine monoplane, thus making him a kind of 20th-century Leif Ericson, an aeronautical Magellan, one of the earliest beacons of the age of aviation. Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.”

There’s no word where this project is set up, or far along in development it might be, but it seems to early days as Simon is still putting pen to paper. Nonethless, with Simon involved, we’re certainly eager to see what comes of it.