‘I named him Greg Stillson’: Stephen King reveals which book he wrote about Donald Trump over 45 years ago

Another day, another vicious takedown of Donald Trump courtesy of Stephen King. While fans of the acclaimed horror author should by now be aware of his hatred for the former president, what they might not have known is that the rivalry stretches back much further than we thought, at least according to King’s new post. 

Taking to his least favorite platform on Monday, the author said that over four decades ago, he “wrote a book about Donald Trump.” The book in question is not It (though Trump is certainly a clown), but The Dead Zone, and King claimed that one of the central characters, Greg Stillson, is Trump in literary form. 

For those unfamiliar, The Dead Zone is the King sci-fi novel published in 1979. It follows clairvoyant protagonist Johnny Smith as he comes into contact with Stillson, a real estate businessman-turned-president whose story arc feels mighty familiar when compared to that of Trump’s.

Among other parallels, Stillson — played by Martin Sheen in the movie adaptation — is a grifter, bully, blackmailer, and leader of controversial political rallies, and the similarities between the pair have been noted long before King’s most recent post on X. 

Earlier this year, a new fan of The Dead Zone took to Reddit to make note of the parallels between Trump and Stillson, while another person made the comparison on X way back in 2016. Even King himself has mentioned the similarities in the past. In a 2019 interview with Now This, the author said he could envision the rise of a real-life politician who, like Stillson, was “willing to say anything that he would capture the imaginations of the American people.”

King went on to mention some of the uncanny, The Simpsons-like predictions he unknowingly foresaw in The Dead Zone, from both Trump and Stillson wearing hard hats at rallies, to their shared claims of cleaning out Washington and the media’s dismissal of both figures as viable candidates. “Stillson has a lot of the Trump genome in him,” King said.

While a contender for the president being compared to a villain in a sci-fi novel is scary enough, King has said in the past that if he’s elected, a second Trump term would be “scarier” than any novel he’s written. Thankfully, King is doing his darnedest to ensure those horrors don’t become a reality, emerging as one of the most vocal opposers to Trump since his first presidency in 2016. 

In the last few months alone, King has said Trump’s brain is “turning to mush”, declared that he has “no business being near the levers of power”, criticized his debate performance, and described him as “upper-class twit”, an “elderly man”, and a “senile uncle at the dinner table.” 

At this point, we could almost compile all of King’s anti-Trump X posts into a horror novel of their own, but the former president would probably toss that away in favor of his wordless picture book. Who are we kidding, he probably doesn’t read because that would take time away from watching Fox News.