Early in the 2016 campaign, months before Donald Trump won his first presidential nomination, I wrote my friend Philip Roth an email about his novel, The Plot Against America, which had appeared twelve years earlier. The book was Roth’s fanciful but chilling fiction about a fascist takeover of the presidency in 1940 by the pilot and American hero Charles A. Lindbergh. I was curious about the possible connection between the novel and Trump’s all too factual political emergence.

Over the years, several pundits had claimed that Plot was really Roth...