Best-selling author Stephen King has always been a liberal, but ever since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the king of horror has appeared to succumb to a terminal case of what is mockingly called Trump Derangement Syndrome.
There is not a liberal politician King won’t flatter, or a Republican or conservative that he will not excoriate in the most hysterical, inaccurate, and sometimes vicious language. Now he’s set his sights on Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom King appears to hate mainly because King believes, without evidence, that Trump and Putin are some kind of political best friends.
King’s recent posts on X/Twitter have featured various photographs of the Russian leader, with King drawing attention to the fact that Putin’s facial expressions remain pretty much the same. In one post that showed Putin delivering an address, King wrote, “This is Putin happy.” But then right away, he posted the same picture and labeled it “This is Putin sad.”
King appears to be trying to make the point that the Russian leader is cold and emotionless, and the implication is that viewers can tell something about Putin’s character by noticing his unchanging expression.
Then, in third post, King posted the same photograph and captioned it, “This is Putin ecstatic.” It is not clear why King believes that using the same photograph three times demonstrates anything about whether Putin is capable of arranging his face differently.
In a fourth and final post in the series, King posted a new photograph of Putin with the accompanying text “His face NEVER F— CHANGES” (caps as in the original).
No one is surprised that rich, famous celebrities trend left politically, but King stands out as being among the most easily provoked and quickest to the online equivalent of yelling and screaming. He is the undisputed king of the horror genre, having sold more than 400 million books during his career, many of which were adapted into television movies or cinematic releases.
