Angela Lansbury and Laurence Harvey in “The Manchurian Candidate.” (Associated Press)

Every week, I answer a question from the Monday Act Four chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Dec. 12 chat here and submit questions for the Dec. 19 chat, the last of 2016, here. This week, a reader writes in with a question about art borrowing from politics.

How long until there is a movie or TV series where the president is an incompetent buffoon who is a pawn of a foreign power? Or is that just too implausible for fiction?

There have been far more stories about presidents or presidential candidates being targeted for assassination by foreign powers than there are stories about presidents being controlled by foreign powers, but there’s a definite history of these sorts of plots.

One of the most famous, of course, is “The Manchurian Candidate,” though the control there is a bit more indirect. The novels “Stealth Bomber” and “Ikon” both involve Soviet plots to secretly control the president, while Irving Wallace’s “The Second Lady” involves a Soviet plan to replace the first lady with a double who is a secret agent. In stories such as “The Event,” “Nightrise” and even an episode of “The Simpsons,” it’s aliens who are controlling or impersonating the president. And in “The Dark Knight Strikes Again,” a fake president becomes a front for Lex Luthor.

My favorite of this genre of stories is “In Like Flint,” a completely bonkers 1967 James Bond spoof, which involves an international cabal of evil feminists kidnapping the president and replacing him with a compliant actor surgically modified to look like his double, while also brainwashing the women of the world through their salon hairdryers. It’s probably too silly to serve the more critical purposes you’re thinking of, but it’s an amazing time capsule of ’60s fantasies about female power, sexual and otherwise, and how women might go about seizing power.

I’m sure pop culture will respond to Donald Trump’s presidency. But given how long it takes to make a television show or a movie, it will probably be a couple of years before we figure out which of many, many options Hollywood takes in making that critique.