Online article (Dec. 2020)
Trump, it bears repeating, is no Shakespearean villain—he is too willful, ignorant, undisciplined, and shallow for that. What we are watching is not the despair of Macbeth as he learns that Birnam Wood to Dunsinane Hill doth come and that Macduff was not indeed born of woman. It is, rather, a malignant narcissist’s psyche collapsing in on its hollow core. That process may be of clinical or purely malevolent interest, but it’s not the stuff of tragedy, because Trump is really only a few shards of a genuine human being.
But Shakespeare does have something yet to offer us about this moment when treason against the constitutional order is a matter for serious Oval Office debate. The Bard had a rich sense of the creeps and criminals, sycophants and slimeballs, weirdos and wing nuts who hang around power. And although it is true that in an awful lot of his plays the good guys end up poorly, it is reassuring to know that a lot of the toadies, demagogues, and opportunists get theirs in the end.
Take some of the courtiers to Richard II, a weak and easily flattered king. “Caterpillars of the commonwealth,” the usurper Henry Bolingbroke calls them before dispatching them to the block. They go with a snarl. The duke of Buckingham, faithful aide to Richard III, is at least remorseful when his boss sends him off to meet the headsman: “Come lead me, officers, to the block of shame. / Wrong hath but wrong, and blame the due of blame.” Of course, members of Trump’s entourage need not fear so gruesome a fate, and I do not wish bodily harm on any of them. Yet gloomy thoughts of a similar kind may have occurred to more than one of the president’s appointees when he heard the swishing of the Twitter ax descending on his exposed neck.
Of course, the cast of characters in Trump’s mad court was much wider than this. Pious hypocrites? Jerry Falwell Jr. could probably take a lesson or two from Angelo in Measure for Measure. After preaching a rather austere morality (death as punishment for premarital sex), he tries to commit rape and judicial murder, thinking he can cover up his adventures. He cannot. “That Angelo is an adulterous thief, / An hypocrite, a virgin-violator, / Is it not strange, and strange?” Well, quite, and while Falwell is alleged to have merely watched rather than indulged, the ruin is similar, and equally well deserved.
But it would be wrong to think that bad behavior in Trump’s court is a masculine matter only. There is, after all, an odd mix of female political advisers, television personalities, and preachers who have, as does Queen Margaret, “a tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide.” They have not gone mad, as Margaret does, but they do have Joan of Arc’s misplaced self-confidence, and there is time yet.
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