Friday
There’s been a Macbeth sighting in the public news recently. Reporting on the FBI descending upon Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to seize illegally pilfered documents—a story that gets more interesting by the hour—former special agent for the FBI and now Yale lecturer Asha Ramgappa said that Attorney General Merrick Garland was employing a Birnam Wood approach. My instant response: “That’s really cool!”
It’s a perfectly applied allusion. Macbeth believes he will never have to account for his crimes because a supernatural apparition, conjured up by the witches, has informed him of the following:
Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are:
Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.
Macbeth feels as invulnerable to accountability as Trump, After all,
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root?
Meanwhile Malcolm, like the FBI, is plotting his stealth attack—although the FBI at least let Trump’s Secret Service detail that it was coming (not to mention sending an earlier subpoena). Nevertheless, stealth from better than a full frontal assault, and stealth has been Garland’s M.O. He aims to catch Trump off guard:
Let every soldier hew him down a bough
And bear’t before him: thereby shall we shadow
The numbers of our host and make discovery
Err in report of us.
When Birnam Wood begins to move, Macbeth goes into the same kind of denial we are seeing from Trump and his faithful followers. They just want to hear good news, not the truth. Although to their credit, they probably won’t hang truthtellers from trees until they starve to death:
Messenger
As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look’d toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to move.
MACBETH
Liar and slave!
Messenger
Let me endure your wrath, if’t be not so:
Within this three mile may you see it coming;
I say, a moving grove.
MACBETH
If thou speak’st false,
Upon the next tree shall thou hang alive
Till famine cling thee.
I’ve compared Trump to Macbeth multiple times (for instance, here), but I haven’t focused on who or what would take him down. The unassuming Garland, who resembles the unassuming Malcolm, works for me.
