Tuesday
Those familiar with Shakespeare knew that a narcissist like Trump would not relinquish power and privilege quietly if he lost the election. That’s because we’ve read King Lear.
I’ve compared Trump to King Lear numerous times (for instance, here and here), but this is the first time the comparison involves how the two handle failure. Both throw a hissy fit when they no longer command everyone’s full obeisance. Trump’s accusations of voter fraud are par for the course.
Their situations differ in that Lear willingly gives up his leadership position—he is not booted from office—but Trump is like Lear in that he didn’t care about leading. Being president for him was chiefly about having his ego stroked, which is what Lear wants as well. Narcissist that he is, Lear thinks people will keep stroking after he steps down.
Act II is about his rude awakening.
Lear’s elder daughters provide the shock. While their father is in power and has goodies to dispense, Goneril and Regan prove the equal of any Trump sycophant with their assurances of love. Here’s Goneril:
Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;
Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;
No less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honour;
As much as child e’er loved, or father found;
A love that makes breath poor, and speech unable;
Beyond all manner of so much I love you.
Once her father has stepped down and his retinue is partying in her castle, however, Goneril sings a different tune. The way she and her sister systematically strip their father of his dignity is a case study in sadistic humiliation.
The situation is as follows: Lear’s 100 knights help him maintain his illusion of primacy. Goneril, however, demands that he cut the number in half and Regan in half again. In his panicked response, Lear lashes out with words designed to cut as deep as possible:
Hear, nature, hear; dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful!
Into her womb convey sterility!
Dry up in her the organs of increase;
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honor her!
Then, when Regan proves just as obdurate, he is reduced to groveling:
LEAR (to Goneril): I’ll go with thee:
Thy fifty yet doth double five and twenty,
And thou art twice her love.
The daughters respond by making Lear feel as small as possible:
Goneril: Hear me, my lord;
What need you five and twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
Regan:What need one?
Lear responds with threats reminiscent of a four-year-old:
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall–I will do such things,–
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep
No, I’ll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep.
The rage continues as Lear goes mad. In the famous storm passage, he sees the rain and thunder as extensions of himself and fantasizes that their power is wrecking the world:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
That most people experiencing the storm will not be thinking of Lear is something he cannot imagine.
Later, Lear stages a mock play where he imagines justice—or vengeance—being meted out to his daughters. The part of Goneril is played by a joint-stool
Lear: Arraign her first; ’tis Goneril. I here take my oath before this honorable assembly, she kicked the poor king her father.
Fool: Come hither, mistress. Is your name Goneril?
Lear: She cannot deny it.
Fool: Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool.
Lear: And here’s another, whose warp’d looks proclaim
What store her heart is made on. Stop her there!
Arms, arms, sword, fire! Corruption in the place!
False justicer, why hast thou let her ‘scape?
By Act IV, the cognitive dissonance has turned Lear entirely mad he as he wanders about the heath. In short, he first lashes out, then grovels, then lashes out again, then indulges in power and revenge fantasies, and finally loses it altogether. Trump appears to be going through a number of these stages.
In his madness, however, Lear arrives as some insights that I suspect may elude Trump, although we’ll see. The mad king comes to see through his sycophantic advisors:
They flattered me like a dog; and told me I had white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say ‘ay’ and ‘no’ to every thing that I said!–‘Ay’ and ‘no’ too was no good divinity. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found ’em, there I smelt ’em out. Go to, they are not men o’ their words: they told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.
It also remains to be seen whether Trump, like Lear, will discover that a force exists, love, that is greater than self. Lear must reach rock bottom to realize this, but it is the play’s silver lining. In Dante terms, this would get Lear to Purgatory and ultimately to Paradise to reunited with his daughter. Put another way, for a few hours he experiences divine love. Inferno is a symbol for those who remain forever trapped in ego.
We’re hearing that certain of Trump’s allies, to soften the blow, are talking to him of his great legacy. This, however, is just a continuation of the enabling that has kept him trapped in the hell of self. A narcissist who loses the spotlight comes to see himself as nobody, which is what he has feared and secretly believed all along. That he is only the fourth president in the past one hundred years to be defeated while running for reelection can’t help.
Lear changes after he loses everything except for Cordelia’s love. Trump would have to fall much further before reaching that point.
And speaking of those charging voter fraud
Someone tweeted a Yeats line in response to one of the funnier things to happen in 2020. Apparently Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, in setting up a press conference on Democratic voter fraud, made a venue mistake. Thinking he was booking a Philadelphia hotel, he instead rented the landscaping firm Four Seasons Total Landscaping, situated in an outlying strip mall between an adult bookstore and a cremation center. Tweeter @SlactivistFred pulled from Yeats’s “Crazy Janes Talks with the Bishop”:
Giuliani chose the venue, a nursery and fertilizer supplier betwixt a sex shop and a crematorium, as a deliberate and profound meditation on the human condition. As Yeats wrote, ‘Love hath pitched his mansion in/ The place of excrement.”
In actuality, however, the poem doesn’t fit that well. Crazy Jane is making the point that “fair and foul are near of kin/ And fair needs foul.” In the case of the Trump administration, however, we have not seen a dynamic tension of opposites. It’s all been foul.