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Monday
Tomorrow, for the first time in my life, I will be teaching Shakespeare’s Richard II, which among other things points to what we can expect if Donald Trump is re-elected president. It has also provided me with a great phrase to describe the ex-president and all the grifters who follow in his wake: think of them as “caterpillars of the commonwealth.”
Richard II is a particularly bad king in ways that are reminiscent of Trump. In the course of the play we see him as
—incompetent: he botches a quarrel between two noblemen in ways similar to how Trump botched the Covid pandemic, sometimes lurching one way, sometimes another;
—corrupt: he confiscates Henry Bolingbroke’s land to pay for his Irish war, just as Trump unlawfully has been accepting and soliciting bribes from a variety of sources, foreign and domestic;
—susceptible to impulsive actions and wild mood swings;
—arrogant and deaf to good advice;
—enabling of corruption in others: Bushy, Bagot, and Green, the named caterpillars, resemble Jared Kushner, the Trump children, Steve Bannon, various former members of Trump’s cabinet, and a host of others.
This enabling, incidentally, gets some of the best lines in the play. The court gardener turns a pruning lesson into a political allegory on the state of the nation. His servant starts him off by wondering why they should continue upkeep when the nation is falling apart around them:
Why should we in the compass of a pale
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit-trees all upturned, her hedges ruin’d,
Her knots disorder’d and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?
The gardener replies by holding Richard responsible for the corruption he has allowed. He also observes that Henry has begun the necessary uprooting:
Hold thy peace:
He that hath suffer’d this disorder’d spring
Hath now himself met with the fall of leaf:
The weeds which his broad-spreading leaves did shelter,
That seem’d in eating him to hold him up,
Are pluck’d up root and all by Bolingbroke,
I mean the Earl of Wiltshire, Bushy, Green.
The gardener is referring to how Henry has, in fact, executed these individuals. He observes that Richard would have preserved his kingship if he himself had “trimm’d and dress’d his land”:
O, what pity is it
That he had not so trimm’d and dress’d his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees,
Lest, being over-proud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself:
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have lived to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty: superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live:
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.
If Trump is re-elected and, following the advice of Project 2025 as well as his own inclination, replaces civil servants with loyalists, we too will find our land swarming with caterpillars.
So what does this drama about overthrowing a divinely anointed monarch have to do with those of us who live in a secular democracy? Well, before Trump, I might have thought, “not much.” But then, I wouldn’t have thought we needed President Biden reminding us that “presidents are not kings.” And I never thought I’d see Supreme Court justices chastising the court’s majority for having created a “law free zone around the President.” In granting Trump immunity for his crimes, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, the rightwing justices have ignored the Constitution by creating “an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.”
Early in the play, Richard has power that Trump dreams of. As he informs the two quarreling noblemen when they question his decision, “We were not born to sue, but to command.” He is also assured, by one of the church leaders, that his position has the backing of God. Sounding like one of the rightwing pastors supporting Trump, Carlisle assures Richard, “Fear not, my lord, that Power that made you king hath power to keep you king in spite of all.”
Recall that Trump informed us at one point that God may well have saved him from assassination in order to achieve higher things. “I’d like to think that God thinks that I’m going to straighten out our country,” he told radio host Mark Levin. For his part, Richard periodically reminds himself that he too is God’s instrument—so much so that it doesn’t matter that his troops have fled, his enemy is at the gates, and his advisors have been executed:
I had forgot myself; am I not king?
Awake, thou coward majesty! thou sleepest.
Is not the king’s name twenty thousand names?
Arm, arm, my name! a puny subject strikes
At thy great glory.
When, later Northumberland is telling him to surrender, Richard replies,
Because we thought ourself thy lawful king:
And if we be, how dare thy joints forget
To pay their awful duty to our presence?
If we be not, show us the hand of God
That hath dismissed us from our stewardship;
For well we know, no hand of blood and bone
Can grip the sacred handle of our scepter…
But for all Richard’s blinkered arrogance, he says one thing that we do well to heed. If there is no orderly plan of succession, the country will be ripped apart. In 14th century England, the monarch was monarch for life and the throne was passed on to a predetermined line of succession. In our case, the president is succeeded by whoever gets the most electoral votes in the next election. Thus Henry’s attack on Richard has its modern version in Trump and the GOP’s attacks on elections themselves. With bogus charges of massive voter fraud—which have yet to be verified by any objective authority—they undermine constitutional governance itself. Lisa Needham of Public Notice notes what many political observers are pointing out: the goal of the GOP is a swing state like Pennsylvania is “to sew distrust in the election, likely setting up a challenge for Trump to contest the results if Pennsylvania doesn’t go his way.”
Or as the headline of her piece puts it, “If you can’t beat ’em, destroy the system.”
Richard, speaking to Northumberland but seeing his boss in the background, points to what happens if we violate society’s rules for orderly succession:
Tell Bolingbroke–for yond methinks he stands–
That every stride he makes upon my land
Is dangerous treason: he is come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war;
But ere the crown he looks for live in peace,
Ten thousand bloody crowns of mothers’ sons
Shall ill become the flower of England’s face,
Change the complexion of her maid-pale peace
To scarlet indignation and bedew
Her pastures’ grass with faithful English blood.
And so it transpires in Henry IV, Part I, with civil strife breaking out almost immediately after Henry grabs the throne. In the opening scene of the sequel, Henry thinks he has found some breathing space and plans a crusade to wash away the blood from his coup and the assassination of Richard. He quickly discovers, however, that he can’t command the blind obedience due to a divinely ordained king. After all, his fellows have seen him as one of them.
For instance, when Henry orders Northumberland’s son Hotspur to do something he doesn’t want to do, Hotspur doesn’t refer to Henry as king but as “this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke.” He also calls out his father for having assisted in “murderous subornation.” Together they have “put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose.”
Before dying, Richard has predicted to Northumberland that he will one day fall out with Henry. And in fact, Northumberland and Hotspur do rebel. Here’s Richard’s prediction:
Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal
The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne,
The time shall not be many hours of age
More than it is ere foul sin gathering head
Shalt break into corruption: thou shalt think,
Though he divide the realm and give thee half,
It is too little, helping him to all;
And he shall think that thou, which know’st the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,
Being ne’er so little urged, another way
To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.
The love of wicked men converts to fear;
That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both
To worthy danger and deserved death.
That’s the key: once one “know’st the way to plant unrightful kings,” one will know “another way to pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.” And indeed, early into Henry IV Northumberland is contending that Richard had chosen a different successor, not Henry, were he to die. Multiple claimants to the throne, none being able to claim absolute legitimacy, is how you plunge a nation into “civil butchery.”
So for all those Republicans buying into Trump’s Big Lie that he did not lose to Joe Biden, remember this: as soon as candidates start getting seats they did not legitimately win, bloody succession battles become likely. No one’s seat is safe.
Richard may have been a bad king, but Shakespeare indicates that, in overthrowing him, Henry sowed the seeds for the Wars of the Roses.
Biden is fond of saying, “You can’t love your country only when you win.” Are we really going blow up our democracy, along with all the benefits of a stable society, for the sake of Donald Trump?
