Tuesday
What do you do when your leader goes insane? While many of us have suspected for a while that Donald Trump is descending into dementia, his unhinged Easter tweet threatening Iran has even former ally Marjorie Taylor Green leveling the charge. Here’s what she had to say:
Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit.
She was responding to the following Truth Social message from the president:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.
The literary figure that comes to mind is the raging King Lear, although in saying this I am mindful of a critique from my eldest son. A former theater major who knows his Shakespeare well, Darien complains that I elevate the president by making such comparisons. Trump might even embrace the comparison if he knew who King Lear is (which I doubt) since, even in his madness, Lear can still draw himself up and describe himself as “every inch a king.” If I’m going to compare the two, I must include the kind of disclaimer that T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock makes in his extended soliloquy:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
Prufrock would like to think of himself as a tormented Hamlet but, upon reflection, admits he is more like the foolish Polonius. Trump too appears to be an easy tool, easily manipulated by any number of bad actors (Putin, Netanyahu, the king of Saudi Arabia, Kushner, the fossil fuel industry, I could go on). He’s not even a Prufrock, who at least is capable of self criticism.
In my defense, in the past I’ve used Lear for contrastive as well as comparative purposes. All those figures to which I’ve compared our president—Lear, Macbeth, Richard III—are capable of looking inward, and they achieve a certain level of dignity in doing so, no matter how black their crimes. Lear even discovers love for the first time in his life.
Trump, on the other hand, is more like Dante’s souls in Inferno, locked forever in the hell of self. Or to choose another character destined for hell, one drop of repentance—even half a drop (I’m quoting here from Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus) would save his soul, but he can’t manage even that much. I predict that Trump’s death, when it comes, will be as agonizing as Faustus’s.
The reason that I can’t let go of such comparisons is because Shakespeare, with his deep understanding of human beings, gets why someone like Trump would go mad. Both Lear and Trump are consummate narcissists, so accustomed to thinking the world revolves around them that they can’t handle it when reality claps back. Trump’s increasingly panicked and often contradictory pronouncements about the war in Iran remind me of Lear when he is humiliated by Goneril and Regan. He sounds like a toddler making threats:
No, you unnatural hags,
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.
By the end of the tantrum, he is predicting, “I shall go mad!” and we next see him yelling at the storm:
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!
A number of political commentators are observing that the Constitution’s 25th Amendment–which calls for a president to be removed when he or she “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”—was drawn up for moments like this. However, neither Trump’s cabinet officials nor the GOP will intervene. As a result, they are all (to use Green’s word) complicit.
It’s noteworthy that Shakespeare, when he wrote the play, probably had the recent Annesley affair in mind. In this family drama (I quote from the Norton Anthology here), “the two elder daughters of a doddering gentleman named Sir Brain Annesley had attempted to get their father legally certified as insane, thereby enabling themselves to take over his estate, while his youngest daughter vehemently protested on her father’s behalf.”
Trump’s enablers, unfortunately, just continue to do his bidding. They are like Oswald, Goneril’s sycophantic steward who does her dirty work. Oswald is even prepared to kill the blind Gloucester in his boss’s service.
So for all those who are choosing Trump over God, the Constitution, the country, and all that is decent, I conclude with Kent’s characterization of Oswald:
Kent: Fellow, I know thee.
Oswald: What dost thou know me for?
Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.
That sums it up pretty well.
