Tuesday
@Wwm_Shakespeare tweeted a comparison between Donald Trump and King Lear following Saturday’s low turnout at the president’s Tulsa rally. Trump is not the only one who needs a band of slavish followers to boost his ego.
Although I’ve made Trump and Lear comparisons numerous times—both are destructive narcissists who tear apart their countries—I have overlooked the importance of followers to each man. Trump was willing to put the health of his supporters at risk just so that he could bask in their adulation while Lear goes crazy when he can’t retain his 100 knights following his abdication.
Commenting on the 6600 people who greeted Donald Trump in the 19,000-seat auditorium, @Wwm_Shakespeare quoted Kent, “How chance the King comes with so small a number?”
The word is actually “train” rather than “number” but the quote is still on target. Kent hasn’t yet heard that Goneril and Regan are in the process of stripping Lear of his entourage. Given Trump’s desperate need for rallies and attention generally, it’s worth examining what the knights mean to Lear.
His decision to abdicate and to divide the kingdom practically guarantees the political instability that follows. Lear is unwilling to give up the perks that come with being king, however—like Trump, he wants the privileges without the responsibilities—and insists that his knights accompany him as he moves into Goneril’s castle.
Awful though Goneril is, it’s hard not to sympathize with her at having to host 100 knights that she describes as “riotous.” The same neediness that leads Lear to extort declarations of love from his daughters causes him to insist on his knights: they reassure him that he is a person of consequence. When Goneril points out how unnecessary the knights are, Lear plaintively cries,
O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.
Which is to say, everyone needs more than that which sustains life. I suspect Trump overrode advisors who questioned why he was holding a rally in a safely red but Covid-infested state, craving adulation the way an addict craves a fix.
Following his pleas, Lear unleashes an attack on his daughter that make Trump’s rage tweets seem mild in comparison:
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! If she must teem, Create her child of spleen; that it may live, And be a thwart disnatured torment to her! Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth; With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks; Turn all her mother's pains and benefits To laughter and contempt; that she may feel How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child!
After Kent comments on Lear’s lack of followers, he has an exchange with Lear’s fool that, believe it or not, Donald Trump’s father may have alluded to in advice that his son took to heart. The fool (would that Trump had a fool who spoke truth to him) explains to Kent why Lear’s followers are dropping him:
All that follow
their noses are led by their eyes but blind men; and
there's not a nose among twenty but can smell him
that's stinking. Let go thy hold when a great wheel
runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with
following it: but the great one that goes up the
hill, let him draw thee after. When a wise man
gives thee better counsel, give me mine again:
While receiving the Horatio Alger award in 1985, Fred Trump told the audience,
I used to watch other successful people and — that did good and that did bad and I follow the good qualities that they had to perfect myself. Shakespeare said, never follow an empty wagon up here, never follow an empty wagon, because nothing ever falls off.
Given that Trump Sr. fraudulently made millions off of government contracts (so much for Horatio Alger’s belief in honest toil!), how interesting that he would seize upon this particular passage. After all, those in the play with integrity remain attached to the great wheel, even when it threatens to crush them. The Trumps would consider Cordelia and Kent to be suckers and would prefer Oswalt, who will kill a blind man to curry favor with his boss.
It’s too early to tell if Trumpists are actually bailing on the Trump wagon, and he probably has some loyalists who will stay true to the end. Regarding those who joined his campaign purely for gain, however, we can expect wholesale abandonment should the wheel break free or the stinking become overwhelming.
After all, that’s what the Trumps would do.
Further thought: In the twitter follow-up to the Lear passage, one reader posted a passage that fits Trump to a tee. In All’s Well that Ends Well, the notorious grifter Parolles is outed by the king’s nobles. Before the trap is sprung, one of them describes him in a way that captures Trump:
Believe it, my lord, in mine own direct knowledge, without any malice, but to speak of him as my kinsman, he’s a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy your lordship’s entertainment.