Monday
It appears that Donald Trump’s gathering to celebrate his new Supreme Court pick may have been a Covid superspreader event, with members of Congress, Trump aides, attendees, and Trump himself coming down with the virus. The Washington Post described the situation as Shakepearean tragedy:
[T]he jarring contrast between the carefree, cavalier attitude toward the virus on display in the Rose Garden last Saturday and the pernicious awakening that occurred Thursday night resembles a Shakespearean tragedy.
The White House’s handling of the period between the first known symptoms — those of Hicks on Wednesday — and the president’s infection, which was confirmed about 1 a.m. Friday, is what experts considered a case study in irresponsibility and mismanagement.
I’m not the only one to question the Shakespearean designation. Before voicing my own doubts, let me note some of the clever twitter pushback the article has received.
For instance, there was a riff relying on Marx’s famous dictum (about Napoleon III) that great world historic facts and personages appear “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The appearance of Covid is tragedy while Trump contracting it after calling it a hoax is farce. Only, as tweeter (((Curtis Perry))) essentially notes, for months we’ve essentially seen a whole series of farces. Or rather,
First as tragedy, then as farce, then as musical comedy, then as Blair Witch shakeycam, then as Shakespearean, then as theater of the absurd, then as The Sequel, then as muppets, then as a gritty reboot, then as Theater of Cruelty, then as a gothic reimagining, then as claymation
To which list tweeter Bradley Greenburg adds,
then as 80s MTV video, then as vaudeville, then as Monday night open mic at a comedy club in Ft Wayne, IN, then as a high school play staged by homeschoolers, and finally as a danse macabre
The same twitter thread also contained the following gem, which similarly undermines elevated claims of tragedy:
Chorus: “O mighty King of Thebes! rescue your people from this plague that afflicts our city!”
Oedipus: “Nah.”
Although I don’t hold out great hope, we’ll see if Trump changes now that he has contracted the disease. Someone else on twitter imagined him being visited by the ghost of Herman Cain, who died of Covid after attending Trump’s Tulsa rally (maskless, of course), who sets up meetings with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.
In other twitter responses, legendary Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe compared the attendees at the Rose Garden ceremony to the partygoers in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” (Senator Mike Lee’s embracing multiple persons and then testing positive makes him a prime candidate for Poe’s story.) My son Toby Wilson-Bates, meanwhile, tweeted out a still from HBO’s Game of Thrones’ “Red Wedding” episode, where guests are lured into a wedding and then massacred.
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s gathering is indeed a “Rose Garden massacre” since if we’re lucky no one will die. But Trump inviting everyone together and then unleashing the illness upon them invites the comparison. Oh, and can we still call it the Rose Garden now that—in a very George Martin touch–Melania has uprooted all the roses? (Is there anything that Trump and those around him haven’t left in smoking ruins?!)
But back to “Shakespearean tragedy.” Perhaps the authors have in mind leaders who, after violating law and tradition, have their evil rebound upon them. In that case, the Post reporters might have in mind Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III or—my favorite for Trump comparisons—King Lear. Or maybe they’re thinking of Hamlet, with the protagonist learns dark truths while a sketchy wedding is underway. Calling it a tragedy, however, dignifies a shameless hustler who, as Bob Woodward’s tapes make clear, has by lying through his teeth to us about this killer virus.
I’m therefore with the tweeters on this one. Trump contracting Covid has more in common with shakeycam than Shakespeare.
