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Thursday
In the past I’ve compared Donald Trump to King Lear—both are supreme narcissists who plunge their nations into civil strife to indulge their own egos—and now I’ve found another point of commonality: both are obsessed with wind power.
To be sure, they come at the issue from opposite sides. But let’s look at how they see it.
Although in the past Trump has complained that wind turbines kill birds and disturb whales, he didn’t provide any explanation as to why, on August 22 (as reported by historian Heather Cox Richardson),
the Interior Department suddenly and without explanation stopped construction of a wind farm off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island that was 80% complete and was set to be finished early next year. As Matthew Daly of the Associated Press noted yesterday, Revolution Wind was the region’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. It was designed to power more than 350,000 homes, provide jobs in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and enable Rhode Island to meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2033.
Since only the most credulous MAGA member would believe that Trump is actually concerned about wildlife, we can all figure out the real reason. Trump wants to prop up fossil fuel industries, including Russia’s biggest energy company Rosneft, while also taking an axe to one of Joe Biden’s signature achievements.
Lear, on the other hand, allies himself with wind power. Enraged that his two eldest daughters are not letting him have his way, he sees in a blustery storm his own turbulent emotions. Whereas Trump has been known to fling ketchup bottles against the walls, Lear imagines the storms unleashing its fury on 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, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
It’s ironic that, by targeting renewables, Trump is making extreme weather events like Lear’s storm more likely. As we’ve seen to our sorrow, “cataracts and hurricanoes”—from North Carolina to Texas to Japan to Europe and elsewhere—are drenching us with historically unprecedented, oak-cleaving ferocity. Like Kent, we are seeing “the storm of the century” hit us on a regular basis:
Things that love night
Love not such nights as these. The wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark
And make them keep their caves. Since I was man,
Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,
Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never
Remember to have heard.
Like Lear, however, Trump is indifferent. All-shaking thunder can smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world for all he cares since he’s doesn’t see it as his job to pick up the pieces.
Like Trump, Lear surrounds himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear (Regan, Goneril) while driving away those who tells him what he needs to hear (Cordelia, Kent). He is driven mad when he discovers he can’t shape reality to conform to his desires.
Unlike Trump, however, Lear is ultimately able to connect with his soul. It all starts when he recognizes the humanity of another human being. Seeing that his fool is shivering, he reaches out in sympathy:
Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?
I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.
Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart
That’s sorry yet for thee.
Can you imagine Trump reaching out to someone like this? Or for that matter, giving his heart over to Cordelia.
To be sure, Lear still has a ways to go, and he will descend into complete madness before recovering enough to ask for forgiveness. His reward will be to find love for the first time in his life.
Significantly, Lear is saved by people standing up to him. Trump should be so fortunate.
