Good Trump bit by Sullivn

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/obamas-legacy-has-already-been-destroyed.html

Twin Tyrants

I have to say that before I read Stephen Greenblatt’s new book on Shakespeare’s megalomaniacs, Tyrant, I’d never thought of Trump and Richard III as analogues. The comparison doesn’t work in every respect, of course. Richard is a much more sympathetic figure, because the core of his tyrannical soul is shaped from his very birth by physical deformity and social rejection. Born prematurely, his back hunched in a coil, his arm withered, he sees himself, from the very beginning of his life, as alone, unloved, unlovable, spurned even by his mother. There is a self-awareness about this that Trump lacks:

I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.
Why I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time.

He seeks power, domination, and control as a way to salve this fathomless void of self-hatred and natural injustice. Trump has no such introspection or excuse. Perhaps, Greenblatt ponders, Trump’s somewhat distant mother had the same emotional impact as Richard’s did on him — “He is my son, ay, and therein my shame” — but it is also clear that in his very childhood, Trump was a sociopath, bully, and coward. He pelted a neighborhood boy with stones at the age of 5; he vowed to break any cadet who transgressed him at military school. He always sought out the weak in order to stomp on them. And there is a pathos to Richard — along with a strategic cunning and wit — I cannot see in Trump. There is even a dark humor, a sophistication beyond the president’s grasp.

What they have in common, however, is striking. They both emerged in a political culture deeply and equally divided into two camps: York and Lancaster, red and blue. Shrewdly navigating this divide, they were both also profoundly underestimated. For Richard’s contemporaries, it was unthinkable that such a creature might actually want the crown, let alone believe that he deserved it. And those in the elite around him in Shakespeare’s play keep being shocked by what Richard is prepared to do, by his shamelessness in his violations of norms and decency. This combination of collective incredulity and individual ruthlessness effectively destroys England in five acts.

Richard cannot obviously obliterate any standards of justice and decency, have an esteemed contemporary and brother, Clarence, drowned to death, and get away with it, can he? He surely cannot intend to murder two innocent, imprisoned children, and successfully place the blame on others, can he? He cannot kill Lady Anne’s husband and son and then try to seduce her, can he? And succeed? And then kill her too? And yet he does all of these things, quite openly, as everyone around him enables him or denies what is in front of their eyes or is, in the end, destroyed by him. And we, the audience, are oddly transfixed by the spectacle.

Richard invades the dreams of others, just as Trump insinuates his sickness into our unconscious. There is no escaping him, no force as powerful as his will to lonely power. And as it slowly dawns on people that there is nothing Richard won’t do in his attempt to fill the void within, their psyches buckle. Richard never apologizes, always lies, and thereby almost paralyzes those who could, if they ever took a real stand, oppose him. He makes them accept his reality. When he accuses a rival of deploying magic to wither his arm — an arm everyone knows was bequeathed him at birth — and proposes to execute him for it, his advisers somehow assent to the logic. Some think they can benefit by siding with Richard; others simply keep their heads down — “I will not reason what is meant hereby / Because I will be guiltless from the meaning”; others still are scared they’ll be next on the chopping block. And so the murders mount, and Richard’s power grows.

Once this dynamic unfolds, Shakespeare seems to say, there is no undoing it from within. The tyrant is not in full control of himself, and has no real idea of what to do with power when he gets it — except purge his ranks and dispatch his rivals in an endless cycle of insecurity. No one lasts for long in Richard’s orbit, or Trump’s. He rages forward blindly, and his only constancy is his paranoia, loneliness, and willingness to cause collateral damage to anything around him. The only way to defeat him, Shakespeare implies, is from outside the system itself: via an invading army, led by an exile. Even then, the damage is deep and lasting. Richard’s reign is just two years long; but the scar is indelible.

And this is indeed the kernel of what I fear: that if Mueller at any point presents a real conflict between the rule of law and Trump’s ego, the ego will win. If Trump has to fire his attorney general, and anyone else, he will. If he has to initiate a catastrophic conflict to save face, he will. If he has to delegitimize the Department of Justice, empty the State Department, and turn law enforcement against itself, he will. If he has to unleash unspeakable racial demons to save himself from political oblivion, he will not hesitate to do so. If he has to separate children from parents, describe humans as animals, and turn Christians into pagans, he will not blink. This is what a tyrant does.

What we have, of course, unlike early modern England, is a constitutional system designed to prevent such a person from coming to power, and, if that fails, to restrain him when he does. We have a tyranny currently wrapped in a democracy. But what Shakespeare shows us is that the will of the tyrant can be more powerful than any collective resistance, can leverage the masses to assent and even empower his will, can violate every single norm, and will never rest, and never, ever concede. There is an irresistible logic to this — driven by a particular form of psyche.

Trump, it seems to me, has established this tyrannical dynamic with remarkable speed. And what we are about to find out is whether the Founders who saw such a character as an eternal threat to their republic have constructed institutions capable of checking him without the impact of an external intervention, of a disaster so complete it finally breaks the tyrant’s spell. Watching what has transpired these past two years, seeing how truly weak the system is, and how unwilling so many have been to recognize our new disorder, I see no reason to be optimistic. The play is a tragedy, after all.