It’s time to turn the page on the Trump-Shakespeare comparisons

As we say goodbye to President Trump, why isn’t anyone discussing Timon?

I’m not talking about the flamboyant tanned meerkat from “The Lion King”, although it can. Rather, I am referring to the title character of “Timon of Athens”, Shakespeare’s tragedy in which a bankrupt businessman, deserted by his sycophants and deprived of power, renounces society with savage curses (“Matrons , become incontinent! ”) To resume a stingy life by the sea in Mar-a-Lago.

Wait, sorry, bad seas – Timon is “outside the walls of Athens”.

Confusion is natural; Shakespeare does double duty these days. While maintaining his career as the world’s most produced playwright, he is also the most cited metaphor provider of the Trump era – and in particular its denouement. Hardly a thumb-sucking political analysis goes without a hint of one of the 37 canonical pieces, however limited or far-fetched the comparison may be.

Not that Shakespeare is new to the game of gratuitous hints. For decades, if not centuries, it has been the go-to brand for instant gravitas. (More than one American politician has been referred to as an “American Macbeth.”) But something about the Trump presidency, which ends Wednesday, has since started sending writers on a scavenger hunt through the First Folio.

They don’t usually come back to Timon. (The play, circa 1605, is one of Shakespeare’s least popular.) Scholarly references in popular culture only work if the reference is popular. Googling the terms “Trump” and “Timon of Athens” returned less than 150,000 hits, about as many as “Trump” and, say, “The Lucy Show.”

But when I entered “Trump” and “King Lear,” over 2.8 million links appeared. Many of these led to a show called “Trump Lear,” a biting comparison of the two leaders who ran off Broadway in the summer of 2017.

The comparison is not totally inappropriate. The King and President are known to play loyalty games: Lear with his daughters, Trump with his minions. (Is Mike Pence a Regan or a Cordelia?) The two have been, shall we say, ambivalent about handing over office power. The two are divisive – in Lear’s case, literally, carving up his kingdom like pizza.

But you can make that kind of comparison between two products of human culture once you’ve narrowed it down enough. (Like Lucy, Trump is always in trouble.) If Shakespeare’s plays are so often the first choice of experts seeking to add grandeur to their accounts of the use and abuse of power, it is less because they are apt than because they are ubiquitous, overflowing with tragic leaders from all walks of life.

Not that recent coverage has been limited to tragedies. Trump was detected in the deceived and preening Malvolio of “Twelfth Night” and in the overconfident and clumsy-prone Nick Bottom of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – the one who turned into a donkey.

But above all, these are the tragedies and stories – carried out in my informal investigation by “Julius Caesar”, “King Lear”, “Hamlet”, “Othello”, “Macbeth”, “Coriolan”, “Richard III” and “Henry V ”- which have been cited to get to the heart of Trumpism. But do they really do it?

Look at some of the matches:

• The 2017 public theater production of “Julius Caesar,Starring a blond Caesar and his sulky Slavic wife, has led critics to consider the limits of dissent when a leader veers into authoritarianism.

• Sampling “King LearAs a touchstone for the inconsistent rage of a deteriorating personality has become almost de rigueur in the chaotic final months of the Trump presidency.

• In “Hamlet“, The Vengeful Prince is mad only” north-north-west “, but knows otherwise” a hawk from a hand saw “. Journalists cite the play to suggest that Trump is deliberately stoking chaos and confusion as a screen behind which to cunningly pursue his goals.

• “Don’t ask me anything: what you know, you know,” Iago said when he was finally apprehended for organizing a seditious plot in “Othello. Iago’s moral nullity reminded the writers of the president, who similarly said, dismissing the death toll from Covid-19: “This is what it is.”

• For some people, “MacbethDescribes the psychosexual pathology behind a relentless quest for power; for others, the pandemic-like wasteland has left in its wake.

• The rarely seen “CoriolanusAbout a leader who despises the ordinary people he claims to serve, has also been cited as a way of thinking about the president’s response to the coronavirus.

• How a man of “unfathomable cynicism, cruelty and betrayal” comes to power is the subject of “Richard III– and many editorials warning against the 2016 election.

• And no less expert than Timothée Chalamet, who portrayed Henri v in the 2019 film “The King” noted that Henry, “like Trump,” is “insulted by anything”.

So there you have it: Trump is pretty much the entire canon of Shakespeare’s tragedies – even “Romeo and Juliet” – in one. However, this mania for comparison depends on a fine analysis of the president and the parts.

For one thing, experts ignore traits that don’t match. Richard was born disabled; Hamlet avenged a murder. Most of the rest were victorious warriors; President “Bone Spurs” was not.

Beyond that, the coins, with all their flaws, have a deep and noble purpose that Trump does not have: to provide a glimpse into life. Comedies offer a glimpse of love; the rest in the corruption of power. But there are no clear lines: the genres are blurring – as is the moral status of the characters. Shakespeare rarely presents anyone as entirely bad; maybe only Iago, who doesn’t deny it. Everyone is made up of spots of right and wrong, revealed and partly justified in the scintillating light of language.

But like most real people, especially because of his psychological and political makeup, Trump is not captivable in this way. He does not willingly open his heart in public, and our time has not demanded that he be understood in words. (Twitter doesn’t count.) Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln come to life in their letters, newspapers and leaflets. Hamlet has some 1,500 lines to explain himself. But Trump forever remains impenetrable in the 280-character outbursts, which is why commentators have struggled to unearth more easily understood precedents.

I admit that I do too. I turn to “Julius Caesar” for a guide to demagoguery. And to “King Lear” to understand how a man who “always but little known himself” could know others well enough to rule them.

But even these comparisons are reductive – both ways. Shakespeare’s characters are much richer and more readable than someone as unattractive as Trump. At the same time, we would be lucky if he was just a Shakespearean; no invented villain, not even Iago, is as alarming as someone for whom everyone is truly a scene.

Still, there is something to be said for the Iago comparison. His final line, as he is taken to court, is “From this point on I will never speak again” – a drink to be devoutly wished for.