Out there in some afterlife, is a very frustrated William Shakespeare begging for a chance to write and produce a play based on America’s 2020 presidential election. Think of it: King Donald The Maskless, shaping an entire campaign around the denial of a plague, and then being stricken by it just as voting begins.
Americans aren’t used to presidential elections with this kind of high drama and daring plot twists. We’re much more accustomed to Al Gore and his demand to put “Social Security in a lock box,” or George H.W. Bush’s cry of “Read my lips: No new taxes,” or, Barack Obama’s “Change we can believe in.”
It’s hard for us to wrap our weary heads around such a diabolical storyline: An accidental and bombastic king is so taken with himself that he repeatedly tells the citizenry to ignore talk of a disease infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. He says it will all go away soon. And then the virus suddenly swoops in and attaches itself to him, capturing not only his body but also his fate.
Oh, what the Bard could have done with this material! He was the master of plot twists and iconic irony. In Henry V, for example, Shakespeare had the King of France send a crate of tennis balls to the young Henry as he assumed England’s throne. The gift was intended to mock him for his carefree, pleasure-seeking ways. Unamused, Henry upped his game from tennis balls to cannonballs, with which the military used to invade France in an epic battle. To top it off, Henry married the French princess, his adversary’s daughter.
In The Winter’s Tale, Antigonus, a Macedonian king, was traveling with his infant daughter. He tells the audience that a vision appeared to him in a dream and warned him that he would never see his home or his wife again. Antigonus laid his daughter down in the woods. As he walked away, a bear attacked and killed him. Soon a shepherd and his son, a clown, found the abandoned baby. They vowed to raise the child themselves. Really.
In Shakespeare’s storytelling, events follow a karmic pattern of actions begetting reactions, of causes and effects colliding on a sometimes slippery slope. The playwright would have been fascinated with the Donald Trump character, a rude, profane elite wannabe, born to aristocratic, emotionally sterile parents.
Think about it. Here’s this 74-year-old orange-tinted man-child, the most unpresidential of presidents, the product of an election he was not supposed to win. All he really wanted was to pump up his brand a bit so he could sell more condos, steaks, bottled water and neckties. He billed himself as a business genius who, alone, would solve all of our problems. In truth, he was deep in debt and badly needed to hawk more stuff. He saw a presidential campaign as a road to two riches that had always eluded him: financial stability and an adoring fan base.
As we work our way through the final act of this tragedy, King Donald’s election opponent is technically Joe Biden. But the King’s real foe is COVID-19. Right now, the battle between the two of them is both actual and metaphorical.
Although Trump knew since February how lethal this virus is, he kept telling his kingdom that it was nothing to worry about. Even as the pandemic shook every corner and cranny of this country, leaving behind a terrorized trail of loss and raw fear, the president, rather than managing the disaster, continually minimized the virus. Just a week ago, with 7 million Americans infected and more than 200,000 dead, King Donald insisted that this disease “affects virtually nobody.”
And then, just a few days later, he got it. The “harmless” virus invaded Trump’s body. It also infected a growing list of GOP office holders and staff who had earlier gathered – maskless – in a Rose Garden celebration of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. Right now, there is nothing in this world that affects Donald Trump’s future more than this novel coronavirus.
Shakespeare’s fascination with this development would hold regardless of the outcome of Trump’s disease. The conflict is not one of life and death. Instead, it’s about a powerful ruler’s battle between truth and deceit, between science and the will of a fool.
This president constructs his own reality to please himself and his loyal fans. He insisted Hilary Clinton was a crook, and his fans chanted “lock her up.” He claimed caravans of violent migrants were invading our border, and his fans grabbed their guns and headed south. He says the Democrats have rigged the election against him, and the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist, white supremacist group, is “standing by.”
That Donald Trump has desecrated all notions of truth is no longer in dispute. According to the Washington Post, his current average is 23 falsehoods a day. The culture of deceit in this White House is so deep that the first 48 hours after Trump was hospitalized were dominated by false and conflicting reports on his condition. Not only that, but there has been widespread speculation on the left that Trump is lying about having COVID in an attempt to move his poll numbers. What else could we expect from a fact-free administration?
Science, however, does not lie. For all of the 7.6 million Americans infected with this virus, including the 210,000 who died, there are tens of millions more – family members, friends and neighbors – who know first-hand how real and how devastating this disease in. They also know how wrong Trump was when he tweeted from his hospital bed: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” In this bizarre election drama, those are merely sad, close-to-final lines of a sick man and a failing candidate.
What would Shakespeare think of it all? Well, he gave us a hint in the second act of Measure For Measure:
“. . . proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.”