‘Trump, for all his love of the theatrical and spectacular, can’t act at all.’ Samuel Corum via Getty.
The American President has come and gone, and since he didn’t publicly say “bullshit”, “scumbag”, or “slimeball” once, his trip to Britain can be deemed a success. The role of the United States is to rule the world, while the role of the United Kingdom is to supply the pomp and pageantry which might help to distract people from the nastiness Donald Trump’s visit involves: even as he insults the mayor of Britain’s capital once safely back home. A man who provides billions of dollars for the wholesale butchery of Palestinians, while flushing the homeless off the streets of his own country like so much garbage, is fawned over by a British prime minister who hovers about him like an obsequious tailor about to measure his inside leg. We may have lost the Empire but, boy, can we play the bagpipes.
The odd thing about flattery is that it works, even if you know that’s just what it is. Even Trump can reach beyond his own swollen ego long enough to see that all those scarlet tunics and rows of gleaming fish knives aren’t purely for aesthetic effect, yet he relishes them all the same. One is reminded of the physicist Niels Bohr, a convinced rationalist who used to display a magic icon on his house to protect it from evil spirits. When asked whether he really believed in such nonsense, he replied that it was reputed to work whether you believed in it or not.
In the eyes of many beyond the United States, Trump is a walking assemblage of all the most unpleasant qualities of the stereotypical American. Rather as the British at their stereotypically most repellent are snobbish, two-faced, cold-hearted and likely to let you die in a ditch so as not to interfere with your privacy, so Trump is loud, brash, crass, arrogant, greedy, philistine, aggressive, and pathologically upbeat. (Some of my best friends, I should add, are American. My children, for example.) Trump is the American equivalent of a Frenchman who has a ring of onions round his neck, a troop of mistresses in tow and can’t stop shrugging his shoulders.
We know that Trump is fond of Britain. In fact, there’s something a little Scottish about his sandiness of hair and complexion. It’s therefore not unreasonable to assume that he’s a devotee of Shakespeare, an author who, with his usual prescience, has much to say about the 47th ruler of the American Empire. There’s a lot about The Donald in Hamlet, for example. One of the mysteries at the heart of the play is why its protagonist takes so long to kill his step-father, Claudius the King, knowing that Claudius has murdered his own father and then married his own mother. Every time he comes near to despatching the usurper, however, Hamlet’s hand is mysteriously stayed.
One solution to the enigma has been proposed by the Freudians: the hero can’t do away with Claudius because he subconsciously finds in him an image of himself. In killing the prince’s father and marrying his mother, Claudius has done just what the oedipal Hamlet himself unconsciously wants to do. Murdering the king would thus turn out to be self-slaughter. It’s not a solution likely to appeal to the British, who have common sense rather than a subconscious. But Hamlet was a foreigner, and foreigners, lacking our own self-understanding, may possess desires of which they’re unaware. The theory may look weak when applied to Hamlet and Claudius, but it’s strikingly relevant to the relationship between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Why is every threatening deadline suspended or quietly ditched? Why is it taking him so long to recognise that the man is a crook and a killer, who poisoned Alexei Navalny just as Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s father? Clearly, because Putin is the tyrant Trump longs to be, the alter ego he can’t shake off, the shadowy brother for whom democracy is just a sick joke and law must bend to power.
One might also detect a touch of Nigel Farage in Shakespeare’s Prince Hal. Both men hang around taverns, and both do so to project an image of themselves as “Normal Guys”. Hal is a Right-wing populist who courts the common life in the form of Falstaff, a boastful knight, and his cronies so as to use this inside knowledge for the ends of power when he finally becomes king. Once he ascends to the throne of England, he will turn on Falstaff and cast him off, just as Farage will sell out the ordinary people on whose back he hopes to climb to power. (He once said the worst thing about running Ukip was having to work with low-grade individuals.)
Then there’s Macbeth, who was Scottish and would probably have liked golf. He might also have been sandy-haired. As a monarch he’s rapacious, brutally ambitious and has a brisk way with his enemies, though his wife refuses to take a back seat à la Melania. Given how Lady Macbeth ends up, Melania may well have made a wise decision. Macbeth also feels that without consolidating his kingly power, he lacks identity and is perpetually unfinished, his life being merely a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. Shakespeare is worried about people whose identity is so protean and mutable that there’s nothing solid or definitive about them (the Pucks and Ariels of this world, along with the Macbeth witches); but he’s also troubled by those stolid souls who aren’t able to be anyone but themselves. Some characters have too little selfhood, while others have an excess of it. He seems to believe that this conflict is built into the kind of animals we are.
All this is, among other things, a reflection on Shakespeare’s own profession as an actor, which involves projecting oneself into others without losing grip on yourself. Only a strong self can take on another. Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream wants with Trump-like infantile greediness to perform all the parts in a play staged within the drama, but the joke is that he can’t be anyone but himself. Hamlet hasn’t a clue who he is, which strikes Polonius’s advice to him (“This above all, to the own self be true”) as pointless and pedantic as most of what he says. What if your true self is a serial killer? Have those who mouth the postmodern mantra “I like to be myself” paused to consider this question? Being themselves is precisely what’s wrong with a lot of people.
Othello is magnificently capable of being himself, but for the same reason, incapable of empathising with anyone else. He is in love with his own burnished, mouth-filling rhetoric, a splendid actor who thinks of himself as entirely authentic; whereas Trump, for all his love of the theatrical and spectacular, can’t act at all. His lack of flexibility in this respect is also a lack of humanity. Yet the devil is a shape-shifter too. Othello’s devious adversary Iago can assume any persona he chooses (“I am not what I am”), which is why he can bring Othello down. (Trump has a certain low cunning about him, but our own home-grown Iago is surely Peter Mandelson.)
There are also parallels between Trump and King Lear, one of which is that the latter goes mad while the former is slightly touched: think of those sudden grimaces and surreal digressions. Lear is a despot who “hath rather slenderly known himself”, while the President is a would-be autocrat whose only flash of self-knowledge to date has been to reply to a journalist who asked him why he didn’t drink. “Can you imagine what I’d be like if I did?” came the response.
The difference, here, is that Lear is a tragic figure, whereas Trump is not. To use the word “tragic” is to claim that Lear can find out who he is only by being hauled through hell. Only by being hacked down to nothing can he become something. In the depth of his madness, or is it his sanity, Lear rounds on the Fool and cries in agony, “Who is it who can tell me who I am?” Trump wouldn’t even understand the question, let alone be able to give an answer. King Lear is about the horrifying process to which someone as cocooned in false consciousness as Trump would need to submit in order to be saved.
Speaking of salvation, Trump was described by one of his acolytes as “a proud Christian”. He is, in fact, no more a Christian than Paddington Bear, whatever he may consider himself. You can’t just take someone’s word on the question of whether they are a Christian or a fan of Taylor Swift or a Manchester City supporter. People who claim to be Swifties, but have never heard her sing, and wouldn’t recognise a photo of her — like those who claim to support Manchester City but have never watched them play — are either lying, self-deceived or have no grasp of the concept of supporter. Much the same goes for claiming to be a Christian.
The so-called Beatitudes of the New Testament single out several groups of people as particularly blessed: peacemakers, the poor, the meek, the merciful, those who are persecuted, those who hunger for justice. Trump has a word for these people: losers. And, of course, he’s right. This is no way to get on in life. In fact, it’s the quickest way to become an abysmal failure, rather like the founder of the Christian movement. The Gospel has Jesus warn his comrades that the world will hate them and murder them. Much of the world also hates Donald Trump, which is about all that he and Jesus’s followers have in common. The current power structure is threatened by love, wants to do away with it, and looks at the moment as though it’s winning. It’s just that for tragedies like Lear, what looks like losing may actually be in some well-nigh incomprehensible way the only true way of living — which is to say, in the end, the only way of succeeding.