Of Trump and The Tempest

Roger Kimball:

I suspect that, come 2024, when President Trump completes his second successful term, Americans will indeed look back, but to the election of Barack Obama and the prospect of a second President Clinton in 2016. They will then wonder how they could have been so misguided as to have elected a naive, anti-American race-hustler like Barack Obama not once but twice, and they will thank their lucky stars that they dodged the bullet of a Hillary Clinton administration, which would have completed the anti-freedom agenda of the deep state and assured generations of economic lassitude and dependency. 

Cohen is correct that Shakespeare is relevant to the Trump administration. But the pertinent play is The Tempest, not Macbeth. In Act II, a few of the shipwrecked men are taking stock of their situation on Prospero’s enchanted island. It soon becomes clear that the island appears very different to different characters:

ADRIAN: The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. 
SEBASTIAN: As if it had lungs and rotten ones. 
ANTONIO: Or as 'twere perfumed by a fen. 
GONZALO: Here is everything advantageous to life. 
ANTONIO: True; save means to live. 
SEBASTIAN: Of that there's none, or little. 
GONZALO: How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green! 
ANTONIO: The ground indeed is tawny. 
SEBASTIAN: With an eye of green in't. 
ANTONIO: He misses not much. 
SEBASTIAN: No; he doth but mistake the truth totally. 

As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that Gonzalo sees the world aright while Antonio and Sebastian are caught in the grip of a fevered delusion.  Their animus and hatred blinded them to reality. The increasingly fanatic and hysterical anti-Trump chorus would do well to reflect on that phenomenon. Their hyperbole has begotten an alarming disconnection from the real world of solid political accomplishment.  The situation is pitiable as well as contemptible. But the malignancy of their vituperation disarms pity before it can even engage. All that is left is contempt, leavened by anger.