This piece in the New York Times drawing parallels between Trump’s final days and Shakespearean tragedies (and toppled authoritarian regimes) is well written and certainly worth reading. If you’ve been reading his twitter feed you know that he’s losing it, but this description really brings it home:
Over the past week, President Trump posted or reposted more than 130 messages on Twitter lashing out at the results of an election he lost. He mentioned the coronavirus pandemic now reaching its darkest hours four times — and even then just to assert that he was right about the outbreak and the experts were wrong.
Moody and by accounts of his advisers sometimes depressed, the president barely shows up to work, ignoring the health and economic crises afflicting the nation and largely clearing his public schedule of meetings unrelated to his desperate bid to rewrite the election results. He has fixated on rewarding friends, purging the disloyal and punishing a growing list of perceived enemies that now includes Republican governors, his own attorney general and even Fox News.
It was inevitable that we’d start to see pieces about King Lear and Richard III, so I won’t excerpt that. This was more interesting:
Alina Polyakova, the president of the Center for European Policy Analysis and a Russia scholar, said Mr. Trump reminded her of President Vladimir V. Putin, who has largely withdrawn from view recently amid public discontent in the late stages of an aging regime.
“Both also seem to be living in alternate realities surrounded only by those who confirm those realities,” she said. “But whereas one brooder will weather a slow and long decline, the other is increasingly facing a rapid decline and scrambling to do what he can to save his family and loyalists — and of course himself.”
I guess I didn’t know this about Putin. It’s fascinating that there might be such parallels between him and Trump in this regard.
And then there’s this:
Students of the American presidency, on the other hand, could think of no recent parallel. “As we move toward Inauguration Day, I have thought almost daily of a remark attributed to Henry Adams: ‘I expected the worst, and it was worse than I expected,’” said Patricia O’Toole, a biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as well as Adams.
Unlike any of his modern predecessors, Mr. Trump has not called his victorious opponent, much less invited him to the White House for the traditional postelection visit. Mr. Trump has indicated that he may not attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration, which would make him the first sitting president since 1869 to refuse to participate in the most important ritual of the peaceful transfer of power.
He has been enabled by Republican leaders unwilling to stand up to him, even if many privately wish he would go away sooner rather than later. After being called “profiles in cowardice” by an ally of the president, 75 Republican state legislators from Pennsylvania on Friday disavowed their own election and called on Congress to reject the state’s electors for Mr. Biden. Only 25 of 249 Republican members of Congress surveyed by The Washington Post publicly acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory.
“He really has paid attention to the base,” said Christopher Ruddy, a friend of the president’s and chief executive of Newsmax, part of the conservative news media megaphone that has supported and amplified Mr. Trump’s allegations. “They got him elected and in his mind got him elected the second time. And they’re strongly in favor of this recount effort and they want him to continue this. In his mind, he’s not just doing this for himself he’s doing it for his supporters and for the country. He’s on a mission and he’s not going to be easily swayed.”
That is, of course, bullshit. He is doing this for himself. Period. He thinks it will keep his base close to him and, not incidentally, keep the money flowing to his slush fund which has already collected over 200 million dollars since the election. 200 million dollars! He literally has millions of reasons to keep his deluded base agitated and engaged.
Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed is a fire hose of denial. “NO WAY WE LOST THIS ELECTION,” he wrote at one point in recent days. “We won Michigan by a lot!” he wrote at another of a state he lost by more than 154,000 votes. He reposted a message seeking to delegitimize Mr. Biden: “If he is inaugurated under these circumstances, he cannot be considered ‘president’ but instead referred to as the #presidentialoccupant.”
And he has turned on his own party, angry that Republican leaders have refused to accept his baseless claims and overturn the will of the voters. He referred to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, once a favorite ally, as “the hapless Governor of Georgia.” and the “‘Republican’ Governor of Georgia” using his quotation marks ironically. Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, another Republican stalwart, has joined the target list. Mr. Trump retweeted a post saying “Gov Ducey has betrayed the people of Arizona,” adding, “TRUE!”
In a rambling 46-minute rant transmitted from the White House to the outside world by videotape this past week, Mr. Trump denounced “corrupt forces” stealing the election and insisted it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost. If only everyone would accept his unfounded claims, he said, then “I very easily win in all states.”
“Many people in the media — and even judges — so far have refused to accept it,” Mr. Trump said, more as accusation than concession. “They know it’s true. They know it’s there. They know who won the election, but they refuse to say you’re right. Our country needs somebody to say, ‘You’re right.’ ”
There is no one in a position of authority in the courts or the legislature who will do that. And that’s because it’s batshit insane. […]
As the circle around Mr. Trump shrinks and even allies like Mr. Barr distance themselves, the president resists any suggestion that he stand down. “I’m never, ever going to concede,” he told one ally who urged him to prepare to do so. And if he is not listening to advisers, many are no longer listening to him.
At one point, Mr. Trump appeared to call Mr. Ducey even as he was certifying Arizona’s results on television and the governor refused to take the president’s call, which was announced by a “Hail to the Chief” ring tone.
Top Republican lawyers have dropped off his election lawsuits, which have been dismissed by the dozens and even in one case declared “bizarre,” by a judge appointed by Mr. Trump. Five courts in five battleground states rejected his latest legal challenges to the election in a little more than three hours on Friday, with a Wisconsin judge warning that “this is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread.”
Sliding further away from the mainstream, the president has aligned himself more clearly with fringe news outlets like One America News Network and the conspiracy theorists of QAnon, who believe the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles plotting against Mr. Trump. In a meeting with Republican senators, according to an official confirming a report in The Post, Mr. Trump said QAnon followers “basically believe in good government,” a comment that left the room silent until his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, volunteered that he had never heard them described that way.
With more than six weeks until he leaves office, Mr. Trump remains as unpredictable and erratic as ever. He may fire Mr. Barr or others or issue a raft of pardons to protect himself and his allies or incite a confrontation overseas. Like King Lear, he may fly into further rages and find new targets for his wrath.
“If there are these analogies between classic literature and society as it’s operating right now, then that should give us some big cause for concern this December,” said Mr. Wilson, the Shakespearean scholar. “We’re approaching the end of the play here and that’s where catastrophe always comes.”
We are in a very dangerous period. The country is being overrun with a deadly virus, the economy is cratering, and the demented president is howling at the moon. I would say the catastrophe is here. But, of course, it can always get worse. I just hope there is someone left in the chain of command who isn’t completely corrupted or insane — or both.
Fasten your seatbelts.