Macbeth: I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked.
Give me my armour.Seyton: 'Tis not needed yet.
Macbeth: I’ll put it on.
Send out more horses. Skirr the country round.
Hang those that talk of fear. Give me mine armour.— Macbeth, Act V, Scene 3
Macbeth’s premature insistence on donning armour illustrates his already-advanced persecution complex, his obsessive concern with threats to his hold on power in the face of what he—rightly—believes to be a rising tide of enemies. Yet his paranoid, thin-skinned ill-humour is not unique to the final phases of the play; it is manifest almost from the beginning, as the improbable words of the witches plant the first seeds of grandeur in his mind and his various enablers further encourage his egocentricity.
What follows is reckless abandonment of duty in the service of ambition. Particular ears become willing to the whispers of particular tongues. Inevitably, poisonous minds turn upon ally and enemy alike, twisting both into an amorphous, universal antagonist. Madness descends and, with it, ill-conceived activity. Macbeth, or merely mid-week political news in a so-called democracy of the early second millennium?
Sweet nothing. Original image: The New Yorker.
Perhaps it seems like a foregone conclusion that members of a political party (any party) would stare fact in the face and even offer it stern denials in order to protect a problematic leader elected from amongst their own. That certainly seems to be the case so far in the United States. But I wonder; how long will it take, or what would it take, for that to change? Because if one thing is true of political expediency it is the nature of a pragmatic short-term advantage and what a vicissitudinal beast that really is. In short, what is advantageous today may not be advantageous tomorrow, and the shift in circumstances may not be terribly pleasant for those involved.
So, while the U.S. president, Donald Trump, retains his stubbornly intractable levels of support then it would seem that there is advantage to the Grand Old Party in remaining behind him. That seems to be the status quo as it stands. Politics in general appears, and probably feels much of the time, a dog-eat-dog correlation. Most of the time, those dogs are content mauling their opposition and I would argue that such a state is largely the function, if not the intended purpose, of a political ontology; each side exists to challenge the nature of its opposite.
This seems particularly apparent in two-party-dominated systems, though the modern dichotomy of ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of parliaments certainly informs that conceptual demarcation. In principle we would hope that such a function would be to hold one side accountable to the other, but in reality it acts more as an anchor to resist the pull of the opposite; back and forth, perhaps with the result that conditions remain closer to a central point than veering to one side or the other. Until it reaches a point that each side is so intent on impressing its ideology that rather than meeting in the middle, all pretence of compromise is abandoned and a nation lurches left, then right, with staggering disregard to the welfare of those caught in between.
It is extraordinarily difficult to establish political intent, because, in my view, intent shifts constantly and, like most human consciousness, utilises schemas for the most part but remains flexible enough to deal with new or shifting phenomena. Therefore, viewing a situation like support for an impeached president as reflecting the intent of a political party is pointless. It is possible that one of the reasons why political parties seem so rudderless and incompetent much of the time is precisely because they avoid expressing overt intent, and follow instead the most immediate demands on their attention. They literally cannot afford to be doctrinarian about too many issues. Risk avoidance also looms large in any political reckoning. Thus, the dogs are out in defence of the incumbent precisely because that is their instinct. The function here is to deflect attention, or attack the opposition… for now.
What I find particularly interesting is the potential of that moment when things change. It certainly seems utterly inconceivable at this moment in time—the cusp of December 2019—that the Republican Party establishment would turn on its troublesome erstwhile messiah. Yet the manner in which Trump has ruthlessly demeaned the office he holds may inevitably offend even those who have, to this point, enjoyed sticking it to the so-called élites who traditionally demean them instead (never mind the colossal cognitive irony that Trump, purportedly a billionaire real estate tycoon, absolutely meets such a definition himself). Yet it is also true that many of Trump’s supporters enjoyed his defiant anti-political-correctness because of an inherent anti-authoritarian bent. Should Trump continue his apparent desire to fête dictators, instil an institutional disregard for the rule of law, and brook no resistance to his own personal will, he may well find that his obvious wish for unlimited authority concentrated upon his own self might consequently diminish the support of the people who once admired him.
It remains perhaps the greatest irony of Trump’s presidency that he began with the refrain that he was there to drain the swamp that is Washington; that is, to remove all the ‘establishment’ toadies and the lobbyists and restore the will of the people. It is, as Lennox (a Scottish Thane) says in Macbeth:
Or so much as it needs,
To dew the sovereign flower and drown the weeds.— Macbeth, Act V, Scene 2
The irony being that the proper sovereign in question here is the people, and yet from the moment of his ascension, Trump moved immediately to forget so much as it needs, and drown pretty much everything that didn’t suit his own personal purposes, weeds or otherwise. And it certainly wasn’t his blood that was to dew the sovereign flower; he regularly sacrificed the nearest minion to flavour the altar. The sad reality is that the flower was already long-faded, and the weeds are happy to have Trump amongst them so long as they continue flourishing.
The nature of political manoeuvring is ultimately one which oscillates between the competing primary needs of self-interest and obfuscation; should the tide begin to turn against Trump, or should individual Republican senators begin to see a looming defeat on the horizon, mark my words: those dogs will turn on themselves and rend the president asunder.
It is easy to forget what the dominant perspective was back during the Republican Party primaries prior to the 2016 election, back when the Democrats were busy planning what life in the White House would be like for the next dozen years before the G.O.P. finally completed its self-inflicted internal evisceration and deigned to present a half-competent offering to the voting citizenry of the United States. How long ago that seems now, presumptive hubris punished, the Hillary Machine having ground to a halt.
Back then, Trump was a mere outlier, an amusing sideshow, truly a ridiculous novelty candidate, but nevertheless he eventually managed to first disembowel and then outlast the main event; the establishment. For a while there, the sequence actually threatened to become Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama, then Clinton-or-Bush. Just think about that for a moment. For a nation established with the explicit intent of rejecting the heavy hand of monarchy and its hereditary foundations, it is ironic that the Founding Fathers did their best to create a king-in-function (if not in name), and for a time we even have competing aristocratic houses to fulfil the lineage.
Yet there he was, the nouveau-riche upstart. Trump could stand up in the primaries and say something along the lines of, I know how beholden you people are to donors because I am one, so you have to do what I say. How can you argue with that? Who couldn’t help but, at the very least, be somewhat impressed by the sheer audacity of such a statement. For a would-be-emperor whose nakedness has since been displayed for all to endure, he sure knew how to disrobe his predecessors. Trump engineered the most awkward of silences, and in that long pause managed to wedge himself into a place from whence he could not be dislodged.
Even then, I don’t think anyone really expected him to be president. Yet here we are, in that unimagined future. It just goes to show how little of history is predictable. In hindsight, of course, the indicators were there. Personally, I still believe that a significant contributor was the disillusionment of Democrats with the machine-like coldness of their own contender; Hillary is an impressive political performer, disciplined and determined, but she lacks the kind of charm Obama or her husband are able to deploy, or the bluster and bravado of Trump.
A lot of people who were supporters of Bernie Sanders appeared to become intensely disillusioned by the way their own primaries anointed the establishment choice instead of the popular one (another indicator of just how powerful that cresting anti-establishment wave really was on both sides of politics), and most assumed Hillary would win an easy victory anyway (most polls had Clinton in a practically unassailable position… ‘practically’ being the key term). Then there’s the not-insignificant baggage of being a Clinton in general, between the obviousness of her husband’s predatory nature and the plethora of fanciful conspiracy theories they, as a couple, tend to attract. It would make an interesting essay to consider whether the name “Clinton” is actually a political advantage, or a disadvantage.
This uncertainty, though, is one of the truly fascinating elements of politics: nothing is inevitable, nothing is entirely static. The Republican Party in turn will remain steadfastly united behind Trump… until it isn’t. At that point, the bloodshed will begin and the shift will almost certainly be swift, and ruthless. Then, all indicators will turn to make it look like his downfall was practically preordained. Or, perhaps the triggering moment will never occur and the status quo will largely remain (in which case it might be tempting—I would argue erroneously—to believe that the capital-p Party was always determined to support him). It is of course impossible to say whether it is cowardice, or greed, which is the dominant characteristic of the self-serving crony.
Either way, I imagine the certainty with which the future’s narratives will illustrate given moments in the present (as they always seem to do with their powers of retrospective reconstruction) will likely overlook the uncertainty which prevails, even dominates, in actuality. Until a moment occurs and passes us by—and becomes absolutely certain in hindsight—that certainty never actually exists, which is what makes even historical experts (along with everyone else) such poor predictors of the future. Nobody now thinks to take, say, the millennium bug drama seriously, because we in our unscathed future think of it as anachronistic or comedic or both; but I assure you that at the time it was never a sure thing.
In Macbeth, during the scene which most people would associated with witches and boiling, toiling trouble, Banquo says to the crones:
If you can look into the seeds of time
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak, then, to me, who neither beg nor fear
Your favours nor your hate.— Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3
The prophetic ability to witness, or even imagine, the future is not the same as interpreting it correctly, as countless examples of providence or doom over millennia can attest. Sometimes, it can be just as difficult to divine the nature of that which has already happened. Here, Macbeth’s man Banquo pleads to the witches to reveal which grains or seeds will grow into what they will perceive as the future. He claims he does not care for their favour nor does he fear them, but it is impossible to say because we do not know his mind. Banquo is told he will never be king but his children will be, so we cannot ultimately trust his loyalty; nor that of Macbeth, who, having been told he will be succeeded by Banquo’s children, acts to have them all killed. The manner of individual intent, or interest, is a startlingly opaque aspect of history, just as it is the present or the future.
Despite the bluster and the idiocy which frequently appears in defence of Donald Trump—who to any reasonable definition of the term is patently nepotistic and utterly corrupt—there must already be many among the Republican establishment who, despite outward appearances, would be thinking very carefully about where their loyalties lie; or, at the very least, about the dangers of where their publicly stated loyalties lie. After all, there may be a plethora of servile toadies around Trump who have no particular loyalty to him personally. They may simply be happy to remain in the orbit of a powerful political figure whose influence happens to align with their own interests. For now. There is another adage from Macbeth which illustrates the point perfectly:
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach.
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.— Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 2
Here, Angus—a Thane who has by this stage abandoned Macbeth—reflects on the rising tide of dissent against the king after the faith-breach that is Macbeth’s betrayal of the people’s trust. His underlings now move only in command, nothing in love; that is, their obedience stems from his authority alone, not out of respect or admiration. Hence, his rule is hollow, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief; his ambition has outstripped his capacity, and his moral smallness is swallowed by the size of the mantle he bears. This takes a toll not just on Macbeth’s mental health but that of his wife, and upon the loyalty of those who should normally be in thrall of his title.
Trump has already hired and fired a plethora of staff, most of whom have since either explicitly turned on him or at least refused to defend him. Vanishingly few are those who have come, and gone, and remained overtly loyal. Sarah Huckabee Sanders being one of the few I can think of but—given her entire reputation is based upon the nature of her disgraceful fawning over the president’s every word—that should not be at all surprising. A parasitic leech which has had its fill of blood should not be expected to disgorge its meal the moment it drops from the flesh of its host. That would defeat the point.
That there exists such an array of dissidents, particularly given that these are not only preëxisting public servants but often those Trump has hand-picked himself, offers an extraordinary degree of evidence to the incompetent and dysfunctional nature of his administration. This is not a ‘Republican’ thing, either; one did not see mass turn-over during either Bush presidency, nor that of Ronald Reagan. Trump is likely to be almost unique, I imagine, amongst all other presidents of the United States of America.
One of the great mysteries in this scenario, in my opinion, is the way in which so much discussion, amongst those who aren’t part of the president’s cheer squad, largely revolves around treating the situation of this catastrophic disdain for process and principle with some kind of hesitant bewilderment, as though it will sort itself out by inherent acumen; that “the people” will come to their senses and poll results will begin to illustrate Trump’s “true nature” finally sinking in to the consciousness of the greater populace. Followed by further confusion when that intellectual inertia remains. If one has ever wondered why more Germans didn’t act against fascism in the 1930s, how such a parlous state could possibly have come to be, one needs only turn one’s ear toward the contemporary United States to receive a deafening answer. The two are not entirely analogous, but the impotent hesitancy on one side of the political aisle and sheer mean-spiritedness on the other bears a striking similarity.
What seems to have escaped significant notice is that tyranny can exist in ways beyond jackbooted uniformity, the smashing of windows, and the militancy of a sector of the citizenry (though, ironically, a doppelgänger of 1930s Germany which even explicitly labels itself as “white supremacist” has already appeared in the form of the tiki-torch-wielding mobs in Charlottesville in 2017). The president, who openly speaks of various cruelties and traffics in vile stereotypes and, frankly, lunatic conspiracy theories, is often treated as a figure who should by his very nature simply be rejected by the populace. And when not disregarded entirely he is simply mocked as a ridiculous clown.
Undoubtedly some people do reject him, as a proportion of any populace rejects their leader or leaders. Similarly, he is frequently seen as a comedic figure by a great number of people—and, despite the risk of triggering Godwin’s Law, I’m going to evoke this anyway as it is not intended as hyperbole—but early in his tenure Adolf Hitler was seen in precisely the same way. Punch cartoons regularly illustrated Der Führer as a little man in a uniform, usually loud, obnoxious or shouting at anyone who might listen, puffed up and playing with his dispirited neighbours, who simply could not take him seriously. The reality was something less amusing.
Image: Punch, 25 November 1942
To return briefly to Macbeth, one famous illustration from Punch shows Hitler in a literal manifestation of the figurative line referring to the giant’s robe. Here, the modest figure of the dictator (surrounded by historical accoutrements of war, including various sizes of renaissance boots) is swallowed by a regal gown which is far too large for his small frame. The collar reads “world domination”, and despite his best efforts his hands will not protrude from the enormous sleeves.
While history now tells us that there were very few in Nazi Germany who were willing to confront Hitler directly, it was the internal perception of Germany’s mistreatment in the Treaty of Versailles, the excruciating and humiliating reparations which ruined their economy, and the residual pride of those who wanted to see their nation assert itself against its perceived enemies which ultimately shielded Hitler from genuine criticism when there was still an opportunity to stop him. Pride in the Fatherland held the tongues of the people until it was too late.
Of course this is not to say that Trump equates to Hitler, for the latter was a true ideologue with a vicious character and temperament, whereas the former is a petulant man-child whose life-long nepotistic tendencies are so natural to him that I could understand him being genuinely confused by accusations of corruption. Trump seems more like a casual racist and—in the typical colonial-minded style—nativist, than a true Bannonite who would see whole swathes of the “wrong” sorts either cast out of American society altogether or ground into the dirt to the point of literal insignificance.
What will really challenge the United States going forward is not just the apologist opportunism of the Republican Party and in particular its senators, but the larger problems of the adoration of certain aspects of the nation itself (and its associated mythology) by the populace at large. I find it sobering to recall that it was a former military General, Dwight Eisenhower, who as (a Republican) president first warned his own public of the rise of the “military-industrial complex” we now know so well. The land of the free and the home of the brave? I’m not sure anyone outside the United States takes that line seriously any more, because the U.S. has—for generations and across the political divide—been an incessantly intrusive bully across the world stage, an all-consuming capitalist monstrosity which has ruthlessly exploited its obscene military advantage in order to embiggen the “1%” or however one chooses to frame the financial élite who are its true rulers.
The cultural obsession with patriotism which has infected the U.S. for generations is, in this very scenario, shown for the emotionally disarming tool of authoritarianism that it ultimately is. And that patriotism, which holds the tongues of so many of its citizens—for fear of besmirching the flag or some other reason to frown upon one’s neighbours—only strengthens the oligarchy which keeps so much of the citizenry in thrall. Perhaps as an Australian, with our inherent cultural suspicion of the powerful and the wealthy, and our traditional disdain for jingoism, such patriotic fervour seems particularly palpable and repulsive (though don’t for a moment think we are immune from it ourselves). Donald Trump is not an aberration; he is merely a symptom of a sickness which has been rotting the ethical bowels of the United States for half a century. That he is allowed, and even encouraged, to be so blatantly incompetent only illustrates the degree to which that illness has spread throughout the nation’s vital organs.
Yet despite the sycophancy he surrounds himself with, the needy shouts he makes and then receives, echoed from bootlickers at Fox News, it perhaps comes as no surprise that Trump has for some time now taken a view not dissimilar to the erstwhile king Macbeth, in anticipation of his erstwhile status as president:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have, but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath
Which the poor heart would fain deny and dare not.— Macbeth, Act V, Scene 3
He rages—either privately or on Twitter, his moods appear synonymously transparent—about the disloyalty of those who dare question him or his decisions, and clearly lacks that which should accompany old age—that is, the fruits of reciprocal favour—and instead receives those curses, not loud but deep which course through the nation he purports to lead, the resentment he has bred of his own self, by his own hand, and that slippery respect he has utterly failed to grasp, shown in turn merely as mouth-honour, the speaking of compliant words without sincerity. One imagines, “yes, mister president,” while all manner of disobedience swirls within the private sphere of thought.
As regards his impending impeachment, we might turn again to the words of Angus, who earlier in the piece had arrived to grant Macbeth the title of Thane of Cawdor, as prophesied by the witches only moments before. Macbeth asks, “why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” suggesting that such a title is inappropriate, or at least temporary. Angus replies:
Who was the thane lives yet,
But under heavy judgment bears that life
Which he deserves to lose. Whether he was combined
With those of Norway, or did line the rebel
With hidden help and vantage, or that with both
He laboured in his country’s wrack, I know not;
But treasons capital, confessed and proved,
Have overthrown him.— Macbeth, Act I, Scene 3
He who was thane remains alive, but has betrayed Scotland, and so bears his life under heavy judgement… which he deserves to lose. He will not be long for the world. Did he side openly with the enemy, or was help offered but obfuscated? Was it both? Angus is unsure: but the once-thane has engaged in treason, confessed and proved, and that was his undoing. Trump, in habitual style and not content to merely defend himself, doubled down on his audacity and declared on the White House lawn that, yes, he had done the things he was accused of but—and this is a colossal “but” around which the entire narrative revolves—his status, or title, immunises him from censure or punishment. Essentially his attitude is: I did these things, but so what? Trump is become as Lady Macbeth, wandering fitfully in her sleep:
What need we fear who knows it,
When none can call our power to account?— Macbeth, Act V, Scene 1
One wonders if Trump might have recognised that—because he is not a monarch who rules for life—that he was ordained only to be dressed in borrowed robes, that the hidden help and vantage he benefited from may well have ultimately also overthrown him. Perhaps he might have been more considerate of his office, its traditions, and the respect with which it is held by many of the people he is meant to serve (a concept I believe is genuinely alien to him insofar as it applies to those not being servile to himself). Perhaps he might have changed a lifetime’s worth of vanity and reflected upon the world around him.
Even as I write it, I can barely imagine it any more than I could Trump’s victory before it happened, or any kind of true punishment or censure while his allies maintain their grip on the levers of accountability. And it doesn’t really matter: those particular seeds of time did not grow, and so we cannot know. And the people, deferential to patriotism, hold their tongues some more and quietly abet a chaotic proto-fascist and his vast conceit.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.— Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5