In response to Eliot A. Cohen’s piece, How Will Trump’s Presidency End?
And to see the more intimate, domestic side of this Trumpian tragedy, we turn to King Lear. Trump, like Lear, has children (perhaps more than we know) whose lives have been cast into chaos and yet what Trump cares to notice is not the storm of hostility that has overtaken them and will soon overtake his grandchildren, but who is willing to shower him with the most adoration. Will one of his children, like Cordelia, quietly demur from the Trump show, offering only a yearly birthday gift? A card? A polite refusal to attend the family event? Will he see this one brave child’s mere absence and silence as rank betrayal? Will Trump focus all his rage on this ingrate as his mind breaks up in the coming storm? We do know for sure that Trump will shatter, crush, blot out his own kingdom and his whole family because his vanity was not gratified. We know this because he already has.
“I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall- I will do such things-
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth! You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!” King Lear
— Erica Da Costa
