Would Shakespeare impeach the president?

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

The Democrats pushing impeachment simply don’t understand Donald Trump. Their latest theory — that Trump leaned on Ukraine’s newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky to tarnish Joe Biden and ease the path to re-election in 2020 — has one glaring flaw: it isn’t in keeping with Trump’s character.

Anyone who observed this man during his 2015-16 run for the White House learned one thing: He doesn’t think he needs anyone’s help defeating his political opponents. He sees himself as Gulliver and his challengers as Lilliputians. Trying to extort a mafia-like “favour” to defeat Biden would be an admission of weakness, likely the most odious of character traits to Trump. Even more ludicrous is the notion that he would reveal such need for assistance during a high-profile phone call being overheard by a dozen officials in both countries. In Trump’s world, real warriors don’t connive, they conquer.

The obvious explanation for Trump’s request of a “favour” springs from what seems to be the prime motivation behind all of his behaviour — a profound sense of pride in his accomplishments and deep indignation when anyone calls them into question.

Having been lambasted as corrupt, Trump likely wanted to expose Biden as a weasel and not the honourable, moderate man the former vice-president styles himself as.

If Democrats really wanted to understand the President, they would read Shakespeare’s King Lear. All the ageing monarch wants is to be loved and appreciated by his three daughters. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child,” he laments about his eldest, Goneril.

Trump is Lear, and the country is the king’s daughters. What wounded the king more than anything was filial ingratitude.

What seems to gall Trump most is the thought that his achievements — record low unemployment, substantial tax cuts, a booming stock market, deregulation, judges — go unacknowledged by his enemies like Goneril and her sister Regan, who instead seek to obstruct him at every turn.

After a series of seemingly never-ending assaults on his dignity, Lear painfully observes out on the rainy heath: “I am a man / More sinn’d against than sinning.” It isn’t difficult to envision Trump saying the same.

Even adamant supporters of the President aren’t blind to his annoying character flaws — the endless self-aggrandisement, the bravado, the hyperbole, the unpresidential disregard for language. Trump’s brashness invites his mistreatment to some extent.

Shakespeare’s Lear was full of himself too. And like the king, Trump has been subjected to a daily barrage of indignities, distortions and outright falsehoods, which render him a folk hero to his followers.

In the Trump-Lear story, Trump’s champions resemble the faithful Kent, who called the monarch “every inch a king”.

In Trump they see every inch a president. Impeachment may turn some against Trump, but it will only rally those who actually understand him.

Gregg Opelka is a musical theatre composer-lyricist.