Forsooth, Whatever Happened to Shakespeare’s Trump?
Of my total readers across all platforms, the people following Shakespeare’s Trump on Medium was not a large percentage, to put it mildly. But as I launch a new project, I feel like I’m obligated to explain why my last ambitious release hasn’t seen its way through to its conclusion. I don’t like that it didn’t. I’m a finisher. But this time, things got totally out of my hands.
I released the first scene of Shakespeare’s Trump in the early days of the Trump presidency, without necessarily intending to follow it up. But it went over well, and so as those four years came to a close, I started doing more. Using some approximation of the voice of the Bard seemed like a good way to address the whole mess, to vent all these thoughts and feelings that the era had left me with, without just tiresomely repeating the rest of the internet.
I figured I’d release scenes at a pace that’d let the series conclude shortly after January 20, 2021, perhaps with Biden’s inauguration making up the last scene if it gave me some juicy quotes.
So what happened?
The simple answer: 1/6 happened.
To be sure, I was starting to drag in terms of producing the series… I posted this message to the effect that I’d need a little time to finish things up. But it’d be 2021 sometime for sure, I thought at the time.
I had prepared myself for Trump to win in November…certainly not because I wanted that, not even because I thought it was likely, but because 2016 should teach anyone who lived through it not to treat a truly democratic election as a sure thing. I steeled myself to start calling the project Shakespeare’s Trump Part 1, after the Henry plays.
But after Trump lost, the “lame-duck months” seemed to me relatively predictable. He would keep lying about who really won, of course, and weasel out of any real consequences for his incalculable crimes. But at least he’d no longer be an active, direct threat to society. He’d probably go back to the in-case-of-loss plan he seemed to have before: market himself as a political Jesus Christ, too good for this fallen world, with “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Trump” bumper stickers available in Genuine Gold(TM) for $49.95 each ($99.95 with a “verified” signature). Take all the credit for hypothetically fixing everything without having to do any of the actual work.
The Republican party, meanwhile, would begin quietly distancing themselves from him and pin their hopes on some new star, perhaps no less authoritarian but at least younger and actually capable. “2018 was a weird time in American politics,” one Republican senator might concede in 2023. But “historically, our party has been the party of integrity,” blah blah blah Benghazi Lewinsky.
Welp, no, wrong. The Republicans are more in the tank for Trump than ever, a 2024 run and victory seem like his likeliest future, and American democracy still seems as fragile as a leftover patch of sidewalk ice on a 50-degree February day. Even aspects of the tale that I was sure were finished off, like Steve Bannon’s political career, have risen zombie-like from their graves.
I reserve the right to revisit this one in the future (and maybe revise some parts that look less-than-Shakespearean to me now). But at this point, I can’t conclude Trump’s presidency because we haven’t. We knew when the Clinton Era was over. Ditto the Obama Era and the Bush (Jr.) Era. But the Trump Era and its story? At this point, I’d bet on its not being over. But I wouldn’t put all my chips on any predictions at this point.
And even the Bard himself couldn’t do justice to a story where nobody knows how it ends.
Update: With every passing month, I grow less likely to come back to this project, so I’m officially pronouncing it dead. If you enjoyed it, though, I recommend MacTrump, another execution of the same idea by Ian Doescher and Jacopo della Quercia. It covers 2017–2018, but the authors are likely to put out a sequel at some point.