An exchange between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Meet the Press host Chuck Todd on the January 5th episode caught my ear. Warren implied that President Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian general Soleimani to move the world’s focus from his coming impeachment trial rather than for reasons of U.S. national security:
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: Donald Trump was doing what Donald Trump does. And that is he was advancing his own personal political interest. And I think the question people reasonably ask —
CHUCK TODD: Do you think that’s happening here?
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: I think the question people reasonably ask is, “Next week Donald Trump faces the start potentially of an impeachment trial. And why now?” I think people are starting to ask, “Why now did he do this? Why not delay?” And why this one is so dangerous is that he is truly taking us right to the edge of war.
It’s not a new observation that Trump uses what I think of as a “jazz hands” technique of distracting the world from things he doesn’t want us to pay attention to with outrageous behavior or tweets, but something about Warren’s interpretation rang familiar.
Eventually, I realized it that it sounds like the advice a dying King Henry IV gives to his son and heir, Prince Hal, towards the end of Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part II. In a long interview with his son, Henry admits that he came to power (by deposing his predecessor King Richard II and then having him killed) in ways that were at best questionable if not downright illegitimate:
God knows, my son,
By what bypaths and indirect crooked ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head.
To thee it shall descend with better quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation;
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth.
King Henry took the crown with the assistance of allies who later demanded favors that, when he denied them, “daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed, wounding supposèd peace.”
Sound familiar? Trump’s electoral college victory but popular loss combined with Russian interference and Cambridge Analytica have all stained the legitimacy of his presidency, and the polarization of the U.S. has only gotten worse and worse and worse since his inauguration.
But it’s Henry’s next advice that is truly eerie:
Thou art not firm enough, since griefs are green
And all thy friends—which thou must make thy friends—
Have but their stings and teeth newly ta’en out,
By whose fell working I was first advanced
And by whose power I well might lodge a fear
To be again displaced; which to avoid
I cut them off, and had a purpose now
To lead out many to the Holy Land,
Lest rest and lying still might make them look
Too near unto my state. Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels, that action hence borne out
May waste the memory of the former days.
Translation: Your claim to inherit the throne is shaky, since people still remember how I got it. I’ve neutralized the people who helped me, but only for the moment. They might try to take it away since I haven’t been their lackey. I had intended to lead the disgruntled on a Crusade to retake Jerusalem in the Middle East in order to keep them busy and not thinking about my illegitimate claim to the throne. But now I’m dying. So, my son, keep their gossipy, political minds busy with wars outside of England so that if you win those wars that success will bury the memory of how I came to power.
Likewise, and as Senator Warren implied, Trump choosing this month to start a fight with Iran, a “foreign quarrel,” was a distraction from the fact that the House impeached him and the Senate will have to put him on trial, even if Majority Leader McConnell wants to make the trial a speedy exoneration.
One alarming inference underneath this Shakespearean moment is that Trump might be thinking in dynastic terms, which is the only reason I can possibly imagine why Trump’s own Prince Hal, Donald Trump, Jr.—who has even less political expertise or acumen than his father—published a book of political analysis late last year: “Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.”
Will Don Jr. and Ivanka have to duke it out for who runs in 2024?
Yikes.
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