Trump's Macbeth Moment

Repost from an earlier comment

I am not so willing to condemn Vance as many are on this board. I don't think that Vance is all that terribly bright, but I do think he's smarter than Trump, and I also think that a new piece is on the board in the person of the new Pope Leo.

The currrent situation is, I think, right out of Shakespeare, in which Macbeth (the Thane or Earl of Glamis, one of the clans of Scotland at the time), kills King Duncan with daggers, in conjunction with his wife Lady Macbeth. She takes her own life in the same way, not so much out of remorse as guilt that she was involved in the killing, even as Macbeth becomes more fearful and paranoid, an attitude fueled by his advisors. One of Duncan's other thanes, McDuff, becomes suspicious of the perfidy of Macbeth, and ultimately wages war against the new King, getting close enough to the Keep at Dunsinane by the ruse of felling trees from Birnam Wood and using them as cover for his own army (this, by the way, is where the allusion to the Ents, the tree people in Lord of the Rings, comes from). Ultimately, MacDuff storms the keep and kills Macbeth.

The cast of characters:

Duncan ... Joe Biden (and by proxy, Kamala Harris)
Macbeth ... Donald Trump
Lady Macbeth ... Elon Musk
Macbeth's advisors (Miller, Bannon, Eric Prince, Peter Thiel, etc.)
McDuff ... JD Vance, under the advisement of Pope Leo.

Musk's role in this is murky, but was probably finalized in October when Trump mysteriously took a flight to a campaign appearance in Montana, diverting for a couple of hours to another anonymous meeting before arriving very late for the early August rally. I'm guessing that Musk and Peter Thiel were both in attendance at the meeting, and it may have been there that Thiel's protege JD Vance was advanced as VP, while Musk (who would have been ineligible to become president) was given the role of helping to dismantle the existing government with the benefit of destroying records that could have incriminated him and his companies.

Casting Musk as Lady Macbeth makes sense here, because he was the one who, in conjunction with Trump, killed the King (stole the election) with at a minimum vote buying and using X in a massive disinformation blitz, and possibly in manipulating the vote tallies. After Trump "won", Musk was given free reign, until eventually his excesses brought him down and he was forced out of power (in effect, suicide by politics). Musk's business empire is in shambles and his reputation is ruined, and my suspicion is that he is very likely now a dead man walking because he knows too much about what actually happened.

With Musk's influence gone, Stephen Miller and Eric Prince stepped into the vacuum. Miller is an avowed neo-Nazi, and is likely a major planner of Project 2025. Prince stands to benefit financially as a provider of mercenary services and incarceration facilities, both of which he's heavily invested in. Thiel's influence has largely been on the crypto-side, and I suspect that it was Thiel's crypto-money that gave Trump a last minute much needed cash infusion. He is also angling to be the next Fed chairman after Powell.

Why Vance as McDuff? McDuff was an odd hero, even in Shakespearean terms. You really did not meet him in any significant capacity until the middle of the second act, and his primary role was to act as the agent of divine retribution. He is otherwise something of a non-entity. The story of Macbeth could have just as readily been called McDuff but it wasn't, because Shakespeare wanted to make it clear that the most interesting character study was that of the usurper, and McDuff was the one who, in the end brought the usurper down because of the latter's hubris and paranoia. (Note that this doesn't completely gibe with the historical evens of Macbeth, when assassination generally beat out old age as the leading cause of death for rulers.)

Vance was supposed to be Trump's replacement, someone who could be easily influenced by those "wiser, older heads around him" should something befall the man, and that influence would have been the current hardliners in the administration (most notably Miller and more indirectly Thiel) had not the Conclave of Bishops taken the unprecedent step of chosing an American liberal bishop from Chicago as the next Pope. Sometimes popes are chosen as strong leaders or able administrators, but sometimes popes are chosen to be advisors to key people. Trump is supposedly a Charismatic Christian (he declared himself a non-denominational Christian in 2020, after being a Presbyterian - more than likely the only god he believe in is himself). Vance is Catholic, however, and while there was a real attempt to diminish the meeting in the press, when Vance met with Leo after his ascension, he had a half an hour talk with the Pope. This is actually quite unprecedented, as has been occasional comments that Vance (not Trump) is in his prayers.

Musk's (totally expected) betrayal of trust was the worse thing that Musk could have done to Trump, because it fed into Trump's already well developed paranoia. Now his advisers, Miller and Thiel, possibly in conjunction with Trump's son-in-law, Eric Prince (which is purely an accidental naming, but it fits SO well into the monologue) have been poisoning his ears further, with talks of other plots. So much of Trump's actions are punitive, making other people suffer for all of the supposed abuse that was heaped on him, despite having a life far more privileged than almost anyone else on the planet. To a man troubled by one of the most powerful consciences in the world, even if it is external.

Will those seeds of doubt whispered by a new Pope to a president in waiting (Vance) be enough to make a difference? Hard to tell. JD Vance is married to an Indian woman. His book, Appalachian Elegies, while not perfect, is a reflection about people that I think is indicative of someone who does think about others in ways that exceed pure transactionalism. He has a capacity for insight that I think Trump completely lacks and probably has never had. Right now Vance is playing good little soldier, because Trump would make his life a living hell otherwise. At the same time, Vance has power over Trump in one very particular way: he could form a coalition of people in the White House to declare Trump incapable of fulfilling his duty for health reasons - Article 25 section 4. Trump's hold on power is NOT absolute, and he is developing political enemies far faster than he is developing allies. This will only escalate as the impacts of what he is doing harm others.

Trump is old - he will be eighty next year. He evidences continued decline in cognitive capacity, he lashes out irrationally when he feels he's been offended, and not surprisingly, you are seeing him appear in public less and less. His appearance at his parade was telling - it should have been a shining moment for him, but he was falling asleep instead. He's increasingly being used as a prop to support a shadow agenda, and not a change agent in his own right.

Trump knew that he didn't have the stamina to be president again. He did so because his alternative was likely incarceration, and certainly a significant diminishment of his business holdings. That has not changed. Trump cannot retire gracefully, because it simply puts him back into legal jeopardy again, and he learned first hand that a Vice President will not automatically grant clemency. At the same time, Birnham woods is still circling, the physical manifestation of Vance as the agent of death. Trump, like most narcissists, fears death more than all things, because while I don't think Trump is a religious man, he is clearly a superstitious one.

Will Vance become the next president? I'd say the odds are high. I think if he does, he will likely throw out the incompetents and the sycophants, and start rebuilding what's been damaged. Will he be a good president? Probably not a great one - the country periodically thrusts strong powerful leaders into the office, where they wreak change upon the system for good or ill, but vice presidents historically have been spent picking up the pieces of their predecessor's excesses. At this point, it doesn't matter; McDuff was not the most interesting character in the play.

For Donald Trump, however, Birnam Woods is coming to Dunsinane.