
Did Shakespeare Anticipate Donald Trump?
For nearly a decade, literary scholars, theater directors, and political commentators have reached for Shakespeare to make sense of Donald Trump. The impulse is understandable: Shakespeare devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to the psychology of power—how leaders acquire it, wield it, and lose it—and his gallery of kings, generals, and tragic figures offers a rich vocabulary for describing contemporary politics. Stephen Greenblatt’s 2018 book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics did much to popularize this mode of analysis, arguing that Shakespeare’s history plays and tragedies function as enduring studies of demagoguery, populism, and authoritarian temperament. Several characters recur in these comparisons, each illuminating a different facet of Trump’s public persona. But if one figure captures the fullest and most resonant parallel, it is Richard III—the scheming, charismatic outsider who dismantles political norms through sheer theatrical audacity. The other characters discussed below—Coriolanus, King Lear, Falstaff, and Julius Caesar—each capture something real, but partially: pride, loyalty demands, comic bravado, or populist menace, without matching Richard’s particular fusion of outsider self-fashioning and calculated norm-breaking.
Did Shakespeare Anticipate Donald Trump?
Four Types of Extraterrestrial Beings Identified
Who’s the Biggest Deficit Culprit: Trump or Biden?
Are Meta and Social Media Getting Their Comeuppance?
Who Is Trump’s ‘Security Blanket’?
