The April visit of the British king and queen provided plenty of foursome photo-ops across the White House, but also plenty with just the suits: on one side, the gracious, affable figurehead; on the other, the democratically elected felon seeking to extort himself into kingly status. This unlikely pair of kings would seem to play right into Donald Trump’s favorite metaphor of statecraft: having or not having the cards.

With at least one card of conscience up his sleeve, King Charles attempted some stealth diplomacy while addressing a joint session of Congress. He reminded the legislators why their constitution has been a 250-year-long beacon for democracy, only to draw blank stares from half of them. While most of us can (or maybe can’t) imagine what Charles made of Trump and the MAGA spectacle, the king travels with his own spectacle of phantom grandeur—access that can still be counted out in bullion but weighs almost nothing. (Plus, there’s Andrew.) In the end, everything about this pair of old kings—the powerless aristocrat and the power-mad buffoon—rings hollow. And that, for better or worse, leads us to Shakespeare.

The bard would certainly struggle writing a king as verbally and intellectually limited as Trump (the same 2020 soliloquy in every scene?). But while Charles would bore him to tears, the conniving ability to make oneself the chaotic, petulant center of the globe would have to pique his curiosity. Shakespeare had a thing for tyrants, especially the petty ones prone to dumbass moves. And he had a lot of experience sane-washing and sanitizing medieval thugs for the pleasure and profit of the Elizabethan court.

In the second act of King Lear, the enraged tyrant exclaims: “I will do such things— / What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!” How much different is this from Trump’s rage-post of April 7? “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that ‌to ⁠happen, but it probably will.” (Thankfully, the night passed without Iran having died, even though Trump had claimed it “one of the most important moments ⁠in the long and complex history of ⁠the World.”) The Tragedy of King Lear can be pretty enlightening in regard to Trumpian theatrics. Two particular aspects of the play, in fact, seem to have anticipated America’s belligerent near-octogenarian who thinks he has all the cards. The first is the losing of one’s mind.

When I read King Lear in college, I wondered why the Earl of Kent remained loyal to such an awful king until the very end. I later realized it’s because Lear has managed to survive to be a very old man. Kent admires him, I imagine, for the same aura that compels the poet Elizabeth Bishop to set free the “tremendous” fish she has reeled in: his “grunting weight, / battered and venerable,” the five old pieces of fish-line worn “Like medals with their ribbons / frayed and wavering, / a five-haired beard of wisdom / trailing from his aching jaw.”

The presumably venerable Lear lacks nothing at the start of the play except the youth to remain king. All that’s left to do is marry off his beloved youngest daughter to the right foreign adversary and divvy up the real estate—and yet what he does instead is divest himself of everything he has, until he’s left holding his daughter’s dead body. While Lear’s initial illogical decision triggers a chain of violence in those around him, the frenzy he whips up in himself is mentally destabilizing: “Vengeance, plague, death, confusion!” Mind-losing is phenomenally quick in Shakespeare. In a play like Macbeth, we see the logic path of desire-transgression-remorse as it jumps the tracks in real time. But Lear’s bad decisions are not the reason he loses his mind. His dementia is the reason for his bad decisions. His dementia may have even provoked him to give away his kingdom in the first place, as a perverted pretext for seeking revenge.

The actor Simon Russell Beale, who played Lear in the 2014 Sam Mendes production at London’s National Theatre, believes Lear has worsening dementia and has even described the type: Lewy body, caused by abnormal protein deposits in the brain that produce sharp fluctuations in alertness and vivid hallucinations. (The late Ted Turner had this form of dementia.) Decline doesn’t happen gradually but in sudden drops like a plane during turbulence. It’s terrifying, according to Beale: “You don’t see angels at the end of your bed; you see dogs.”

Donald Trump has been seeing dogs in whatever he fears for quite some time. When his enemies suffer a setback, they do so “like a dog.” Although it’s hard to imagine Trump giving away anything of monetary value let alone a kingdom (the ballroom! the arch!), it’s easy to imagine him marrying off a kid to seal a deal. And though he doesn’t have loyalists like Kent and Gloucester, he does have MAGA, who consider him as venerable as a harpooned Moby-Dick. Most of all, Trump has enemies on whom he seeks to exact vengeance via a weaponized Department of Justice. When it comes to the law, it’s all wrath and no rules.

Is this a sign of dementia? Some argue that Trump’s character has always been demented, that old age has not dredged up any shockers. But fate has conveniently (or malevolently) given us Trump in two installments, just as Shakespeare saw fit to give us Henry IV in two parts: because things change. As in King Lear, Trump 2 is showing us what happens when the mind of a ruthless fighter begins to degenerate: everything gets destroyed. With Lear it’s a kingdom; with Trump, a democracy.

Which brings us to the second, more important aspect of King Lear that is metaphoric in Shakespeare but literal in Trump: the transfer of the seat of power from king to fool.

As precursor to the comedian, the court jester or fool was the only version of infinite scroll the Middle Ages had on offer, and naturally it was reserved for kings. A plaything to be bandied about, the fool often had the prospect of execution at whim hanging over his head. A good fool had three essential qualities: being clever, being amusing, and being loyal. We can guess what Lear’s Fool had been to him in years before, but with the worsening dementia, the Fool becomes his lifeline, like the emotional support cockapoo that women of a certain age insist on bringing into Fairway.

When Lear recognizes his madness and runs out onto the heath during a storm, he is followed by his Fool. You might expect a fugitive from his own bad actions to be followed by his conscience, but the compromised Lear doesn’t even have that. He needs the Fool to keep talking to him to help maintain his grip on reality. And of course what the Fool keeps telling him are clever metaphors for his own foolishness. It all comes down to the king’s fatal mistake: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”

An Oval Office photo-op session on April 18 revealed a lot about the relationship between Trump and one of America’s most prominent fools, Joe Rogan. Trump’s signing of an executive order to fast-track FDA approval of psychedelic drugs for veterans was urged on the Administration by Rogan, who stands directly behind the president’s chair. Clearly, Rogan knows who’s playing to whom. Influencers on the left pointed out the hypocrisy of Rogan literally standing behind the man he’d lately begun to ridicule. But Rogan, despite being short, is looking down on a hunched-over president at the center of an acolyte circle. He knows that whether dementia-addled or not, this king would not have a kingdom were it not for fools.

Trump must know that working the podcast bro circuit is what won him the 2024 election, despite the hundreds of millions expended by Elon Musk and other billionaires. The rise of podcasting as social force coincided with Trump’s own ascent. The fact that many of its stars are or were standup comics is not surprising given that comedy clubs are the dominion of men. Though men may have a hard time with the straight-on path to leadership (in the style, say, of the Earl of Kent), they’re good with the crabwalk of sideswipes that somehow takes them to the top faster. Hamlet’s contention that “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King” has it all wrong. Kings such as Trump don’t have a conscience, only scattered attention. And it’s the joke that’s the thing to catch this attention because it’s what catches our attention.

For late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, the joke’s always the thing to catch Trump’s attention. As a fool of the people, Kimmel can tell the truth about Trump as long as he’s funny—something the mainstream media can’t do. To Trump’s inner Lear, Kimmel might as well be the Duke of Cornwall set to gouge out someone’s eyes. Trump fears Kimmel more than any Democratic star, not just for the Nielsen ratings he insists Kimmel doesn’t have, but for his indefatigable ability to be clever and amusing.

Lear’s mind is all but gone by the end of Act 3, when the Fool loses his function and disappears. We don’t hear of him until Lear holds the dead Cordelia in the final scene: “And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life.” Trump, on the other hand, will never run short on fools, regardless of how much his cognitive abilities decline. The more frustrated he becomes with his sycophants, the more he needs (and simultaneously loathes) the spectrum of fools who make us laugh.

Trump may not get the jokes, but he knows their value. He knows that the old Borscht Belt refrain “everyone’s a comedian” was never true and is especially not true in a hyper-changing world. And yet he has surrounded himself with a lead-tongued cabinet who make people laugh for all the wrong reasons. J.D. Vance’s manufactured public persona has ironically affirmed that the man has absolutely no comic instincts or timing. Marco Rubio—simultaneously the most Shakespearean and most potentially AI character of our time—will be forever frozen with that dead expression on the Oval Office couch.

Though tech billionaires can successfully land a rocket full of women who’ve had work done, they can’t seem to land a joke. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—plagued as they are by the hamartia of South African white nationalism—emit words that sound like broken parts inside an Amazon box. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos have the same lack of charisma that makes every utterance fall as flat as Bezos outside his Blue Origin space capsule.

In this age of puppeteer oligarchs, it may be inevitable that all of our rulers will eventually be comedians. There can be good in this, as when Vladimir Putin’s threats pushed Ukrainians toward a man who’d previously given them the haven of laughter. At the other extreme, however, you might have the sneering hate of Fox’s Greg Gutfeld, slouched on primetime television like the kid in the back row of organic chemistry mocking every question his classmates ask.

After more than a decade of Trumpian destruction, it’s anyone’s guess where a Shakespearean fool would lead us. Like critics, fools need things to react to. They don’t generate de novo. The Fool card in a tarot deck is numbered zero, echoing the Fool’s admonition to Lear: “Thou art an O without a figure.” But then doesn’t all politics need things to react to? The tarot Fool is zero because the entire tarot journey—every numbered card thereafter—is predicated on where and how he does his moving. In other words, without the Fool, you really don’t have the cards. §