Michael Tomasky writes:

Most every night, just after he slips into bed, Jamie Raskin picks up a volume of the collected works of Shakespeare, thumbs through it, and reads a few pages before sleep takes him. He is not, he admits, a big reader of fiction; doesn’t have the time. But he loves his Shakespeare, he told me one October night as we sat in his kitchen. Two days later, I asked him for a quote from the Bard that sums up our times. He squinted his eyes and looked downward.

“I mean, um … ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’?” He smiled cheekily at the line, spoken by Ariel in The Tempest, referring to sailors jumping off a burning ship; no elaboration was needed in either of our minds about who these “devils” of today might be. Then he gave the matter more serious thought. “I think about Macbeth all the time…. Lincoln was obsessed with Macbeth, and so was John Wilkes Booth, who had played Macbeth.” Contemplation of Macbeth led him to settle on his more considered answer: “I’ve thought a number of times of ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’”

The line opens Macbeth’s soliloquy toward the end of Act I, as he contemplates murdering King Duncan. The soliloquy showcases not just Macbeth’s malevolence, but his awareness that he may be setting off a series of events that he will not be able to control: “we but teach bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.” It is from this speech that we get the phrase “poisoned chalice,” from which the instigator of dark events will himself one day be forced to drink.

Donald Trump, who has poisoned our republic’s chalice arguably more thoroughly than any other figure in U.S. political history, has not been forced to drink from it. But then, we’re only (alas) in Act III of the Trump tragedy. The climax lies ahead. Whether Act V ends with Trump victorious, the republic in ruins around him, or with Trump vanquished and the republic saved and vindicated, remains to be seen. [Continue reading…]