Chris Jones: Tragic presidency of Donald J. Trump may be nearing an end. What will be the final scene?

The most excellent and lamentable tragedie of Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States, is approaching its season finale. Polling data suggests little likelihood of renewal for a second season.

But a tantalizing — for some, terrifying — question remains: What will be in the final scene?

Analyzing the trajectory of a presidency is not unlike inhabiting a renewal-hopeful writer’s room at Netflix or HBO. The last moment, the fade to black, can’t easily be prepared in advance. Not without a lot of pre-existing love for a long-running show, anyway. “Mad Men” was an auteur exception; most of the time, a brutal cancellation creates an ending no less final for being unintended.

Still, once the arc of the Trump presidency is complete, likely just weeks away, opinion writers will fall over themselves to analyze the last four years, searching for the cohesive dramatic metaphor that fits their purpose.

Many will search hard for the tragic flaws of the protagonist.

Blame for the lack of a renewal will surely often fall on Trump’s zero-sum, lock-’em-all-up personality; his scorched-earth, droning rhetoric; his inability to conjure up a Reagan-esque “morning in America” optimism, long a prerequisite for political success. As explored in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”

“He loves no plays, as thou dost, Antony,” Caesar warns of Cassius. “He hears no music. Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort as if he mocked himself, and scorned his spirit that could be moved to smile at anything. Such men as he be never at heart’s ease while they behold a greater than themselves.”

In fact, Shakespeare warned often of the perils of the zero-sum life: “We, ignorant of ourselves,” Menecrates astutely observes in “Antony and Cleopatra,” “beg often our own harms.”

Indeed. August Wilson, another great tragedian, concurred: “When the sins of our fathers visit us, we do not have to play host,” he wrote in “Fences,” the tragedy of Troy Maxson, a Pittsburgh garbage collector fouled out by racism.

Presidents. Garbage collectors. All unable to escape the formulation of their own selves. All capable of inflicting pain on those who enter their orbit. Lorraine Hansberry wrote of what they never seem to see: “There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.”

Columnists more sympathetic to Trump will look to externals to explain his rapid fall. they’ll likely point to an unfair and hateful media that operated like Sophocles’ aggrieved Antigone, ranting and railing to such an extent that they destabilized the nation’s neophyte president. These columns will argue that the moral absolutists in the media shoved the ill-equipped Trump away from his initial moderate and pragmatic inclinations and pushed him further and further into a shadowy, self-echoing, destructive world of super-spreading rallies and white supremacist appeasements. Even when supporters were planning to kidnap his enemies! As if America was emulating the gothic plot of “Ozark,” as told by Borat.

This was not a place Trump had intended to go at all on Inauguration Day, his apologists will write. They’ll explain the apparent intemperate Trump meltdown in these weeks before the election as an overdue presidential realization that the decks were so stacked, you may as well fling the cards to the floor. Or walk out on Lesley Stahl, who held a straight flush all along.

In this telling, Trump will be like King Creon in Greek mythology, a potentially capable new leader who only needed a fair shot but never had a chance, being born, like Wilson’s Willie in “The Piano Lesson,” into “a time of fire.”

Fault will be found on Fox News and elsewhere not so much with the president but with the cruelty of America itself. Trump’s furious Tweets, which basically began before the inauguration when the cast of “Hamilton” assailed from the stage both the vice president and his own election, will be defined merely as a response to an elitist establishment that refused to accept his elected legitimacy, or the rights of his supporters. In this telling, Trump will be a Nixonian version of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV,” terrified of a betrayer lurking in every White House office or hostile deep-state agency, burnishing their book deals like swords.

Progressive columnists will reject that formulation, arguing that the cruelty that destroyed the Trump presidency was not so much systemic and pre-existent as propagated by the man himself. They will see this four-year drama mostly as one of dangerous evil unleashed, of Trump as Richard III and America as Lady Anne, the widow that tricky Dicky seduces, even though he just murdered her husband. They will write a narrative of a country that fell prey to its own worse tendencies, of a leader who cultivated racist hatred to serve his own purposes. Of a man who played America for his fool, only to end up howling at the heath like a latter-day King Lear with a bankrupt portfolio of trust and affections.

Gentler progressives and relative thinkers will wonder what Freudian forces made this man, handed the keys of the White House and all that goes along, operate more comfortably as a crazed nocturnal Twitter pundit than as a leader with singular power. Harder-edged critics will argue for the irrelevance of the very question and rejoice not only at the cancellation of the tawdry show, but the constituent vanquishing of evil incarnate.

Somewhere in all of this will figure the pandemic. It will be argued in some places that its global challenges of public health and economics were so acute as to have likely undermined most any leader, a line of thinking that may gain in credence if voters kiss off other inevitably unprepared chief executives around the world. Either way, Trump taking it on the chin surely will make it far easier for Joseph R. Biden to embrace a more attractive narrative of renewal and recovery. That mini-series likely will be coming to a locked-down living room near you in 2021.

But others will make a comparison between Trump and Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King,” written both 2,500 years ago and seemingly yesterday. Therein, the leader of a plague-stricken country who genuinely loves his people sets about trying to rid his land of the pestilence, only to find that the task leads him right back to what he did himself, and whom he chose to become.

But wait. It’s not yet over. No last scene. Will Trump wander quietly into the darkness like Oedipus, or be led away like Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire?”

Or will the plot twists spin like the season finale of “Succession?”

Therein, the writers were desperate to give the powerful their comeuppances and exploit schadenfreude, one of America’s primary pandemic distractions, as the writer Jeffrey Toobin recently discovered. But they also well knew that they had to keep their hypnotically mercurial characters alive to maintain the show’s oxygen. They couldn’t throw out their babies with the bathwater. America loves disrupters.

Just storytelling and moneymaking, of course. Mere dramatic fiction.

In life and truth, no one yet knows what is going to happen in these climactic moments.

Perhaps little or nothing. But recent history teaches us that the utterly inconceivable can quickly become the new reality.

———

©2020 Chicago Tribune

Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.