Brian Leiter: 'Shakespeare on Trump: Money Made the Man'

Shakespeare on Trump: Money Made the Man

Donald Trump -- as anyone not blinded by celebrity and wealth can see -- is a mediocre man: homely, boorish, romantically inept (he's on his third purchased spouse!), inarticulate, not very bright, and an underperformer who owes his financial success to luck, both of birth and circumstance. Despite inheriting a three or four hundred million dollar real estate fortune some forty years ago (which would have made him a billionaire today if he'd done nothing but give the money to a competent investor!) -- and even inheriting it before the biggest run-up in New York real estate prices ever -- his business acumen and investing has underperformed the stock market since 1988, and he has had to file for bankruptcy four times. In the real world, a spoiled rich kid who screws up so badly is, at best, a laughing stock, at worst, George W. Bush.

And yet this buffoon and blowhard is not seen that way in large swaths of the media and society. How could so many miss the obvious? One central reason is that wealth obscures the man who possesses it.

Several centuries ago Shakespeare had already aptly diagnosed the Trump phenomenon, namely, the way in which the possession of wealth distorts perception of a man's actual qualities. In Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (1623), Timon, a wealthy Athenian loses his fortune, and thus his friends, his status, his reputation. When he subsequently acquires a great amount of gold, he is now rather self-conscious about the distorting effect of wealth.

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