Trump Advisers Tell NY Times President is ‘Moody,’ ‘Depressed,’ and Barely Showing Up to Work
Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images.
President Donald Trump is not having a very fun time in the White House lately, according to a report by the New York Times, which cited conversations with several of his advisers saying that he was “moody,” “sometimes depressed,” and “barely show[ing] up to work.”
An article published on Saturday by Peter Baker titled “Trump’s Final Days of Rage and Denial” detailed the fury and melancholy dominating Trump’s moods. Trump’s final days in office, writes Baker, are peppered with angry tweets and a fixation on “rewarding friends, purging the disloyal and punishing a growing list of perceived enemies that now includes Republican governors, his own attorney general and even Fox News.”
One section of Baker’s article that got a lot of attention on social media compared the outgoing president to a tragic Shakespearean character:
At times, Mr. Trump’s railing-against-his-fate outbursts seem like a story straight out of William Shakespeare, part tragedy, part farce, full of sound and fury. Is Mr. Trump a modern-day Julius Caesar, forsaken by even some of his closest courtiers? (Et tu, Bill Barr?) Or a King Richard III who wars with the nobility until being toppled by Henry VII? Or King Lear, railing against those who do not love and appreciate him sufficiently? How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless electorate.
“This is classic Act V behavior,” said Jeffrey R. Wilson, a Shakespearean scholar at Harvard who published the book “Shakespeare and Trump” this year. “The forces are being picked off and the tyrant is holed up in his castle and he’s growing increasingly anxious and he feels insecure and he starts blustering about his legitimate sovereignty and he starts accusing the opposition of treason.”
Missing from Trump’s tweets: mentions of the coronavirus pandemic, with a few scattered exceptions. Baker notes four tweets where Trump defends his own handling of the pandemic that is killing a record nearly 3,000 Americans every day, and over a quarter of a million in total.
