Overview
Donald Trump Julius Caesar Assassination refers to a controversial production of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which the title character, a populist leader, is depicted as President Donald Trump. After a bootleg video of the play’s finale, during which Caesar is assassinated, leaked online, corporate sponsors dropped support of the production.
Background
Belived to have been written in 1599, William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar adapts the Roman leader as a tragic populist leader murdered by his senate. The play has long been one of Shakespeare’s most controversial as it is frequently adapted to fit modern politics. In 1937, Citizen Kane-director Orson Welles staged a production featuring Nazi imagery, then on the rise in Germany and Italy. In 2012, an adaptation in Minneapolis put then-president Barack Obama in the role.
Following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, theater executive Oskar Eustis decided to produce a version of Caesar where the title character looks like Trump for the 2017 Public Theater production in New York City’s Central Park. The play began previews on May 23rd.
Development
On June 6th, a radio interview between comedian Joe Piscopo and Laura Sheaffer, a sales manager at Salem Media, went viral, after Sheaffer described her outrage after having seen the show. During the interview, she describes his death by the hands of someone who resembles Melania Trump and a nude scene that she says makes a mockery of the presidency. Since being uploaded to YouTube, the interview has been viewed more than 14,000 times (listen below).
The following day, Inside Edition’s YouTube channel uploaded footage of Caesar’s assassination, in which the character in Trump’s garb is stabbed to death. Within a week of its upload, the video has been watched more than 238,000 times.
On June 11th, Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump, Jr, retweeted a Fox news article about the play. In the tweet, he said, “I wonder how much of this ‘art’ is funded by taxpayers? Serious question, when does ‘art’ become political speech & does that change things?” The tweet (shown below) received more than 5,500 retweets and 13,500 likes.
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On June 11th and 12th, three major sponsors pulled funding from the Public Theater’s production, Bank of America and Delta. In a series of statements via Twitter (shown below), Bank of America and American Express, explained their reasoning.
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On June 12th, 2017, the show opened. That night, Eustis delivered remarks before the show about the meaning and intention of the work (shown below). In his speech, he said:
bq.“We try to hold a mirror up to nature. It’s what Shakespeare was doing, it’s what we’re doing. When we hold the mirror up to nature, often what we reveal are disturbing, upsetting, provoking things. Thank God. That’s our job. Anybody who sees this play tonight, and I’m sorry there’s going to be a couple of spoilers, will know that neither Shakespeare nor the Public Theater could possibly advocate violence as a solution to political problems and certainly not assassination.”
Media Coverage
Several news outlets covered the controversy, including The New York Times, Breitbart, HuffPo, The Washington Post,BBC and more. Twitter published two Moments page on the production, one on the controversy and the other on The Public Theater’s response.
On Reddit, there were several threads in the /r/The_Donald subreddit regarding the controversy, as well as threads in /r/politics and /r/conservative.
Search Interest
External References
