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Shakespeare makes it easy for the audience by having his villains – his Gloucester, his scheming Edmund – rehearse, in soliloquy, both the evil of their intentions and the strategy of deception by which they pursue them. Deception becomes not only an instrument but a major pleasure as well, a proof of the superiority of the evil character to the good ones. In  our era, the soliloquy is pretty much dead. The strategy of deception more often deceives the deceivers, who think not that they are beyond good and evil, but that they are experts in nudgery, technocrats and meritocrats, and will the good. Their true intentions are estranged from them, and a whole code disguises the source of their advantages. This is what makes the current freakout of the media over Trump such an interesting phenomenon. At least for the critics. For this freakout has made the norm of strategic dissimulation, usually denied, float to the surface as a thing defended. What I mean is this: the word on Donald