In Act 2 of Macbeth, the king lies murdered upstairs and a drunk man is laughing at the gate. Roused by knocking he can barely hear over his own hangover, the Porter imagines himself the doorman of hell, sorting souls before he lets anyone through. One arrival amuses him more than the rest.

Knock, knock! Who’s there, in th’

other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivicator

that could swear in both the scales against either

scale, who committed treason enough for God’s

sake yet could not equivocate to heaven. O, come in,

equivicator.

Macbeth – Act 2, Scene 3, Lines 7-12

It is the funniest line in the bloodiest scene in the play, and that is the point of putting it there. Shakespeare’s audience knew equivocation as the defense Jesuit priests gave under interrogation: answer a true thing in a way that means something other than what the question asked, and you have not, technically, lied. The Porter’s equivocator can swear two opposite things and have both be accurate in some narrow sense. He can win down here. He cannot win at the only gate that actually matters, because that judge does not grade on technicalities.

The whole play equivocates before the Porter ever opens his mouth. The witches eventually promise Macbeth that no man born of woman will harm him, and that he is safe until a forest marches against his castle. Both promises hold, right up until the moment they don’t. That is what equivocation is built to do. It survives the fact check and kills you anyway.

Four hundred years later, the gate is the Situation Room, and the equivocator wears a red tie.

This war should never have been fought. The president told the country it would be over in four to five weeks anyway. Instead it ran past the hundred-day mark, and here is what that math actually cost.

Thirteen American service members are dead.

More than one hundred billion dollars is gone and we seriously depleted large amounts of our military ballistics.

Two F/A-18s and several other aircraft did not make it home, and 365 Americans were wounded along the way.

The “deal” signed to make all of that worth something does not do the one thing the war was supposedly fought to do. Iran’s nuclear program stays exactly where it was. Iran’s missile arsenal stays mostly intact too. The CIA’s own assessment puts the regime’s surviving stockpile at roughly seventy percent of what it had before the bombing started, with three quarters of its mobile launchers still in working order.

What the deal does do is lift the sanctions. It opens the door to as much as three hundred billion dollars in reconstruction financing for the government the war was supposed to weaken. It reopens a strait that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, the same strait Iran shut down to start this whole mess, and in reopening it on these terms, the deal teaches Tehran the only lesson it actually needed to learn: choke the chokepoint, and the United States will pay you to let go.

This is not a Democrat’s reading of the receipt. Senate Republicans called it, in their own words, “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” and added that Reagan would be turning in his grave at the news. Senator Thom Tillis is a Republican, and he is the one who read the body count and the dollar figure out loud, on camera, without blinking. Senator John Cornyn is a Republican (from Texas!), and he pointed out that the money Iran is about to receive comes with no leash, which means it ends up funding the same regional proxies the war claimed to be neutralizing. Senator Roger Wicker is a Republican, and he warned weeks in advance that trusting Iran’s good faith would produce exactly the disaster it produced. None of these men are doves. They voted for the bombing. They are simply the ones now reading the cost.

The president, for his part, will not commit to what he signed. He says he wouldn’t mind letting Congress see the text, then keeps Congress in the dark on a deal his own administration finalized the weekend before. He calls it a memorandum of understanding, not final, and says that if Iran doesn’t behave, the bombs start falling again.

So which is it? Peace, or a pause he reserves the right to revoke whenever it suits him? He wants credit for both, depending on which audience is listening.

That is not strategy. That is the equivocator’s trick, performed by a man who does not appear to know he is performing it.

He even reused his own punch line. The original sales pitch for starting the war was four to five weeks. The sales pitch for ending it was that the oil reserves would run dry in about four weeks without a deal, and that the alternative was bedlam. Four weeks, doing two different jobs, both times convenient, neither time true.

Shakespeare’s equivocator at least knew what he was doing. He chose the technicality with his eyes open, gambling that cleverness could outrun consequence, and the Porter laughs at him precisely because the gambit is so familiar, so human, so doomed. Trump is not that. He is not clever enough to be cynical. He believed his own four-to-five-week war the first time, and he appears to believe his own peace deal the second time, which makes him something worse than a liar.

A liar knows there are two truths and picks the one that serves him.

A fool thinks there is only one, and that’s the one he told himself first.

False face must hade what the false heart doth

know.

Macbeth – Act 1 Scene 7, Lines 95-96

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Macbeth quotations from Folger Digital Texts, eds. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, used under CC BY-NC 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/).