Courtesy of Trevor Noah, here is the president on Fox and Friends two days ago, frantically pushing the Worldview According to Putin:

https://youtu.be/lY1fv-QP1Pw

Courtesy of Anne-Marie Duff as Elizabeth I, the Tilbury Speech, with the Armada approaching in August 1588, when her nation was threatened by enemies both foreign and domestic:

https://youtu.be/fbjj9Nmn6ZU

It’s hard to beat Elizabeth’s contemporary, Shakespeare, for leadership lessons. It’s no wonder that Olivier’s Henry V became an instrument of war in 1944. Agincourt was fought in 1415; the history play was written in 1599. Both events retained their immediacy as Britain and her allies fought just as bitterly—but with far more lethality— as Henry had on the Continent.

Here is the context: An exhausted, disease-ridden and seemingly doomed English army, vastly outnumbered, prepares to meet the cream of French chivalry in Normandy. These are the words Shakespeare puts in Henry’s mouth, and from what I’ve read about the young king—charismatic, implacable and immensely courageous—this is thin fiction indeed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM

Abraham Lincoln’s devotion to Shakespeare was legendary. For a man whose formal education totaled about seven weeks, it was Shakespeare, the Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England that formed the fundament of the president’s self-education and the templates for his rhetoric, which no president has matched.

What Henry V might’ve taught Lincoln was the importance of the bond between a leader and his people—Elizabeth clearly understood that bond— a lesson mythologized in this scene from Spielberg’s Lincoln.

The scene is mythic because it never happened. But it’s mythic, too, because myths tell the truth in a way we can understand.

https://youtu.be/xsmgkZ8l2TQ

It’s that bond that’s been broken and it’s truth that we’ve lost today: it’s been so besmirched, just as it was in Southern newspapers in December 1860, that recovering it—and with it, constitutional democracy—may require great sacrifice. It may inflict on us wounds beyond imagining. We are met again on a great battlefield where the enemy includes malignant men, so alien to us and to our traditions, and our countrymen, among them those whom we love the most.