Reflections on Character as Destiny

We should not be surprised Trump is blaming vandals for the mess on the Mall. We also should not believe him.

Illustration by Noah Hickey/The Dispatch (Photos via Getty Images).

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In the opening scene of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one of the title characters flips a coin that keeps coming up heads, dozens and dozens of times in a row. Guildenstern muses that the unlikely event might be considered “a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise that each individual time it does.”