The Trump freakout continues. Queen of Snark Maureen Dowd, has said her schooling in Elizabethan literature was perfect training for covering American presidents with their courts and courtiers, intrigue, dynastic conniving and tragic flaws.

With the Trump crowd we have entered the milieu of Jacobean drama which is several shades darker and cruder with titles like “The Revenger’s Tragedy” and plots thick with knifings in the corridors, poisonings, score-settling and hubristic overreach.

It is no accident that, as the great queen aged with no heir, Shakespeare and his contemporaries were obsessed with orderly succession of power, so the Henry IV and V plays, “Julius Caesar” and “Hamlet” all date from the years just before Elizabeth’s death.

The new king, James I, who followed was greeted with suspicion as a Scot, possibly a closet Catholic and in any case an outsider not to be trusted. He seemed cozy with enemy powers and antagonistic to Parliament. From the five years after his succession we have plays terrified of disorder in high places — “King Lear,” “Measure for Measure,” “Macbeth,” “Anthony and Cleopatra,” and “Coriolanus.” They were soon followed by even darker Jacobean nightmares — “The White Devil,” “The Changeling,” and the like.

And we may now find ourselves in a similar place, where ideas of order and conventions of behavior have gone out of fashion. Since Trump’s election, over 300 hate crimes have been reported against minorities of various kinds. Protesters fill the streets of blue states and sanctuary cities. Three million signatures have been added to a petition suggesting faithless electors cast their votes against Trump in December, no matter what the voters of their states decided, giving Hillary an electoral college win to match her popular vote victory.

Cooler, or more conventional, heads argue that we must all come together, the people have spoken and we owe the new president a chance to govern and a peaceful transition of power. But the transition he is hosting is evidence that his critics were right when they called him the chaos candidate. Already heads have rolled as would-be courtiers vie for power and factions jostle for spoils. Many names put forward seem devoid of qualifications for the high offices proposed. A racist for Attorney General, a wildly unbridled character for Secretary of State, a climate change denier for head of EPA.

Normally sane people feel ill at ease in a country so divided, one that is about to be ruled by people so unsuitable. A friend in deep blue Connecticut says her voting place was awash in Trump signs and a Hillary sign in her yard was vandalized. She says she now feels as if she is living in “The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” where she has to ask of each person she encounters — “Is he one of them?”

Michael Moore, dashed by the Trump victory, believes he must be resisted but is consoling himself with the conviction that the Imperial Donald will be unable to control his larcenous, intemperate, self-absorbed worst impulses which will lead inexorably to impeachment before his first term ends. Possible, but with the government completely under Republican control, who would do the impeaching?

The truth of the matter may be that we are no longer in a Civil War of left versus right but one between right and alt-right. That duel appears to be playing itself out in Trump Tower as the frequently remade transition team feuds internally and the man in the high castle waits to choose.

This may provide people with no enthusiasm for Trump with a shiver of Schadenfreude, but we will all be stuck with the consequences of such chaos. Democrats and even some Republicans such as Rand Paul are gearing up to fight against the confirmation of some of Trump’s wilder possible nominees, such as John Bolton, Frank Gaffney and Gen. Michael Flynn, wild-eyed hawks straight out of “Dr. Strangelove.”

And leading the pack of deplorables is Steve Bannon as chief strategist and counselor, a post equivalent to that held by David Axelrod under Obama and Karl Rove under George W. Bush. Rove was known as Bush’s brain and if Bannon is going to be Trump’s brain he’ll have to be put down as a mad dog. Bannon ran Breitbart, the alt-fascist website that is catnip for white supremacists, anti-semites and misogynists. It is famous for such sentiments as: it is better for your daughter to get cancer than to become a feminist.

With appointees such as he is proposing, and a transition effort so disorderly, it begins to look increasingly as if Trump is not ready for the big leagues he so often boasts of inhabiting. It was reported, for example, that aides were stunned to learn on a White House tour that over 500 people needed to staff the West Wing will have to be hired and on the job bright and early January 20th. News to them.

Trump is said to have refused to think about the transition before the vote for fear of jinxing the outcome. Oh good, another superstitious president like Ronald Reagan. What’s next, the hiring of the White House astrologer?

This would all be pretty funny if Trump were about to assume the mayorship of Queens where state dinners could be pizza and cokes catered by Papa John. But being ill-prepared as president is potentially a threat to world peace, American prosperity and the environment of the planet.

This is no joke, especially since given the way Trump won, by promising the moon to large swathes of the populace and demonizing the rest. He has roused expectations and passions that can easily get out of control if he doesn’t make good quickly. As Trump’s favorite book says, “They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.”

And here’s one more apposite quote to make us all uneasy, one containing an idea that was familiar to the Jacobean playwrights:

“Mass extremism, intolerance, a desperate desire for radical change — all factors that make a stable democracy impossible — are difficult to evoke. When the community is secure, political agitators find themselves ranting in near-empty halls. It takes a haunting fear, a sudden awareness of hitherto unsuspected dangers, to fill the halls with audiences who see the agitator as their deliverer.”

That’s by William Sheridan Allen from his classic book, “The Nazi Seizure of Power.”

We shouldn’t be too sure it can’t happen here.