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Monday
Credit to political blogger Tom Sullivan of Hullabaloo for observing that “Trump was always going to go Red Queen. His Truth Social post from Saturday makes clear we have arrived at the ‘off with their heads’ phase.” Sullivan was responding to Trump’s recent Truth Social post to the Attorney General:
Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, “same old story as last time, all talk, no action. Nothing is being done. What about Comey, Adam “Shifty” Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all gilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done….We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT
Is it necessary to remind readers that the Attorney General and the Justice Department are supposed to be independent of the presidency? Neither Bondi nor Kash Patel of the FBI should be Trump’s personal enforcers, although that is what they have become.
Several times during Alice in Wonderland we see the Queen of Heart engaging in Trumpian-like temper tantrums. One instance is during the chaotic croquet games when the balls, played by hedgehogs, keep running off:
The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting “Off with his head!” or “Off with her head!” about once in a minute.
Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, “and then,” thought she, “what would become of me? They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there’s any one left alive!”
That dispute will actually happen during the trial at the end of the book when Alice speaks truth to power. The royal court is prepared to execute the Jack of Hearts for having stolen a platter of tarts before his trial. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” declares the Queen, which is a version of Stalin’s “Show me the man and I’ll find the crime.” Increasingly Trump is behaving this way, demanding that federal prosecutors find people like New York attorney Leticia James and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook guilty of mortgage fraud (of which both are innocent) and then firing the prosecutors when they fail to deliver.
Meanwhile, those prosecutors who are in fact following Trump’s orders—say, attempting to indict a Department of Justice employee of felonious assault for throwing a Subway sandwich at national guardsmen—are increasingly finding themselves thwarted by grand juries. A DC federal grand jury also has refused, three times, to indict a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent.
Needless to say, these people would not escape punishment if Stalin were in charge so we can be thankful for that at least. To this point, everyone, from ordinary citizens to federal prosecutors to law firms, universities, media companies, and others, should be responding as Alice does:
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice.
“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
“Who cares for you?” said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time). “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”
Granted, as a child I used to find terrifying by what happens next—as much by Tenniel’s illustration as the action:
At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration can mete out more harm than a pack of cards. We can’t say, as the Griffin says of the Queen, “It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody.” Those who have been dragged off the streets and sent to prisons in Louisiana and concentration camps abroad can attest that Trump’s axes have some bite. So can comedians Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.
Still, Trump isn’t able to silence these comedians altogether. In a way, think of them as the Cheshire Cat, whose head mysteriously appears at the croquet game and frustrates royalty no end. Upon hearing that the king wants the cat removed, we are told that the Queen “had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said, without even looking round.”
There’s a problem, however, as the executioner points out:
The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn’t going to begin at his time of life.
Just because Colbert and Kimmel are no longer connected to their pusillanimous media companies doesn’t mean that they will shut up. Like the Cheshire Cat, they will keep grinning.
Further thought: The Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass were inspired by Queen Victoria, and it may be—as power shifted from the monarchy to Parliament—that the emptiness of the Queen’s threats capture this shift. One may become more strident as one loses power. To her credit, Victoria herself was a huge fan of the Alice books, and if she recognized herself at all in Carroll’s queens, it meant that she had a sense of humor about the matter. Trump, by contrast, is frustrated by the fact that he doesn’t have the power he believes he should have—he dearly would like to be a dictator—so that his bluster smacks of desperation. It’s why some people still don’t take his threats seriously.
