Thursday
There haven’t been many times when I’ve seen such a public beatdown as that administered by Kamala Harris Tuesday night in the presidential debate. What the Democratic nominee did to Donald Trump reminded me of Goneril and Regan taking apart King Lear.
There are limitations to the parallel of course. While I’ve compared Trump to Lear multiple times in the past (links to some of those posts appear at the end of this essay), the situation here is very different. After all, Trump did not step down voluntarily from the throne, nor is Harris a resentful inheritor using her newly-gained power to settle decades of stored-up grudges. Harris, in short, is no Goneril or Regan (although Trump probably experienced her as such in the course of the debate).
That being noted, however, by the end of the debate Harris—like Lear’s daughters—had turned her antagonist into a sputtering toddler, throwing out wild accusations to hurt her as he was being hurt. The result was, as David Corn noted in a Mother Jones article, the vice-president made Trump appear “small, vindictive, mean-spirited, and old.” I half expected him, once the debate had ended, to flee the scene and start ranting in a rainstorm, a metaphor for his inner turmoil.
To recap the play, Lear, seeking to retire from kingship without surrendering any of its perks, has divided it between the two daughters who tell him what he wants to hear while disinheriting the daughter who tells him what he needs to hear. Then, expecting to be treated as though he were still king, he and 100 retainers essentially move into Goneril’s basement apartment and start partying it up.
She, in response, begins to systematically strip him of his dignity. First, she instructs her steward Oswald to disrespect him. Then she starts working on him herself: she begs him to reduce the number of retainers while at the same time noting that the request could morph into a command: she has the power to take, to “disquantity” or reduce, the number of his followers. Then, she hits his sore spot, essentially telling him that he should act his age. Instead of carousing with young rowdies, he should befriend companions who are suitable to his time of life.
In short, she makes him feel old, which is one of his deepest fears:
Be then desired,
By her that else will take the thing she begs,
A little to disquantity your train,
And the remainders that shall still depend
To be such men as may besort your age,
Which know themselves and you.
If her intent is to trigger her father into flying into a rage and walking out, she succeeds. First, however, Lear launches into a brutal misogynistic attack, which is what men will often do when threatened by a woman: he curses Goneril, saying that he hopes her womb will dry up. One can’t imagine a nastier attack:
Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear!
Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend
To make this creature fruitful.
Into her womb convey sterility.
Dry up in her the organs of increase,
And from her derogate body never spring
A babe to honor her.
As Harris has begun to overtake Trump in the polls, he too has turned to sexist attacks, just as he did with Hillary Clinton, Meghan Kelly, and other powerful women. His lowest blow came when he shared a tweet that Harris has “spent her whole damn life down on her knees.” The reference is to a relationship she had many years ago with San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, which Harris’s rightwing enemies say is the reason for her rise. Some have worn sweatshirts with the derisive logo, “Joe and the Ho.”
If the purpose of Goneril’s remarks is to drive Lear away, they are successful as he storms off to her sister. Regan, however, is equally adept at triggering her father and tells him that she agrees with her sister that he is old and should behave accordingly:
O sir, you are old.
Nature in you stands on the very verge
Of his confine. You should be ruled and led
By some discretion that discerns your state
Better than you yourself.
Between them, the sisters succeed in stripping Lear of every one of his companions, who are important to his identity as a former king. Perhaps it’s as if a president stepped in and took away his predecessor’s security detail in the most humiliating way possible. When Regan insists that Lear reduce his retinue to 25, he turns back to Goneril, who has initially seemed agreeable to having 50. Then the following happens:
LEAR [to Goneril]: I’ll go with thee.
Thy fifty yet doth double five-and-twenty,
And thou art twice her love.
GONERIL: Hear me, my lord.
What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five,
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?
REGAN What need one?
This tag team humiliation in the end has Trump behaving like a little child issuing impotent threats:
No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall—I will do such things—
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth! You think I’ll weep.
No, I’ll not weep.
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep.
For his turn, Trump’s go-to temper tantrum involved the world criminals streaming into America to commit crimes, Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, World War III, America trashed, etc.
The difference between Harris and Goneril and Regan is that she is not operating in a monarchy or a dysfunctional family. She has no reason to cater to an old man’s tyranny. Indeed, by exposing him as a narcissistic tyrant with no impulse control, she is doing us all a favor. The public can see one of the presidential candidates for what he really is.
Political scientist John Stoehr of Editorial Board notes that Harris has done what no one else has proved capable of doing: she has exposed Trump’s ego as glass that can be shattered. Like Goneril and Regan depriving Lear of the followers who are critical to his self-worth, Harris has taken away Trump’s “ability to dominate and control, and to create a spectacle in the process.” Take those away, Stoehr says, and there’s nothing left:
She controlled the man who is said to be uncontrollable. She tamed him. She neutered him. They say he’s a bull in a china shop? Well, last night was nutting season. And she did all this by telling the truth, addressing the American people directly with appeals to democracy, decency, and the rule of law, and using his own insults against him.
She called him weak.
She called him confused and boring.
She suggested he was old.
Most painful of all, for Trump, she seemed to pity him.
Even if Trump manages to win the election, Stoehr contends, he will never recover from this blow.
In Lear’s case, being brought low has a redemptive turn. For the first time in his selfish, lonely life he learns what love is. Tragic though the play is, there is this amazing breakthrough.
I don’t know if Trump is capable of such a discovery. But if Lear is any indication, it will only occur if he suffers a reversal of fortune. If, instead, he is reelected president, expect more of the same.
Previous Posts Comparing Trump to King Lear
Trump’s Love Test Resembles Lear’s
Lear, Trump Rage against Their Enemies
Lear Also Doesn’t Step Down Gracefully
Trump and Lear without Their Fans
Trump as Low Rent Lear, the GOP as Hollow Men
Corruption Starts at the Top
Lear, Trump, and the Hell of Loneliness
