Wednesday
When my faculty book group discussed Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night last week, I gained a new insight into Vice-President J.D. Vance: he’s a Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
Vance has pretty much failed every character test with which he’s been presented, but he surpassed even himself earlier this month when he said, after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good through her car window, that the man “is protected by absolute immunity” and that “he was doing his job.” While this permission structure may not have directly led to the subsequent murder of Alex Pretti, it didn’t help.
Vance has since walked back the “absolute” although he did so in his characteristic mealy-mouthed fashion:
I didn’t say and I don’t think anyone in the Trump administration said that officers who engaged in wrongdoing would enjoy immunity. That’s absurd. What I did say is that when federal law enforcement officers violate the law that’s typically something federal officials would look into. We don’t want these guys to have kangaroo courts.
Speaking of kangaroo courts, Trump’s Department of Justice then figured that it should investigate Good and her partner, not Ross. Oh, and Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey as well (for inciting).
It’s a consensus view that Vance, who once suggested that Trump could be “America’s Hitler,” reeks of inauthenticity. It’s as though he says mean things because he believes this will earn him favors with Trump and the MAGA faithful. Instead of coming off as an obnoxious bully-in-charge, however, he appears merely weak and pathetic.
Which is how Sir Andrew appears in Twelfth Night.
Andrew is in Lady Olivia’s household because Sir Toby, her uncle, has persuaded him that he has a shot at marrying her. In actuality, he has no chance at all, which Toby knows full well. As the Twelfth Night Lord of Misrule, however, Toby likes to create mayhem however he can. He also wants to drain Sir Andrew of every last cent. “If I cannot recover your niece, I am a foul way out,” Andrew moans after Toby instructs him to send for more money.
Toby, like Trump with his cabinet, can get Andrew to caper around the room like an idiot. Andrew may think he’s impressing the older man with his dance steps, but he is just being mocked. “Let me see the caper,” Toby says, goading him on. “Ha! higher: ha, ha! excellent!”
Like Vance, Andrew is the kid who is desperate to be one of the populars. While he thinks he can impress the gang by talking tough, however, he overshoots the mark, as in the following interchange:
MARIA Marry, sir, sometimes he [Malvolio] is a kind of puritan.
SIR ANDREW O, if I thought that I’ld beat him like a dog!
SIR TOBY BELCH What, for being a puritan? thy exquisite reason, dear knight?
SIR ANDREW I have no exquisite reason for’t, but I have reason good enough.
“Absolute immunity,” Vance said, sounding tough. And then failed to provide exquisite reason.
At times Andrew, like Vance, just echoes whatever the older man is saying. Note the scene where Toby is complimenting Maria for arranging the Malvolio prank:
SIR TOBY BELCH I could marry this wench for this device.
SIR ANDREW So could I too.
SIR TOBY BELCH And ask no other dowry with her but such another jest.
SIR ANDREW Nor I neither.
FABIAN Here comes my noble gull-catcher.
Re-enter MARIA
SIR TOBY BELCH Wilt thou set thy foot o’ my neck?
SIR ANDREW Or o’ mine either?
SIR TOBY BELCH Shall I play my freedom at traytrip, and become thy bond-slave?
SIR ANDREW I’ faith, or I either?
. . .
SIR TOBY BELCH To the gates of Tartar, thou most excellent devil of wit!
SIR ANDREW I’ll make one too.
Hanging with the cool kids, however, doesn’t protect you from their cruelty, as Andrew will discover when he himself becomes the butt of one of Toby’s pranks. Judging Viola/Cesario to be a coward and knowing Andrew to be one as well, Toby arranges a duel between the two of them. Assuring Andrew that “Cesario” is sure to back down, Toby goads him into writing a challenge, which is as waffling as a Vance declaration:
Youth, whatsoever thou art, thou art but a scurvy fellow. Wonder not, nor admire not in thy mind, why I do call thee so, for I will show thee no reason for’t. Thou comest to the lady Olivia, and in my sight she uses thee kindly: but thou liest in thy throat; that is not the matter I challenge thee for. I will waylay thee going home; where if it be thy chance to kill me,’–Thou killest me like a rogue and a villain.’ Fare thee well; and God have mercy upon one of our souls! He may have mercy upon mine; but my hope is better, and so look to thyself. Thy friend, as thou usest him, and thy sworn enemy, ANDREW AGUECHEEK.
While appearing to endorse the letter, Toby has as much contempt for his companion as Trump has for Vance. Knowing that the note will expose Sir Andrew as a “clodpole,” he chooses to deliver the challenge verbally:
Now will not I deliver his letter: for the behavior of the young gentleman gives him out to be of good capacity and breeding; his employment between his lord and my niece confirms no less: therefore this letter, being so excellently ignorant, will breed no terror in the youth: he will find it comes from a clodpole. But, sir, I will deliver his challenge by word of mouth…
Unlike Trump, Toby ultimately faces consequences for his behavior, although he takes down Andrew with him. (“Everything Trump touches dies,” says Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson about those who associate themselves with the man.) Mistaking Viola’s twin brother for Viola/Cesario, Toby and Andrew try to fight with him and end up with broken heads. As Andrew reports, “we took him for a coward, but he’s the very devil incardinate.” In fact, Andrew appears to have the same sense of justice that Vance has:
I’ll have an action of battery against him, if there be any law in Illyria: though I struck him first, yet it’s no matter for that.
So again, the Justice Department believes that the struck, not the strikers, must be prosecuted. That decision has led roughly half a dozen federal prosecutors in Minnesota and several supervisors in the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division in Washington to resign, according to the Associated Press.
Andrew finally discovers what Toby really thinks of him at the end of the play when he offers him comforting companionship:
SIR ANDREW I’ll help you, Sir Toby, because we’ll be dressed together.
SIR TOBY BELCH Will you help? an ass-head and a coxcomb and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull!
Mike Pence, who sold his soul to be Trump’s first vice-president, thought that his loyalty would earn him his boss’s gratitude, only to see Trump sic an angry mob on him. Why does Vance think things will turn out better for him? His best hope is for Trump to die in office. (His odds of this happening are actually better than Andrew marrying Olivia.)
About Andrew’s name (Aguecheek or, as Toby calls him at one point, Agueface): face ague is a now obsolete phrase for a neuralgic disorder involving facial swelling or facial pain. Vance, for his part, is so embarrassed by his cherubic face that he has covered it up with a beard.
Oh, and while I’m stretching things, Andrew at one point—in his moment of greatest vulnerability and humanity—sadly recalls, “I was adored once.” In Vance’s case, his hillbilly grandmother (“mamaw”) adored him once as well.
Vance built a career by writing about their relationship. And now here he is, passing that adoration along to “America’s Hitler.”
