Thursday
Isabella in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure has a passage that the United States needs right now:
O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
Isabella is begging the cold-hearted Angelo to pardon her brother, whom he has sentenced to death on a technicality, but we can imagine her saying something similar to Donald Trump. After all, our president has been using the awesome power of the U.S. military and of the federal government like a giant. We need Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, to come to our rescue.
Vincentio has put his deputy Angelo in charge of the city while he supposedly journeys to Poland on a diplomatic mission. In actuality, he disguises himself as a friar to monitor how well Angelo will perform his duties. He sees his designated leader promptly enact draconian measures, including ordering the execution of young Claudio for impregnating Juliet, even though they are well on their way to getting married. Angelo also orders all of the brothels in town to be torn down, which as one character wryly observes will work only if he also gelds and spays all the youth of the city.
Angelo’s crackdown is a lot like Trump using his narrow victory over Kamala Harris as license to enact authoritarian measures. Indeed, his complicated rationale for executing Claudio bears some resemblance to the intricate reasons ICE has been citing for deporting people who have been living in the U.S. peacefully for years, with some of them having special protected status. Meanwhile, we have been witnessing our own version of Angelo’s brutality.
There’s another parallel. Righteous Angelo starts lusting after Isabella after she begs for the life of her brother and offers her a deal: her body for a pardon.
Now, I could comment on Trump’s own corrupt pardons or on the deal he has made with the evangelical right (power if they give up their Christian principles). For today’s essay, however, I have something Minnesota-related in mind. Although ICE’s “Metro Surge” is supposedly about capturing and deporting dangerous immigrants, it appears that the critical factor is Minnesota voting against Trump in three successive elections. This became clear when Attorney General Pam Bondi, acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, offered Minnesota Governor Tim Walz a proposition: hand over the state’s voting records and we’ll withdraw ICE.
Jay Quo at the Substack blog Status Quo outlines what’s so frightening about this offer. Through voter records, which are kept private and maintained by top election officials in each state, it is possible to tell “who voted, what party they belong to, what race they are, what gender they are, how old they are, where they live, and who the strongest base supporters are based on voting history.” With such data, Kuo notes, “the Trump regime could cause real mayhem in the midterm elections, undermine confidence in the results and even use it to stay in power.” For instance, such voter information can be used in voter suppression efforts.
Shakespeare’s version of the deal Bondi has offered Walz is Angelo’s quid pro quo to Isabella. He puts it as a hypothetical, asking her how she would behave if a “supposed” someone offered her clemency for her brother in exchange for her body. This someone, of course, is himself:
Finding yourself desired of such a person,
Whose credit with the judge, or own great place,
Could fetch your brother from the manacles
Of the all-building law; and that there were
No earthly mean to save him, but that either
You must lay down the treasures of your body
To this supposed, or else to let him suffer;
What would you do?
Isabella responds as Governor Walz responded Bondi’s offer. Her sacred honor, just like the sacred cause of democracy, is more important than relief:
ISABELLA [W]ere I under the terms of death,
The impression of keen whips I’ld wear as rubies,
And strip myself to death, as to a bed
That longing have been sick for, ere I’ld yield
My body up to shame.
ANGELO Then must your brother die.
ISABELLA And ’twere the cheaper way:
Better it were a brother died at once,
Than that a sister, by redeeming him,
Should die for ever.
When she threatens to expose Angelo for his corrupt offer, he informs her that no one will believe her, given his reputation for purity and austerity. Then he moves in for the kill, giving his “sensual race the rein.” Either “fit thy consent to my sharp appetite,” he tells her, or Claudio gets torture (“lingering sufferance”) in addition to execution:
Who will believe thee, Isabel?
My unsoil’d name, the austereness of my life,
My vouch against you, and my place i’ the state,
Will so your accusation overweigh,
That you shall stifle in your own report
And smell of calumny. I have begun,
And now I give my sensual race the rein:
Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite;
Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes,
That banish what they sue for; redeem thy brother
By yielding up thy body to my will;
Or else he must not only die the death,
But thy unkindness shall his death draw out
To lingering sufferance. Answer me to-morrow,
Or, by the affection that now guides me most,
I’ll prove a tyrant to him. As for you,
Say what you can, my false o’erweighs your true.
The prospect of Trump’s false o’erweighing our true is what is currently keeping us awake at night. And unfortunately, we don’t have a Vincentio secretly watching over us and intervening to save the day. Thanks to the duke’s machinations, Claudio and Juliet are saved, Angelo is exposed, and Vincentio himself marries Isabella.
Then again, the citizens of Minneapolis have shown us that there might be a Vincentio to save us after all, that being “we the people.” Their heroism and resolve have caused Trumpism to hesitate and even withdraw somewhat. Although we don’t know the final outcome, either in Minnesota or in the country as a whole, mass protests and a fervid allegiance to democracy look like they are packing a punch.
The giant may not get the last word.
