Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Wednesday
Margaret Hartmann of New York Magazine’s Intelligencer made good use of the Grimm Brothers in a recent column about Republican rage at singer Taylor Swift. “All the talk about the pop star’s staggering popularity,” she notes, “reportedly has Trump privately fretting over the possibility that he is not the fairest one of all.” We all know the story, of course. but applying it to the former president accentuates his jealousy.
The Grimms don’t waste any time in bringing up the emotion:
A year later the king took himself another wife. She was a beautiful woman, but she was proud and arrogant, and she could not stand it if anyone might surpass her in beauty. She had a magic mirror. Every morning she stood before it, looked at herself, and said:
Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who in this land is fairest of all?To this the mirror answered:
You, my queen, are fairest of all.
Then she was satisfied, for she knew that the mirror spoke the truth.
Snow-White grew up and became ever more beautiful. When she was seven years old she was as beautiful as the light of day, even more beautiful than the queen herself.
One day when the queen asked her mirror:
Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who in this land is fairest of all?It answered:
You, my queen, are fair; it is true.
But Snow-White is a thousand times fairer than you.The queen took fright and turned yellow and green with envy. From that hour on whenever she looked at Snow White her heart turned over inside her body, so great was her hatred for the girl. The envy and pride grew ever greater, like a weed in her heart, until she had no peace day and night.
Snow White is described as being white as snow, red as blood, and black as ebony. Swift has blond rather than black hair but otherwise checks the boxes.
According to Hartmann’s source, Trump is pretty much yellow and green with envy. He has “privately claimed that he is ‘more popular” than Swift is and that he has more committed fans than she does.” According to this source, Trump was particularly furious that Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year went not to him but to Swift.
Anne Sexton, in her version of the fairy tale, says of the queen, “Pride pumped in her like poison.” As a result, her rage knows no bounds:
…so she condemned Snow White
to be hacked to death.
Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter,
and I will salt it and eat it.
The hunter, however, let his prisoner go
and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle.
The queen chewed it up like a cube steak.
Channeling Dante’s Inferno, Sexton notes that the obsessively jealous create their own internal hells. As she puts it, “Oh my friends, in the end you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.” This is a reference to the Grimms’ grim ending, where this literally happens:
At first [the queen] did not want to go to the wedding, but she found no peace. She had to go and see the young queen. When she arrived she recognized Snow-White, and terrorized, she could only stand there without moving.
Then they put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals. They were brought forth with tongs and placed before her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead.
MAGA Republicans at the moment have to go and see the young queen—which is to say, they cannot stop obsessing over Swift. Dancing the fire dance in iron shoes, they are spooling out unhinged conspiracy theories, including that the Kansas City football team is in the Super Bowl only because Chiefs’ tight end Travis Kelce is Swift’s boyfriend.
One beef that Republicans have with Swift is that she has been urging young people to register to vote, with 35,000 registering following an Instagram suggestion (!). Also, although she normally steers clear of politics, she endorsed Biden in 2020. But as Gil Duran of FrameLab points out, she challenges old straight white guys simply by being an independent and powerful woman who opposes racism and champions LGBTQ+ folk.
And which would you rather watch, The Eras Tour or a Trump rally?