Thursday
Political scientists will debate for years how Donald J. Trump took over and “Trumpified” the modern Republican party. Multiple explanations exist, including George Packer’s theory that Trump represents a longtime rot within the GOP (I blogged about this on Monday). Nevertheless, it still boggles the mind that a disreputable realtor to whom no one would lend money (except for shady Russian billionaires) would win the American presidency and subdue a once-proud party.
Shakespeare’s play about a hostile takeover provides some answers.
I started thinking about Trump as Petruchio when a student in my University of Ljubljana Shakespeare class observed that Kate appears to have Stockholm Syndrome. That’s when it struck me that the GOP might be suffering as well.
Stockholm Syndrome is “the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor” (Webster). Belief that the kidnapped Patty Hearst robbed banks with her Symbionese Liberation Army captors because of Stockholm Syndrome led Jimmy Carter to commute her sentence and Bill Clinton to pardon her.
Petruchio subjects Kate to torments outlawed by the Geneva Conventions in order to break her down, refusing her food and sleep. While at first she can’t believe what she is witnessing, gradually she is worn down until, by the end, she does whatever her husband commands.
In certain ways, Kate resembles Trump’s primary opponents who considered themselves firebrands, especially Chris Christie and Ted Cruz. Both had built confrontational reputations, but they were dumbfounded when Trump went further than they thought was possible. Cruz couldn’t believe that Trump could accuse his father of helping assassinate John F. Kennedy or call his wife ugly.
Kate is in the same situation. Shrew though she may be, she expects a conventional wedding and is shocked when Petruchio shows up late and ridiculously dressed. After insulting the priest at the altar, he refuses to stay for the wedding feast and drags Kate away with him. Here’s a witness describing the wedding ceremony:
Tut, she’s a lamb, a dove, a fool to him!
I’ll tell you, Sir Lucentio: when the priest
Should ask, if Katharina should be his wife,
‘Ay, by gogs-wouns,’ quoth he; and swore so loud,
That, all-amazed, the priest let fall the book;
And, as he stoop’d again to take it up,
The mad-brain’d bridegroom took him such a cuff
That down fell priest and book and book and priest:
‘Now take them up,’ quoth he, ‘if any list.’
Kate, who never before appeared to care about people’s opinions, is suddenly concerned about respectability and what the world will think of her:
Now must the world point at poor Katharina,
And say, ‘Lo, there is mad Petruchio’s wife,
If it would please him come and marry her!’
She again expresses her longing for conventional femininity when she gets to Petruchio’s house. As he abuses the tailor, Katharina expresses a desire to appear as other women:
Petruchio: Why, this was moulded on a porringer;
A velvet dish: fie, fie! ’tis lewd and filthy:
Why, ’tis a cockle or a walnut-shell,
A knack, a toy, a trick, a baby’s cap:
Away with it! come, let me have a bigger.
Katharina: I’ll have no bigger: this doth fit the time,
And gentlewomen wear such caps as these
Time and again, we saw Trump outrage custom and get away with it, bending the GOP to his will in the process. Speaker Paul Ryan thought he was on safe ground criticizing Trump’s “pussy-grabbing” comments, only to find himself reeling from Trump’s attacks on him. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was similarly cowed. By the later stages of the campaign, both were prepared to call the sun the moon if Trump declared it to be so:
Petruchio: Come on, i’ God’s name; once more toward our father’s.
Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!
Katharina: The moon! the sun: it is not moonlight now.
Petruchio: I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
Katharina: I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
Petruchio: Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father’s house.
Go on, and fetch our horses back again.
Evermore cross’d and cross’d; nothing but cross’d!
Hortensio: Say as he says, or we shall never go.
Katharina: Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please:
An if you please to call it a rush-candle,
Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.
Petruchio: I say it is the moon.
Katharina: I know it is the moon.
Petruchio: Nay, then you lie: it is the blessed sun.
Katharina: Then, God be bless’d, it is the blessed sun:
But sun it is not, when you say it is not;
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is;
And so it shall be so for Katharina.
Trump now has formerly proud senators like Lindsay Graham willing to debase themselves in public at his command. It’s a version of Petruchio instructing Kate to embrace an old man as though he were a young maiden:
Petruchio: Sweet Kate, embrace her for her beauty’s sake.
Hortensio: A’ will make the man mad, to make a woman of him.
Katharina: Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet,
Whither away, or where is thy abode?
Happy the parents of so fair a child;
Happier the man, whom favorable stars
Allot thee for his lovely bed-fellow!
Petruchio: Why, how now, Kate! I hope thou art not mad:
This is a man, old, wrinkled, faded, wither’d,
And not a maiden, as thou say’st he is.
Katharina: Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes,
That have been so bedazzled with the sun
That everything I look on seemeth green:
Now I perceive thou art a reverend father;
Pardon, I pray thee, for my mad mistaking.
So now Trump, like Petruchio, preens about his power over the GOP while his sycophants, like Kate, chastise anyone who fails to fall into line:
But now I see our lances are but straws,
Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband’s foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,
My hand is ready; may it do him ease.
Scholarly debates rage over whether Kate really means what she says in this speech. Surely this is just a put-on. After watching formerly independent politicians succumb to Trump’s bullying, however, I find Stockholm Syndrome to be a real possibility.