Why Trump’s Rage Defies Historic and Literary Comparisons, In line with a Classics Skilled

By Rachel Hadas, Rutgers College – Newark

The Greek divinity Nemesis, not often depicted in artwork, has no place within the Olympian pantheon of a dozen gods and goddesses. However she’s an omnipresent pressure of retribution, an implacable pressure of punishment that arrives, if not sooner, then later.

Nemesis can bide her time for generations, however there’s no escaping her.

So too, it appears, with President Donald Trump, who’s “clearly not a man who discards his grudges easily,” William Galston of the Brookings Establishment stated just lately. This remark is an understatement.

Trump’s resentment has been steaming because the 2020 presidential election. Now that he’s once more president, he’s removed from appeased; his ire is boiling over.

“Flooding the zone,” a time period borrowed from soccer, was former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s manner of describing the Trumpian tactic of issuing a barrage of statements whose sheer tempo and multiplicity, to not point out contents, are meant to stymie any impulse at rational response.

As he has gained fame and energy, Trump’s contemptuous rage at his opponents and his urge for food for vengeance seem to have sharpened.

Like Nemesis, Trump is now pursuing his perceived enemies, utilizing the ability of the presidency. Amongst his latest retribution: He has
fired Division of Justice officers and workers who labored on felony investigations and prosecutions of him; he has revoked safety clearances for intelligence officers to “punish his perceived opponents,” as one information story put it. And he has eliminated the portrait of Gen. Mark Milley from the Pentagon wall that historically options portraits of the retired chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Employees, as Milley was. In 2024, journalist Bob Woodward reported that Milley had instructed him, “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump. Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country” – clearly sparking Trump’s ire.

As a poet and scholar of the classics, I attempt to discover analogs for this conduct, this temperament – precedents which may assist present some perspective.

Trump shows his anger throughout a rally on Nov. 3, 2024, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
Tyrants, heroes and horses

Historians, I believed, would be capable to give you analogs. For instance, Trump’s preliminary alternative of a political ally, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, as lawyer normal – extensively seen as unqualified for the publish and who later withdrew – was likened to the Roman emperor Caligula, who made his horse a senator. Figures from Greek historical past, from the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus to Alexander the Nice, may very well be famously power-hungry and vindictive.

Classical epic and drama furnish loads of rage, which is the primary phrase of the Homeric epic “The Iliad.”

Since epic and tragic heroes are in positions of energy, temperament and motion mesh. The Greek hero Achilles’ conflict with the Greek military’s commander Agamemnon on the outset of “The Iliad” is psychologically believable. Every man feels insulted and slighted by the opposite; each have trigger for resentment.

Achilles nurses his rage in any respect his fellow Greeks till, a lot later within the epic, his grief on the dying of his beloved Patroklos sends him again into battle. This larger-than-life hero is susceptible, changeable and human.

Maybe essentially the most well-known instance of vengeance in Greek tragedy is Aeschylus’ trilogy, “The Oresteia.” When Clytemnestra murders her husband, Agamemnon, on his return from Troy, she has three understandable motives. Agamemnon has sacrificed their daughter; he has introduced residence a mistress, Cassandra; and Clytemnestra feels loyalty, each private and political, to Aegisthus, her husband’s cousin, whom she has taken as a lover in her husband’s absence and who has his personal causes for hating Agamemnon.

So vindicated does Clytemnestra really feel in having murdered Agamemnon – and Cassandra as effectively – that she proudly compares her motion to rain that fertilizes the crops. As rain is a part of the cycle of the seasons, her act has righted the steadiness of justice.

Crafty rage results in dying

Turning to a couple of Shakespeare’s extra vengeful characters, Iago in “Othello” is an embodiment of a crafty rage that leads him to systematically destroy the harmless Othello’s marriage. He does this by falsely hinting – after which planting a sequence of proof suggesting – that Othello’s bride, Desdemona, is untrue.

Othello finally kills each Desdemona and himself. However the Romantic critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously referred to Iago’s “motiveless malignancy,” because it’s laborious to make sure precisely why Iago is so set on destroying Othello.

Hamlet himself is a reluctant avenger who retains pushing aside the act of revenging his father’s homicide. Within the historical past play named for him, Richard III’s resentment, going again to having been a deformed and unloved baby, makes extra sense. Richard lusts after energy; he systematically and clandestinely murders his personal brother and nephews, who would stand between him and his elder brother Edward’s throne.

Whether or not motivated by political ambition, generalized rancor or an inherited project, none of those figures ends effectively. All of them have enemies, they usually all – besides Iago, who will probably be tortured and executed – die on stage. All have finished loads of injury; none survives lengthy to really feel vindicated. Even Clytemnestra’s triumph is short-lived, since her personal son, Orestes, will quickly avenge his father’s dying by murdering his mom – Clytemnestra.

However all these figures appear to really feel private ardour. Even the opaque Iago has one chief goal: Othello. They don’t current compelling parallels to Trump, whose anger seems to be concurrently personal and public.

Simply offended, Trump is fast to strike again with insults; however he additionally appears to have an insatiable urge for food for broader and deeper punishment, meted out to extra folks and even after a lapse of time. Therefore literary parallels are lower than compelling.

Trump’s anger appears extra normal than private. His aggrieved sense of getting been wronged, victimized by his enemies, is a continuing in his profession. However his targets shift. In the future it’s judges; one other day it’s election officers. Yet one more day, it’s the “deep state.”

And Trump’s implacable resentment has struck a chord amongst many Individuals whose resentment has a extra rational foundation. Trump’s base could imagine he’s talking for them – “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” he stated in a speech at a conservative discussion board, however his first precedence has all the time been himself.

A spirit, ranging for revenge

The injury finished by Trump is usually inflicted by others. Their threats, harassment and even violence are finished within the title of Trump.

He has pardoned nearly all the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, a few of whom have now boasted they may purchase weapons.

Trump has eliminated authorities safety from figures who’ve dared to disagree with him and have acquired dying threats, together with Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Shakespeare, turning historical past into nice poetry, involves thoughts in spite of everything. In “Julius Caesar,” realizing that his funeral oration over the physique of the assassinated Caesar will fire up an offended mob, Mark Antony muses:

“And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his aspect come sizzling from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the canines of struggle”

Antony imagines Caesar’s vengeful spirit rising from the underworld to incite additional violence. Not solely will Caesar’s assassins be punished, however the hell of civil struggle will probably be let unfastened to trigger widespread struggling. Exactly who Trump desires to punish seems secondary to his enjoyment of releasing exactly these hellish canines. Everyone seems to be a possible enemy and a possible sufferer.

“I am your retribution,” Trump has stated. Nothing in Trump’s persevering with story extra clearly echoes the classics than this ominous melding of self with a superhuman precept of revenge.

Such a merging of a mortal particular person with a pitilessly summary energy like Nemesis is nearer to fantasy than to historical past. Or so it could be comforting to imagine.

Rachel Hadas, Professor of English, Rutgers College – Newark

This text is republished from The Dialog underneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the unique article.

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