Euripides says: Don’t laugh at Trump
Posted on: September 26, 2018
Donald Trump responds to laughter during his address to the UNGA on 25 September 2018
I cannot overstate how much it gave me life to see the UN General Assembly openly laugh at Trump’s claim that “In two years, we have accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country” – a particularly impressive achievement, given that the FDR administration went on for 12 years and involved the Great Depression and WWII. The sight of Agent Orange, wrongfooted by an audience of highly educated, internationally-minded representatives of every nation on Earth laughing at him, when he’s much more accustomed to sycophantic applause at his menacing rallies or, perhaps, tight smiles and averted eyes in the Oval Office… well, that cleared my skin, healed my depression, and caused the flowers in every garden in the land to burst into bloom. It was a delicious cold slice of schadenfreude cheesecake and I ate every crumb.
Alas, as always with Trump news, nothing is ever 100% good and enjoyable. Vox has pointed out that this event is the literal realisation of one of Trump’s major fears (and one of the ways he goads his base’s jingoistic pride into supporting whatever nightmarish plan he concocts): namely, that other countries are laughing at the United States, taking advantage of it and subverting its God-given control. And to Trump, laughing at him necessarily and inevitably means laughing at the United States itself. We won’t have long to wait, I’m sure, before he’s bringing this up at a rally somewhere, conflating himself with the American people as a whole and claiming that the ENTIRE WORLD was OPENLY LAUGHING at American achievement and sovereignty, so maybe the US in turn should laugh at the world and see how it tries to struggle on without American trade, military intervention or ingenuity.
Fear of ridicule is a tremendous motivator. This plays out in comedic situations as well as dramatic – think of someone going to extravagant lengths to avoid being caught naked, for example – but given what we’ve seen of Trump’s thin-skinned egotism and minuscule attention span, he reminds me much more of the antiheroine of Euripides’ astonishing masterpiece, Medea, which (from my perspective, if not Aristotle’s) absolutely wins the Best Greek Tragedy prize. At the beginning of the play, Medea has just discovered that she has been abandoned by her faithless partner Jason, with whom she has two sons. Medea, the witch/princess of Colchis, helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece from her own father (I say ‘helped’, she actually did basically all of the work’) and ran away with him back to Greece, kidnapping her little brother for good measure. In order to slow down her father’s pursuit, she killed her brother, chopped him up into pieces and dropped bits of him into the ocean at random intervals so that her father would have to stop to collect all the portions in order to have a hope of reassembling his son and heir for proper burial. You would think that Jason would think twice before doing anything to upset her, but no – in order to secure his position in his new homeland, he decides to marry Glauke, the teenage daughter of the local king, Creon. He then does not understand why Medea is upset.
All fine here, hbu?
Creon, unlike Jason, does not underestimate how dangerous Medea is, and tells her she has one day to pack her stuff and head out, leaving her children behind to be with their father and new teenage stepmother. Medea is very calm and rational and leaves peacefully. Haha, not. Very much not. Once she is able to ensure that she will be welcomed in Athens, and secures a promise that she’ll never be given up to anyone who, say, hypothetically, might want to come and arrest her and kill her, she admits to the powerless chorus that she now plans to murder the princess through means of a poisoned gift and then, most horrifyingly, to kill her own children as the means of wounding her husband most deeply. And what motivates Medea? Why not say ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’ and beat feet to Athens to live in luxury with the Athenian king and his queen? I’ll tell you: right after saying that she’ll kill her children, she gives this horrifyingly brief explanation of her motives:
For the laughter of one’s enemies is unendurable, my friends.
In the original, it’s chilling even if you don’t understand ancient Greek. It’s practically onomatopoeic with hatred. Try saying this very slowly and with as much loathing as you can summon: oo gar gelasthai tlehton ex ekhthrown, philai.
Chills.
If learning Classics has thought me anything, it’s that people, as a race, don’t change. Humans have behaved remarkably consistently over thousands of years, which is why history is useful as a discipline in the first place. So while I may go back and luxuriate in the sight of the world’s most loathsome rancid tangerine peel squirm in his horrifyingly poorly fitted suit as representatives from all nations puncture his bloviating delusion, Euripides tells us very clearly that after the laughter comes something much less pleasant, and it’s usually the most vulnerable who are wounded the most deeply.
If you’d like to hear a really good take on Euripides’ Medea, I strongly recommend this episode of Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics on BBC Radio 4.
Jules Does 
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