What would Lewis Carroll have made of Donald Trump? In an 1875 letter to The Spectator, Carroll (or, really, Charles Dodgson, the don behind the pseudonym) lamented the ways in which the “degradation of women” went unchallenged in British colleges and universities. Imagine the fun he might’ve had, picking apart Trump! He would’ve revealed Trump’s sexism, of course—but also Trump’s ill temper and illogic and basic badness. Looking again at the Alice tales, it’s easy to find parallels to the current campaign, as if the farsighted Carroll were offering us a warning, a century and a half before the possible advent of the Trump Apocalypse.
Let’s start with the first poem in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tale,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!
An allegory of rapacious capitalism, right? And Trump’s the crocodile! You know he has a golden scale someplace. He has a golden everything else.
Jumping ahead to Chapter VI, we meet another Trump stand-in: the Duchess. Among the first things she shouts (to a baby, no less): “Pig!” And then she tells Alice: “You don’t know much, and that’s a fact.” Compare Trump calling everyone stupid.
A couple of chapters later, Alice arrives at the royal croquet-ground, where the Queen of Hearts is screaming things like “Idiot!” and “Off with her head!” The Queen’s “Off with her head!” sounds a bit like something you might hear at a Trump rally: “Lock her up! Lock her up!” The phrases are horrifying, sure, but they’re also meaningless. (Alice, grasping this, replies, “Nonsense!” The Queen goes silent. But later she’s seen in “a furious passion . . . stamping about, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once in a minute.”)
At the end of the first Alice book, our hero dismisses the Queen and her court with this cutting observation: “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” She knows when to call a fraud a fraud.
In the second Alice book, Through the Looking-Glass, the Tiger-lily delivers this Trump-like judgment of Alice’s appearance: “If only her petals curled up a little more, she’d be all right.” The Violet piles on: “I never saw anybody that looked stupider.”
A bit later, Tweedledee recites “The Walrus and the Carpenter”—a poem in which the title characters betray—and eat!—their fellow travelers, the oysters. “I like the Walrus best,” says Alice, “because he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.” Clearly, the Carpenter is Trump, and the Walrus is Mike Pence.
The White Queen, who believes “as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” is another Trump precursor. We’re going to build a beautiful wall! And Mexico will pay for it! And we’ll deport eleven million immigrants! And I have a secret plan to defeat ISIS! And coal-mining jobs are coming back! And the African-American community loves me! And on and on and on.
And then there’s Humpty Dumpty (another lover of walls) and, of course, the Jabberwock (all that burbling!). But wait: the Jabberwock actually doesn’t work as a Trump stand-in. Take a close look at John Tenniel’s drawing. Those claws that catch? They’re huge.
