Donald Trump Performing in Shaw's 'Pygmalion'

By common perception, perhaps even by consensus, the US is the best and greatest democracy in the world. However, in 2016, there is a President-elect with two Americas behind him and before him. America is unprecedentedly divided, following the big victory of Donald Trump. It was an unexpected victory that also led to a nationwide, though small-scale, unrest for a few days. Trump triumphed, but the protesters chanted, with every right and reason, "Dump Trump, Ditch Trump." The US is no longer as united as it was in the past or it is supposed to be. It is Trump and his right wing white supporters and surrogates—racist and nationalist—who were instrumental in engineering his triumph, as much as they were responsible for the uneasy demonstration after the election. 

There has been a surge of white nationalism, not necessarily anti-Jewish but mainly anti-Muslim, in the US and Europe. The last American presidential campaign, especially on the part of the boastful, bullying and belligerent Trump, shares its indignity, unconventionality and anti-establishment message with the theme of shocking and stunning transformation in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913), as the title of the play itself suggests. Sculptor Pygmalion in the Greek myth dislikes real women but falls in love with the statue of a woman called Galatea that he himself made. With the help of the goddess of love Venus, the statue comes to life and both Pygmalion and Galatea become united. Similar (yet different kind of) transformative changes occur in the story of the play and the tale of Trump too. 

Capitalist Trump has a lot in common with the socialist Shaw's proletariat Alfred Doolittle in the play. Putting aside the main (economic) difference between them (one being fabulously rich and the other a working class man, a garbage/rubbish collector), both are into immoral and improper womanising. Trump married at least three times and has had many extramarital scandals to his record. Always surrounded by Miss Universes, Miss Worlds, and other stars and actresses, he is known for making lewd and crude remarks and unwanted sexual advances towards them, bragging about his predatory impulses and desires. Doolittle has had at least six wives and is still free from "fear and conscience." 

Both Trump and Doolittle have had an un-fatherly and morally questionable and controversial relationship with their own daughters. Trump is on record having made obscene, inappropriate comments about his own daughter Ivanka as he did about many other women. In Shaw's play scoundrel Doolittle also makes money at the expense of his daughter, cynically exploiting her situations for money. Both have their unique brand of rhetoric, blunt and unabashed, that they have successfully exploited to their personal interest—one for his election win and federal tax evasions and the other in his open and amusing advocacy of drink and wild fun. Both are notoriously scandalous and unembarrassed about what they do and say. Both are unaffected, unpretentious, and unmasked, in their body language as well as verbal expressions. In this sense, they literally speak their mind in relation to their own selves and their ideas of social criticism. They do so from their own point of view: Trump being a capitalist, protectionist, isolationist, exclusionist, and nationalist about what are in his view American interests, and Doolittle being proletarian and socialist. 

Both of them profess to be anti-establishment. Both are able to recreate and transform themselves into something they could hardly expect: one suddenly entering politics from outside the establishment and getting elected American president, another managing to get recommended, though half-seriously, half-jokingly, to a generous philanthropist, only to get endowed with a large fortune and become, though unwillingly, a lecturer in moral reform under the banner of a reputable organisation. He was otherwise happy with his morally and socially loose and lax past. It remains to be seen whether Trump would feel the same way after facing the Presidential challenges in the months and years ahead.

Trump has also a lot of similarity with Professor Henry Higgins of Phonetics in Shaw's play. Both are unconventional and impatient in their own ways—Trump about the so-called Washington establishment and party bureaucracy, going in the opposite direction from the rest of society in most matters. So is Higgins, who is impatient with high society and its rules and niceties. Though not necessarily bad at heart, both are bullies to others and both are good at branding their names and professions: Higgins is the author of his Universal Alphabet, setting up his own laboratory for lessons in the science of speech, and Trump having his planes, towers, hotels, casinos and other businesses all bearing his name, including the failed Trump University. 

If Trump is a racially and ethnically motivated "America-Firster" (on the basis of the basic "Buy American, Hire American" rule) in economic, military, and nationalistic sense with a bias for anti-ethnic diversity, Higgins is an "England-Firster" in the sense of the English language, which he thinks is the great language of Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible and as such would not allow it to be tainted. Like his real life elder contemporary and English traveller CM Doughty, famous for his Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), whose mission it was to purify English as a language of its impurities in its idioms and expressions, Higgins also would not let the English speech be corrupted in terms of its phonemes and phonetic pronunciation. Higgins finds the accent of the native (English) working class as represented by Eliza utterly depressing and deplorable. She is however laudably trained by him, as the play proceeds, to achieve a perfect command of the science of speech, as perfect as that of an upper class English lady. 

Linguistically, Trump is far from being a protectionist or nationalist; he is then a multiethnic globalised pluralist. Unlike Higgins, Trump can bear with his third and present wife Melania's original Slovenian accent as he did with his first wife Ivana's Slovakian style. He even proudly defended Melania for being able to fluently speak as many as six or seven languages, no matter what the level or quality of her accent is. His second wife Marla Maples' American accent did not matter much to him. It was not her speech or voice quality that drew him to her first or that prompted him to disengage from her later. In his linguistic pluralism and adaptability, Trump is similar to Colonel Pickering in Shaw's play. Pickering is an expert in Indian dialects, branding his expertise as the author of Spoken Sanskrit, as Trump also goes trending his business empire successfully, all bearing his name. Pickering is number two in the Higgins-Pickering transformational experiment on Eliza; he is, as it were, Higgins' running mate just as Mike Pence as the vice president-elect was Trump's running mate. Pickering is polite and polished and fatherly and kindly, just as Mike Pence is, compared with their number one respectively. 

Both Trump and Higgins have their eccentricities, which are as alienating as attractive to many, as both have the power to transform the terms and trends of the society the way they want, like the mythological Pygmalion has his statue of Galatea transformed into a beautiful living woman. Wasn't Trump also able to electorally transform his originally Slovenian model wife Melania into the First Lady of the US? Trump performing Shaw's Higgins and Doolittle has really proven to be shocking and amazing, indeed!

The writer holds a PhD from New York University and is a Professor of English at a university in the Middle East. E-mail: [email protected]