The meddler, the schemer, the veiled power behind the throne, the poisoner, the witch. The image of sinister female power hiding in the dark permeates our cultural consciousness. It is a trope that stretches back to the ancient world, when women were excluded from politics and men sought ways to prove that their participation would be unnatural and dangerous. As ancient texts became part of the Western canon, such suspicion became ingrained into our patterns of thought, surviving long after the conditions that created them.
About an hour after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in July, a Trump-aligned super PAC released an attack ad. “Kamala was in on it,” a narrator says. She “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it.” Mr. Trump picked up the theme soon after. Ms. Harris had, he argued, long concealed Mr. Biden’s incapacity, to ensure her own nomination. As focus on the handover itself fades, this idea has come to underpin one of the Trump campaign’s key lines of attack: Ms. Harris has been the power behind the throne all along, and Mr. Biden simply a front. In an early August interview, JD Vance argued that Ms. Harris must have “been the one calling the shots” all along. Mr. Trump has insisted that “Day 1 for Kamala was three and a half years ago.”
The accusation that Ms. Harris covered up the state of Mr. Biden’s health is not dependent on her gender. It’s doubtless that Mr. Trump would have deployed the same argument, in one form or another, against a male opponent. But leveled against Ms. Harris, it hits upon the ancient seam of rhetoric that associates women with the clandestine exercise of power, giving it a degree of consequence it would never have carried against a man.
The Romans loved a conspiracy theory, and rumors of women-led cover-ups pepper their history. This motif took hold most robustly in the peculiar conditions of the early Roman Empire, as the male aristocrats who’d once ruled the Roman Republic became concerned that women were co-opting power that was rightfully male. It was said that after Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, died, his wife, Livia, continued to issue positive news about his health until she had secured the succession of her son Tiberius. A century later, people whispered that Pompeia Plotina, wife of the emperor Trajan, had concealed her husband’s death for some days, signing his letters to the Senate and forcing through the adoption of her favorite, Hadrian, as his successor.
When they talk about women in politics, Roman historians paint us a world of plots designed to circumvent the will of the emperor and the Roman people — and the Trump campaign suggests something similar in its vision of Ms. Harris’s “undemocratic” nomination. It is hard to find a woman of the imperial family who is not accused of using poison — the most covert means of assassination — in pursuit of her goals, and women’s intrigues were often set under cover of night. Messalina, for example, supposedly used a series of fake nightmares to dupe her husband, Claudius, into executing one of her enemies.
The rhetoric had elements of truth: The public sphere was all but exclusively accessible to men, and the strongest weapon available to women was influence exerted privately on male rulers. But it was exaggerated beyond all historical reality. The women of the imperial family were well-educated veterans of the political game, with huge public profiles. Petitioners frequently addressed missives to empresses, and some women were granted semiofficial titles that, like the vice presidency, carried the potential for (but no guarantee of) great power. Secrecy was stressed not because it reflected the truth, but because it made a point: Female power was destabilizing and the women who held it were not to be trusted.
The long dominance of the classical education system threaded these clichés throughout Western thought and provided a blueprint for anxious characterizations of female power. A succession of queens — Margaret of Anjou, Joan of Navarre, Anne Boleyn — were accused of underhand interference in politics. Contemporaries claimed they plotted court intrigues, bargained with sexual favors and practiced black magic. In visions of witch-queens, the Romans’ fear of women exerting power in the dark was taken to its medieval and early modern Christian extreme. The same anxieties were reflected in literature. Some of our most enduring images of female power — Lady Macbeth, Disney’s evil queens, even Becky Sharp in “Vanity Fair” — are defined by their penchant for clandestine scheming.
Now that women can hold power openly in elected office, these attacks should be obsolete. In the modern world they have generally been reserved for political spouses. In 1992, Hillary Clinton was called “The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock” as pundits warned that a vote for Bill was really a vote for Hillary. Mr. Trump attempted to return to this theme in his clashes with Mrs. Clinton in 2016. By then, her established political career forced him to focus on less historically loaded accusations of concealed business interests rather than hidden political influence.
The extraordinary circumstances of Mr. Biden’s departure have allowed the specter of the sinister power behind the throne to be resurrected and turned against a sitting vice president. It enables him not only to attack Ms. Harris on Mr. Biden’s record, but also to cast aspersions on her character and her place in politics. “If Kamala will lie to you so brazenly about Joe Biden’s mental incapacity, then she will lie to you about anything,” Mr. Trump said in a speech. “She can never, ever be trusted.” He now calls Ms. Harris’s rise not only a “coup,” but also the “vicious, violent overthrow of a president.”
In the long hangover of Rome’s anxieties about female power, this rhetoric bleeds easily into darker accusations. In the recesses of the online right, Ms. Harris emerges as just as morally bankrupt and dangerous as the empresses of the Roman histories. Some have falsely accused her of barricading the White House to hide evidence of Mr. Biden’s death, like a latter-day empress. “This woman’s really scary,” Tucker Carlson said on the day after the Democratic National Convention. “She’s much more skillful than I have ever seen. She’s a liar on the deepest level,” which he called “the hallmark of evil.”
Nowadays, it’s a small minority who would openly argue that women should stay out of national politics. But many more people still feel — perhaps on some level they can’t quite put their finger on — that there’s something a little off, a little unnatural and suspect, about a woman in charge. Today’s political commentators and the first century’s Roman aristocrats have that in common. By associating Ms. Harris with the ancient vision of veiled female power, Mr. Trump can speak to that feeling without ever having to spell out the connection himself.
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