Mourning Becomes Electra And The Tragedy Of Trump’s Enablers

Wednesday, 11 February 2026, 8:09 pm
Opinion: Howard Davis

“The old feminist, the brilliant, self-assertive, daring, reforming woman, is as extinct as a dodo, and the movement called feminism couldn’t fill a small lecture room.”
- Elizabeth Hardwick, The Feminine Principle, 1958.

Eugene O’Neill’s famous drama draws on the Greek myth of Electra as a symbol of both revenge and filial loyalty. Her murder of Clytemnestra is portrayed as the act of a strong and determined woman who helps her brother Orestes complete his mission to avenge the murder of his father Agamemnon and kill their mother.

Even though Electra and Orestes believe killing their mother was fully justified, neither ever achieves peace. To punish them, Castor and Pollux (twin gods and brothers to Clytemnestra) insist that Electra marry Orestes’ cousin and closest friend Pylades, while Orestes himself spends the rest of his life in exile.

Some legends suggest Orestes dies from a snakebite in Arcadia, but in Aeschylus' play Eumenides he is pursued by the Furies (whose duty it is to punish any violation of the ties of family piety) and eventually goes mad. He takes refuge in the temple at Delphi, but even though Apollo had ordered him to kill his mother, the god is powerless to protect him..

Athena finally arranges a formal trial before twelve judges, including herself. Orestes asserts he was simply acting on the orders of Apollo. The votes are counted and the result is a tie, forcing an acquittal in accordance with the rules previously stipulated by Athena. The Erinyes, who insisted on Orestes' responsibility in the murder, are converted into the Eumenides, who now offer him wisdom and counsel.

Sophocles’ version of Electra presents a much more imposing figure than Aeschylus. Consumed by hatred and an almost hysterical desire for revenge, she is uncontrollably bereaved by her father's murder, suggesting she was more attached to Agamemnon than Clytemnestra.

Sophocles also presents a more philosophical side of Electra. When she confronts her mother about the morality of her actions, Clytemnestra offers a logical defence of Agamemnon’s murder. Electra rejects this coldly logical view of her father’s death, focusing more on the act of murder than the circumstances surrounding it and in the process revealing her complete contempt for Clytemnestra.

Thus both siblings of the cursed House of Atreus are condemned to suffer the consequences of this benighted ‘Family Romance’ in perpetuity. A debilitating sense of deep remorse and crippling regret is the only lasting result.

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Given such disturbing precedents, it’s hardly surprising that apex predators like Epstein, Murdoch, and Trump manage to recruit amoral females half their age to do their dirty work for them. These include not only such malignant individuals as Ghislaine Maxwell and Rebekah Brooks, but also Trump’s entire menagerie of sick and twisted enablers, from Susie Wiles to Karoline Leavitt, Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem, and Natalie Harp - all of whom clearly suffer from deep-seated ‘Daddy’ issues.

We already know all about ‘Captain’ Robert Maxwell’s failings both as a businessman and parent, but it would be interesting to learn how the parents of the rest of this toxic crew instilled such an intense lack of self-worth into their blighted children that they are prepared to turn on their victims with such spiteful and vitriolic venom.

Jung’s concept of the ‘Electra Complex’ - which describes a young girl's fantasy of psycho-sexual competition with her mother for possession of her father - is just as salient here as Freud’s better-known ‘Oedipal Complex.’ This variant of the classical ‘Family Romance’ prototype involves an attraction to the opposite-sex parent and rivalry with the same-sex parent. It occurs on a profound level that is psychologically undeniable.

And it’s just as damaging not only to those involved who were permanently warped by terrible childhoods, but also to a social and economic structure that depends so heavily on the domination of women and girls by unscrupulous, dishonest, and manipulative men who reduce them to trafficked commodities.

As John Harris and Nasrine Malik recently observed in The Guardian, this attitude isn’t limited to such ’celebrity’ pedophiles as Jimmy Savile, Michael Jackson, and Harvey Weinstein, but is “the kind of organised abuse that depended on private planes and secluded islands, the involvement of royalty, the roles in the whole terrible saga given to such fellow personifications of boundless privilege as Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Elon Musk.” The obvious implication is “that such political calls are not subject to the naive morality of the outside world, but occur in a complicated sphere that functions high above the average citizen’s paygrade.”

More than half a century of feminist achievement since Hardwick declared the movement over has made little impact on those who inhabit the upper echelons of real wealth and power. Perhaps their curious penchant for wearing expensive white bathrobes in their rabid pursuit of vulnerable prey bestowed a sense of privileged immunity, or maybe it’s just a practical matter of easy access, but for intelligent women to aid and abet such abuse of their ‘sisters’ is indefensible.

In this period of escalating peril for women and girls from men of all ages the behaviour of such nefarious facilitators only amplifies the amount of cynical and overwhelming contempt that so many of us already feel for the profoundly entrenched structures of male political power.

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It’s fitting to conclude with another of Hardwick’s brilliant aperçus, from an essay she published fifteen years later entitled Is The “Equal “Woman More Vulnerable? -

“History often simply fails us and certain matters of justice and goodness echo forever, never coming to rest. Too many women have lived for too long in history and the contingencies of existence are too pressing and various to allow for generalisation. It is, as Chaucer, said ‘like trying to catch the wind in a net’.”

Fortunately spared witnessing the fascistic excesses of Trump’s deranged and demented behaviour, Hardwick must be turning in her grave. History, however, will not judge favourably those who continue to enable the convicted rapist’s vile misogyny and blatant racism as he subverts basic morality and public decency by completely decoupling principles from politics.

© Scoop Media

Howard Davis

Scoop Arts Editor

Educated at Cambridge and UCLA; worked on several major Hollywood feature films and as a Kundalini Yoga instructor in Los Angeles; currently enjoying life in Wellington.

Contact Howard Davis

• Email - howard@scoop.co.nz