Yesterday, on "Meet the Press," Donald Trump was presented with a list of characters he'd been compared to: "some people are calling you the Music Man of this race. Kim Kardashian. Biff, from Back to the Future. George Costanza. P.T. Barnum. What's - any of those do you consider a compliment?" Trump immediately said "P.T. Barnum."
ADDED: Who has compared Trump to P.T. Barnum? I found this from way back in April 2011:
As GOP insiders and the conservative base warm to what party veterans see as a “joke candidate” ...Sometimes the joke is on you.
... likely GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich opted for a more theatrical approach....But here's something from the current election cycle, as people were getting a clue that they'd have to take Donald Trump something like seriously. This comes from Salon, last September, by Sean Trainor:
"Well look I think that he is a little bit wild. A little bit... some have compared him to P.T. Barnum and the rise of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. He is one of the great showman of our lifetime. He is very clever at getting news media attention. And he’s in his “Apprentice” candidate phase. That’s fine. He brings a level of excitement and life — a lot more folks will talk about the Republican ticket in the next few weeks because of Donald Trump. I’m all for him being an active Republican, then at some point he’s got to settle down…But for the moment it’s a bit like watching American Idol. We have the newest guest star."
Donald J. Trump is not, as Matthew Pressman argues in the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan’s heir. Rather, he’s the heir of the 19th-century showman Phineas Taylor Barnum – disingenue extraordinaire and purveyor of humbug (that quaint, old-timey synonym for bullshit)....Hey, this is really good! Read the whole thing. I can't excerpt it all.
This is what makes Trump Barnum-esque: the fact that viewers are invited, implicitly, to decide whether Trump actually means any of what he says. Can a man really love himself as much as Trump? Does he truly think that “bombing the hell” out of ISIS will fix the quagmire in Syria and Iraq? Can he seriously believe that the Mexican government will agree to pay for a border wall? Does he honestly expect that he can negotiate a better nuclear deal with Iran through sheer boardroom finesse?
Scholars have called this the “operational aesthetic”: a kind of spectacle in which the conversation surrounding the show becomes the show itself. And it was pioneered by P.T. Barnum in the decades prior to the Civil War, long before the showman became a senior partner in the Barnum and Bailey Circus....
Barnum understood why his audiences came. And so, time and again, Barnum returned to the public with a litany of spectacles that tested the boundaries of spectators’ belief (while also, at times, exploiting white patrons’ racism): Joice Heth, an elderly African-American woman who he told viewers was the 161-year old nurse of George Washington; William Henry Johnson, an African-American man from New Jersey who Barnum claimed was a “missing link” between humans and apes; and even a hairy horse that he tried to pawn off as a living fossil....
Whether Donald J. Trump is conversant in the finer points of P.T. Barnum’s career and entertainment philosophy remains, for the moment, an unanswered question. But it nevertheless seems clear that, intentionally or otherwise, Trump has mastered Barnum’s “arts of deception,” as scholar James Cook calls them: the ability to invite publicity by inviting doubt....
[A]mong the bulk of Trump’s supporters, I would wager that a more ironic appreciation prevails: a fascination that stems, not from his earnestness, but from the opposite. Sure, many conservatives likely approve of what he’s saying. But if that alone explained his support, Republican voters would have little reason to prefer Trump’s misogynistic, sabre-rattling, xenophobia over that of his opponents. No, his support comes not from his substance but from his style: a delicious disingenuousness after 16 years of George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s deadpan sincerity (unperturbable, even when either has been peddling lies).
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22 comments:
The key is that Trump answered the question on its own terms and turned it into a positive.
Whether Trump is a better promoter than Barnum was remains to be seen. But we will see within the next few months.
"Without publicity a terrible thing happens: nothing." _ P.T. Barnum.
I remember seeing a TV movie on Barnum that presented a very positive account of him, it starred Beau Bridges.
Here is a link to the IMDB entry on it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209720/
According to the movie Barnum was the person who first pioneered "conferences of the press."
Obama was the Music Man and he seduced many the sexy librarian into believing he was more than the con man he was, not to mention that he got the country to buy him band uniforms and instruments, but never delivered the recovery he promised, and still his followers love him.
Wouldn't it have been interesting if the press had probed Obama this thoroughly?
Trump may be an entertainer, but his message seems pretty damned serious to me. Stop the Dem's attempt to bring hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants to the U.S. That's the number one issue of our time.
Thousands of Muslim men carried out a coordinated sexual terrorist attack on German women in half a dozen cities on New Year's Eve. These attacks were clearly intended to drive German women into donning the burqa. In Cologne, the attacks occurred in front of the cathedral, a clear signal of intent to desecrate the city's main Christian symbol.
These attacks were an act of war on the German state.
Trump is entertaining, but he's the only guy out there who says he'll stop this from happening in the U.S. I'm not going to vote for a candidate who won't stop mass Muslim immigration.
P.T. Barnum was a successful entrepreneur and leader. He correctly assessed a need and identified a market, assembled a staff of competent men and women, and together they provided the right product to fulfill a demand. He was the quintessential prototype of the American spirit and achievement.
Walt Disney didn't file bankruptcy four times. He also wasn't a litigation machine.
Ugh....Ann...you directed me to ThinkProgress... I really do not like giving that rag clicks. :)
Speaking of Professor Harold Hill and Donald Trump:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0HpROFEKfw
We are in uncharted waters now. China's economy may be collapsing. Millions of Muslims are invading Europe and nobody is defending the Gates of Vienna. Instead, Merkel is inviting them in and the German police are using water cannon on those opposing the invasion. Millions of Mexicans and illiterate Central Americans are invading us.
Trump is talking about these things and the establishment is trying to describe the Emperor's clothes.
Wait, wait...Trump is not a Pure Ideologue that emits a sincerity aura of pure theocracy and Conservate pre FDR, like the Canadian man does (at least until he changs his mind again on Amnesty for Hispanics and Ethanol subsidies for corn farmers) and ...stay tuned for the next Pure Canadian Conservative 2.0/ position given to him by god.
Trump is a mere Bronx WASP descended from Scots Presbyterians on one side and Dutch Empire super warriors on the other. And his intense showmanship means that he could actually get elected, unlike the foreign Cruz family cult.
If Obama was sized up rationally do you think he would have been president?
Why are you applying all these rational tests to the Trumpster?
Walt Disney didn't file bankruptcy four times.
This is just a lie, that Trump used bankruptcy in any illegal, non standard or unethical manner.
Trump's corporate investment group filed for bankruptcy four times out of hundreds of different business ventures.
This is common business practice for any large corporate entity that creates numerous business entities. If you are a large scale investor and you create hundreds of business entities, a percentage of them will fail. That's just a reality of being a large scale corporate investment entity.
So, basically, you're entire lying or you're ignorant of basic business practices. I worked for a long time in the corporate legal biz which is where such business entities are formed and financed. Bankruptcy for failed business entities is the common practice for a failed investment. If your outlook is that no business investment should fail... by that standard no business investment would ever occur.
P.T. Barnum served in the Connecticut legislature for four terms and was mayor of Bridgeport.
Anybody who voted for Obama got sold the biggest circus act ever so I'm not impressed with the concern about Trump's act. The door has been opened wide to all types of candidates (inexperienced, unqualified, etc.) now.
This is what makes Trump Barnum-esque: the fact that viewers are invited, implicitly, to decide whether Trump actually means any of what he says.
I don't know if that makes him Barnum-esque, but this has been one of my concerns with Trump--does he believe what he is saying, and if elected, what would he actually do?
Instead of asking Trump which character comparison he considers a compliment, a better question for Trump on that program would have been: why are you running as a Republican instead of as a Democrat (other than because you think it is an easier field to dominate)?
The Donald was calm and collected this morning in a small group in Windham, NH. They kidded him about having already having voted for him Absentee, and one lady asked him him for a ticket to the inauguration. She got it.
Watching him seemed like watching a witty JFK performance. The were both showmen.
@David Begley
Walt Disney wasn't a litigation machine? In what universe?
If Donald Trump is P.T. Barnum then Bill Clinton is J.A. Bailey.
Bill Clinton is Fatty Arbuckle.
I don't get this bit about how a lack of conservative purity is so terrible, if you are Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush. So they are establishment GOP. Weak. Compromisers.
And yet lack of conservative purity, when you are Donald Trump, means that you are real, dynamic, amusing, charming and all things to all people.
I still think a yeuuuuuuge story was missed the other day when Trump, at his most Trumpish, declared that he could get things done with regard to gun control legislation by getting people together in a room:
“You know, it’s supposed to be negotiated, you’re supposed to cajole, get people in a room, you’re supposed to deal with them,” he said. “You have Republicans, you have Democrats, you have all these people that get elected to do this stuff, and you’re supposed to get together and pass a law.”
Later in the interview, the real estate mogul wondered aloud why Obama wants to circumvent Congress, asking why the system can’t work as designed.
“I want to see why he couldn’t get this approved by Congress, why can’t he go in and get this approved,” Trump said. “You know, you do have to ask that question, ’cause why can’t you, if something is so seemingly cut-and-dry as you’d like to say it is, why can’t the system work the way it was supposed to be work — the way it was designed.”
The more you think about that, the weirder it gets. So Trump would get Republicans and Democrats together in a room to work out compromises on gun legislation? I wonder where the compromises would come? What does Trump have in mind, for compromises with Democrats on gun legislation? The federal Assault Weapons Bill of 1994 (it wasn't really a "ban," so I steer clear of that word) was such a compromise. And I think that most conservative Republicans think that the 1994 bill was a huge -- no, YEUUUUUUUGE -- waste of time and legislative effort. It didn't do much except annoy a lot of people, and it was allowed to expire with vast Republican apathy.
What the heck is Trump talking about on gun legislation?
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