The walking tour I referred to in the previous post was, as intended, a revivifying return to basics for this correspondent. As I mentioned in that post, locations connected to P.T. Barnum were a major sub-theme of that tour, not surprising in that he was the Father of Modern Show Business. In recent years, however, I have found myself wavering in my devotion to the man’s memory, not due to his horrible misrepresentation (and misquotation) by a shallow news media, or because of that dreadful movie The Greatest Showman, or on account of those who would cancel him for his debatable exploitation or racism, evils of his time of which Barnum merely partook, did not originate, and was no better or worse than his contemporaries. My overarching reason for drifting away was Barnum’s role in conditioning America to forgive and glamorize fraudulence, making our 45th President possible.
Yet a crucial difference occurred to me that dispatches even that Elephant in the Room. We address it as the final item on this list, which also points out all the OTHER ways Barnum and Trump are unalike, ignorant slurs by the media to the contrary. (Google the two names and witness a parade of idiocy). I’m not aware of anyone having previously gone to bat for Barnum on this score. Many of those who you might assume could be relied on to do so, such as the wonderful Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, are institutions, and as such, prevented from getting political in this way. I however, am unencumbered by such considerations. So my duty is clear. Here, then, the principal differences between the two men, and they are MAJOR. In no particular order:
1. Barnum was a Self-Made Man. Barnum’s family was entrepreneurial, but unlike Trump he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He certainly benefitted from the fact that his father and grandfathers were men of the world from whom he could learn the principles of (small) business, but he had no huge inheritance to start him off. He started somewhere near the bottom with modest ventures requiring little capital and expanded through a combination of inspired public relations and sound management. His fortune was entirely of his own creation. Trump’s came entirely from his father.
2. Barnum was Genuinely Religious. Raised in the Congregationalist faith (mandatory in Barnum’s boyhood), he converted to Universalism as a young man out of strong personal conviction. Read this self-penned testament about his faith, which Barnum composed a few months before he died. Barnum was a regular church-goer his entire life, and was extremely charitable. By contrast, while Trump has been embraced by evangelicals (chiefly, it appears, on account of his hypocritical opposition to a woman’s right to choose), no one has ever turned up evidence of a deep or sustained affiliation with any church, either as a congregant who actually attends services, or as someone who practices the tenets of any sect. He was baptized as a Presbyterian, clearly through the agency of his Scottish mother. I’d bet a large sum he could not tell you what sets a Presbyterian apart from anyone else in terms of belief or doctrine. From time to time he pays extremely unconvincing lip service to Christianity, and that’s about the extent of it. This article gives a wonderfully full account of Trump’s tenuous connection to religion.
3. Barnum was Good at What He Did. Like all businessmen, Barnum had ups and downs, including many severe reverses that would have crushed and finished many a lesser entrepreneur. But the overall narrative of his business career is a story of growth. He built and created new things. The entities and properties he bought, he improved, repurposed and expanded. He was a net success by any measure. By contrast (and contrary to the false image projected on The Apprentice), Trump’s business narrative is one of nearly unremitting failure. He inherited millions, squandered much of it through bad decisions, borrowed millions from banks which he didn’t repay. He is the perpetrator of multiple bankruptcies (casinos, hotels, an airline), and several of his enterprises were shut down by the government for fraudulent practices. He slaps his name on things, but his empire, such as it is, is not unlike those building facades on Hollywood movie sets. There’s nothing behind the frontage.
4. Barnum was Highly Literate. This generally gets lost in the shuffle in discussions about Barnum because he crammed so much into his lifetime of activity, but he was, among all his other attributes, a writer. I mean an actual writer. As a young man he published, edited, and contributed to his own Connecticut newspaper The Herald of Freedom (about which more tomorrow), an organ in which he penned controversial editorials on matters of politics and religion. He worked as a writer of ad copy when he first moved to New York. And he (not a ghostwriter) penned several books, including a memoir that sold second only to the Bible in 19th century America. While I’m confident in speculating that as a man of affairs Barnum had little time to bury his nose in books, his writings and utterances demonstrate a working familiarity with the contents of the Bible, the writings of certain theologians and religious authors, Shakespeare, and America’s Founding Documents. Shall I be so cruel as to discuss the evidence of what Donald Trump has read or written? It has been determined by experts that he has the vocabulary of a fourth grader. Ghost writers authored his books. Professionals wrote his lines on The Apprentice and all his important political speeches. And his extemporized utterances reveal an utter unfamiliarity with the Bible, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.
5. Barnum SERVED in Politics. The emphasis of course is because technically Trump was the U.S. President for a term. But to what degree did he serve the people of the United States? As President, I would argue that he acted against the interests of every single living thing on this planet — including the craven ones who think he helped them in some tangible way (e.g., cut their taxes, or gave them some other perceived advantage.) He sought the office purely to feather his own nest, to increase his own wealth and power, and to harm those he dislikes. Evidence for this (beyond the documented ways he enriched himself while occupying his office) may be seen in the fact that he never in his life sought any other office in order to affect change. If it’s not about your ego and your own self-aggrandizement, you look to pull the levers of government to help the people around you.
By contrast, Barnum was deeply involved in local politics in his hometown of Bethel from boyhood. Originally a Jacksonian Democrat, he switched parties over the issue of slavery (despite having once owned slaves himself), becoming an early member of the brand new Republican Party. He served several terms in the Connecticut General Assembly, representing Fairfield. He ran for U.S. Congress and lost, and considered running for Governor of Connecticut. Most significantly, he served as Mayor of Bridgeport, a city he was largely instrumental in creating in the first place, helping it grow beyond its previous status as an average-sized New England town. I won’t link you, but I just came across an op-ed arguing that a statue to Barnum in Bridgeport should be removed on account of certain antiquated attitudes Barnum held which happen to have been ones that nearly every one of his contemporaries shared. The notion of doing so is outrageous. Without Barnum there wouldn’t BE a Bridgeport. (Yes, yes, insert joke about Bridgeport here). The fact remains that Barnum was both repentant about many of his past misdeeds, and a benefactor of the community at large. As mayor, Barnum improved Bridgeport’s water, illuminated its nighttime streets with gaslights, and put the welfare of the people first. He was also instrumental in the creation of Bridgeport Hospital. This was someone who wanted to do some good in the world. It was on his agenda. He was not someone who would, say, quit the World Health Organization for calling attention to a global pandemic that he had an interest in downplaying. And of course, this goes to our next point —
6. Barnum Loved Humanity. Barnum was in the amusement business. His mission was to bring joy to people, all people, everywhere. Yes, to make a profit while doing it, but you can also make a profit by manufacturing armaments or poisons. He chose to lighten people’s loads with laughter and happiness. All of his entertainments and promotions extolled the virtues of the People and the rightness of Democracy. He came up during the Era of Good Feelings; toward the end of his life, he was in accord with the sentiments of Whitman. Contrast it with the bile, paranoia, bullying, ugliness, bigotry, and hatred that forms nearly every Trump public utterance. By his actions and statements do we think Trump seeks public office to make every citizen happy, healthy and prosperous? Or to control them, suck their life energy, break them, divide them, make them his vassals?
7. A Hoax is Not a Swindle. This is the hardest one to parse and it’s beyond easy to lump these two concepts together and confuse them. They both involve fraudulence. In some cases the former may involve the exchange of cash; the latter invariably does.
Obviously I’m making the case that Barnum is a Hoaxer, Trump is a Swindler. What’s the difference? You know if you’ve read widely about Barnum and those who followed in his footsteps. A hoax, a Barnum style hoax anyway, is a practical joke. Its ultimate goal is entertainment. Hoaxes have been known to be cruel. Barnum’s were not. They are “gotchas”. His most offensive one was perhaps the Grand Buffalo Hunt, in that it offered the least entertainment in return for the public’s outlay of time, effort, and money. But in most cases, such as the Feejee Mermaid, it was a delightful appeal to the imagination. Almost everyone who attended Barnum’s museum went away happy and satisfied, because they obtained what they understood they were buying with their ticket: amusement. This is rather different from a swindle, both in spirit and in practice.
A swindle is lying purely to take someone’s money, whether the net result leaves them whole or not. You can injure (even kill) the customer with bad information, empty their bank accounts. Trump’s most egregious and patently transparent swindle was of course his diploma mill “Trump University”. For that crime alone he ought to have gone to jail. He ended by settling and agreeing to pay partial financial restitution, small comfort to the thousands he defrauded, and all the lives he ruined by this one scheme alone. The Trump Foundation was another such: ostensibly a tax-exempt not-for-profit organization set up for charitable purposes which accepted millions in donations, then made countless questionable grants that went to Trump’s personal enrichment and political fortunes. Come to that, he defrauds millions of his own political donors (much of their money goes to his legal expenses rather than his campaigns) and the people who voted for him, as he neglected and actively undermined their safety and security as President of the United States.
Obviously, Hoaxer and Swindler are not polar opposites. Their difference, one can argue, is one of degree rather than one of kind. And it’s a slippery slope getting from one to the other. You can get there in a baby step. It’s just a short hop from the Dime Museum to the Medicine Show, for example, and patent medicine has historically been known to kill people. But as I said, Barnum…built a hospital. And I can’t help observing that he didn’t put his name on it. Whereas, Trump would dismantle the Food and Drug Administration entirely if he could. If he returns to the Presidency, the American people will be returning, not to the 1950s, not to the 1930s, but back to the 19th century, before the time of the reforms of Teddy Roosevelt. And when the American people, his supporters and detractors alike, die in droves from disease and want and mass incarceration, getting rid of him will be far harder than keeping him out this November.