It is by now beyond question that our country is presided over by a man who can fairly be described as a crude, blustering jerk of average intelligence.  His main talent, perhaps his only one, is his unflappable ability to sell himself.   One should not sneeze at this talent.   This is an essential skill for any showman, any celebrity, anyone wishing to be president.  It is a sad day, however, when this ability, vast, inherited wealth and brand recognition are the only criteria needed to attain the world’s most powerful office.  SAD!

Phineas Taylor “P.T.” Barnum was America’s most famous unscrupulous self-promoter, until this chap Donald John Trump came along.   I thought I’d check out Barnum’s life and career a bit, and so spent a few minutes of painstaking research reading the Wikipedia article about P.T. Barnum.    I was surprised and not surprised to learn that among several books written by Barnum one was called “The Art of Money Getting”. 

It is a small step, a hundred years later, to “The Art of the Deal”, an art that Mr. Trump boasts of, without much proof of his skill at it, outside of bullying New York City officials in his early real estate deals.   Barnum, we learn, was born in modest circumstances and made and lost a vast fortune more than once.  Trump, by his own account, required only a “small million dollar loan” from his father to get started building on his father’s real estate empire.   He later legitimately acquired a fortune, and vast publicity and credence (to the credulous),  playing a fictional successful businessman in a wildly popular “reality TV show” made while he was negotiating multiple bankruptcies for some of his many failed business ventures.   

Of the two, only Barnum appears to have done anything good for anyone but himself (unless we include Trump’s appointment of wealthy, unqualified people to high government positions).  Of himself, Barnum said: “I am a showman by profession…and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me”^[2] .   He also said that his personal aim was “to put money in his own coffers”.   That said, he seems to have shared his wealth with others.  Tom Thumb became a wealthy man working with Barnum and the famous impresario seems to have given a good deal of money to others over the course of his life, including Tufts University and the city of Bridgeport Connecticut.  Barnum also advocated principles, like his eventual strong opposition to slavery.

Barnum reputedly said, as Trump would later prove, “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people” [1], and is remembered as America’s flamboyant, once world famous snake-oil salesman.   Still, one would have to take Barnum over Trump for frankness, originality and taste.  He probably would have made a better president, too. 

He could hardly have made a worse one, a powerless prick given to snide understatement might add.

[1] Whoops, this was an observation of H.L. Mencken’s, apparently, paraphrased into the current blunt version we all lovingly quote today