Part of the Series
Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016
Tune in to news coverage of the presidential election and you’re bound to hear someone comparing the Republican Party’s current attempt to pick a presidential nominee to the circus.
Others have suggested that if Donald Trump becomes the official Republican candidate, it will rip the heart out of the party. Some claim that the party is already so divided it might not recover.
Trump has embraced the mayhem, comparing himself to the man who built “The Greatest Show on Earth,” claiming, “We need P.T. Barnum, a little bit, because we have to build up the image of our country.”
As historians, we think Trump’s invocation of Barnum tells us more about the intersection between entertainment and the history of US politics than Trump realizes.
As a savvy impresario of the 19th century’s most popular entertainments, Barnum sold novelty and spectacle: a constellation of beauty pageants, white elephants and elastic-skin men.
Trump also has used entertainment to garner wealth and fame, most notably on television, posing with contestants on his Miss USA pageant, or snarling, “You’re fired,” on “The Apprentice.”
P.T. Barnum and his circus partners infused the “The Greatest Show on Earth” with patriotic pageantry and nationalistic paeans to US progress and industry. Trump promises to “Make America Great Again” through economic nationalism and immigration restriction.
Trump, like Barnum, has skillfully channeled current cultural, political and social zeitgeists into self-promotion.
Whereas Trump’s primary victories may presage the end of the current party, Barnum’s ascendance paralleled the birth of the Republican Party in 1854. That year, Barnum, who had already made a fortune as a museum impresario in New York City, published his autobiography, The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself. The book eventually sold over a million copies.
Many reviewers were horrified by Barnum’s brutally honest narrative of frauds committed, including his display of an artfully sewn baboon head, orangutan torso and fish body that he lucratively billed as the “Feejee Mermaid” in 1842-43.
In 1882, Barnum offered financial advice in The Art of Money Getting. The title of Trump’s own autobiography, The Art of the Deal, suggests that the “Casino King” has long been familiar with Barnum, popularly known as the “Prince of Humbugs” for his profitable hoaxes and clever wordplay.
These attention-loving showmen craved respectability, a need that drove both into politics. Barnum originally was a Jacksonian Democrat, dedicated to the populist notion that his audiences were in on his jokes. But he became increasingly uneasy with his party during the violence in “Bleeding Kansas” and the growing sectional crisis.
By 1860, Barnum was an ardent Lincoln Republican. From 1865 to 1867, he served ably in the Connecticut House of Representatives, where he helped his state ratify the 13th Amendment, which banned slavery. In 1875, he was elected mayor of Bridgeport.
While Trump has never held elected office, he boasts that he will be a pragmatic leader, a “dealmaker” able to negotiate a settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. His own business behavior makes that seem unlikely, as does his hotel’s slogan: “Live life without boundaries, limits, or compromise.”
Trump’s blunt bravado in winning an angry, dispossessed segment of the electorate provides a doppelgänger to Barnum and his audiences, who, as historian James Cook suggests, acknowledged the humbuggery of a market economy riddled with financial panics and depressions.
Trump openly recognizes that Wall Street bankers and offshore corporations have profited in the speculative global marketplace, while ordinary Americans have lost their homes, jobs and sense of dignity. Yet a recent essay in the conservative National Review blames the white working class for its supposed “culture of dependency” on welfare and drugs, which underscores the disconnection of a political party that has abandoned its base for its donor class. Trump is taking a different tack altogether. Unlike “establishment Republicans,” Trump promises to protect entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare. But his populism depends on exclusion.
To energize his supporters, Trump promises to build a huge wall — paid for by the Mexican government — and will ban Muslim immigration and deport more than 11 million undocumented immigrants. His relentless demand for President Obama’s birth certificate in 2011 and 2012 appears to be a warm-up act for a presidential run based, in large part, on xenophobic race-baiting.
In so doing, Trump, like Barnum, has skillfully channeled current cultural, political and social zeitgeists into self-promotion.
Barnum, too, profited from the nation’s explosive racial politics. On the eve of the Civil War, he hired a Black performer, William Henry Johnson, to play a mute, spear-carrying “Missing Link” dressed in fur, billed as “Zip … What Is It?,” based on the popular blackface minstrel character, Zip Coon.
In 1863, Barnum played upon the nation’s fear of Native Americans while “exhibiting” a delegation of Indigenous leaders under false pretenses. He had promised the delegation a respectful audience. Instead, Barnum told museumgoers that one delegate, Yellow Bear, was “the meanest, black-hearted rascal that lives in the far West … If the blood thirsty little villain understood what I’m saying, he would kill me in a moment.”
In this combustible racial climate, crowds easily became mobs. After the First Battle of Bull Run, Barnum gave a rousing speech in defense of the Union in Fairfield County, Connecticut, a local hotbed of secessionist Democratic sentiment. On August 21, 1861, Barnum and fellow Unionists interrupted a local secessionist “peace rally.” Emboldened, the crowd physically carried him to the stage, where he denounced the secessionist flag.
Amid the fracas, pro-Barnum Unionists marched to Bridgeport, home of the Copperhead newspaper, The Farmer. Barnum pleaded for peace, but a mob destroyed the newspaper building.
As Trump does today, Barnum embraced bombast and spectacle as a business model in a racially divided society. Yet here the similarities end.
While Barnum eventually left politics and was content to create an entertainment empire, Trump is reaching for the highest office in the land. In so doing, he imperils recent efforts to rebuild the Republican Party as the “big tent” party.
At Trump’s rallies, there is little space for dissent. Aggressive name-calling and racial incidents are common. While Barnum played fast and loose with crowd-pleasing racial stereotypes in the marketplace, he was more cautious in the political sphere.
At the circus, Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” is only played when catastrophe is imminent, alerting personnel to evacuate the tent. Trump has warned party leaders that riots might occur if he wins the primary season but is denied the nomination, thus providing an eerie reminder of disunion in Barnum’s United States.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy