No, Trump is not P.T. Barnum
President Donald Trump has often been described as the second coming of P.T. Barnum, the legendary 19th-century showman. Biographers, academics and journalists have embraced this idea, as have members of Trump’s family. “He is P.T. Barnum,” his sister once said. With a movie opening today that is loosely inspired by Barnum’s life – “The Greatest Showman,” starring Hugh Jackman – we’re likely to hear these comparisons again.
Please: Barnum would be appalled by Trump. While they share some superficial similarities, it’s the differences that stand out.
Phineas Taylor Barnum is a figure frequently invoked but rarely understood. He amassed a fortune promoting a bewildering range of popular entertainments: an elderly slave masquerading as George Washington’s nursemaid; a gifted Swedish opera singer, Jenny Lind, whom he turned into an international superstar; a half-monkey, half-fish masterpiece of taxidermy that he advertised as the FeeJee Mermaid; and other attractions, dubious and genuine. Many of these he exhibited at his American Museum in lower Manhattan. Later, he took the show on the road, touring the world with his famous circus and sideshows.
Barnum’s hyperbole, his willingness to bend the truth when promoting his entertainments, his artful manipulation of the press, never mind his participation in outright hoaxes, invite comparisons with Trump. Likewise, Barnum’s fondness for living large – he built a garish Moorish mansion he called “Iranistan” – calls to mind Trump’s gilded excesses. Both men became teetotalers; both went bankrupt, only to claw their way back to the top. And then, of course, there’s Barnum’s famous saying: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Except that Barnum never said that or anything like it, though it was a popular saying among 19th-century con artists and flimflam men. As a showman, Barnum went to great lengths to distinguish himself from these swindlers. He believed that if he accepted customers’ hard-earned cash, he had to give them their money’s worth. “No one,” Barnum declared in his autobiography, “can say that he ever paid for admission to one of my exhibitions more than his admission was worth to him.” A patron of Barnum’s museum might dispute the authenticity of some exhibits. But visitors rarely, if ever, came away feeling shortchanged or cheated.
Barnum treated his creditors scrupulously, paying his debts in full and on time. When he went bankrupt in 1856 after foolishly guaranteeing a business partner’s spiraling debts, he moved out of his mansion into rented lodgings and gave up title to his beloved museum. He then began an arduous campaign for redemption. He did not rely on legerdemain to repay his debts, much less Russian oligarchs. Instead, he began working them off by giving lectures on the “art of moneymaking.” Eventually, he reclaimed the American Museum, and with it, his reputation.
That institution, more than any other, encapsulates Barnum’s worldview. In an era of tremendous social divisions, the American Museum welcomed a varied and diverse audience, and was one of the first places in the city where unaccompanied women could go without fear of harassment. Barnum even hired plainclothes detectives to patrol the museum and eject men who bothered women or otherwise violated the family-friendly atmosphere.
Barnum was a devoted husband to his wife, Charity. He was a dedicated Unitarian Universalist, and a progressive one at that: He welcomed Olympia Brown, the first woman ever ordained within the denomination, as a minister to his congregation in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
He was not a saint – far from it. He shared his contemporaries’ casual racism and profited from it, staging exhibits that played off prejudice. He also owned slaves briefly during a tour of the antebellum South. But Barnum gradually changed his mind on the subject of race and slavery. He voted for Lincoln in 1860 and later ran for the Connecticut Legislature. He took office in 1865 and gave an impassioned speech calling for the extension of voting rights to blacks.
Barnum would have recoiled from Trump, especially from his cynicism about principles and truth. In a widely read exposé of swindles, quack medicines and other “humbugs,” Barnum declared that the “greatest humbug of all” was the individual “who believes – or pretends to believe – that everything and everybody are humbugs.” This person, Barnum observed, “professes that there is no virtue; that every man has his price, and every woman hers; that any statement from anybody is just as likely to be false as true; and that the only way to decide which is to consider whether truth or a lie was likely to have paid best in that particular case.”
Barnum was a consummate American: a fast talker, a self-promoter and a relentless striver. He also exemplified many of the qualities that have long made America great in the eyes of the world: generosity, humor, optimism and a willingness, in the end, to do the right thing.
Trump represents something different. Indeed, if Barnum were alive today, he might be interested in exhibiting Trump: not as a paragon of business acumen, political prowess or any of the other main attractions in the circus of contemporary life, but as an extreme embodiment of humbug – worthy of a sideshow, perhaps, but nothing more.
The New York Times
This story was originally published December 19, 2017 at 8:11 PM with the headline "No, Trump is not P.T. Barnum."