Trump in River City Donald Trump is the Prof. Harold Hill of the Presidential Election: Dan Henninger
http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-in-river-city-1438210876
In “The Music Man,” Meredith Willson’s great musical, super salesman Harold Hill talks the townspeople of River City, Iowa, into buying trombones, bassoons and drums to form a boys’ band. Then, after the people of River City have committed belief and money to him, he’ll skip town.
Donald Trump is America’s Music Man, and the United States is his River City. Unlike the original, the Trump version isn’t going to have a happy ending.
Like Professor Harold Hill, Donald Trump must know it’s all a fabulous scam. How else to explain that on June 4—just before his presidential announcement—the Donald came to Mason City, Iowa, Meredith Willson’s hometown and the model for River City. And where did Donald Trump address Mason City’s locals? In Music Man Square.
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Here’s the Washington Post reporting on the Trump visit to the border at Laredo, Texas: “During a whirlwind visit . . . Trump blazed around in a presidential-style motorcade that included seven SUVs and even more police cars. Local officers blocked off roads, including Interstate 35, for Trump’s entourage.”
From “The Music Man”: “I don’t know how he does it, but he lives like a king, and he dallies and he gathers, and he plucks and he shines and when the man dances . . . the Piper pays him.”
Like Harold Hill, Donald Trump believes he can say anything and get away with it.
He said Mexico has an inferior culture, and later claimed that he’d win the Hispanic vote.
What he said about John McCain should have barred him from public life, but the Donald’s enthusiasts said it was no big deal.
On the “Hannity” show Monday night he attacked Scott Walker —for not raising taxes. “I looked into Wisconsin,” Mr. Trump said. “Their roads are a disaster, they don’t want to spend any money on roads because he doesn’t want to raise taxes.” He accused the Wisconsin governor of being “divisive, because everyone there is fighting with each other.”
So the Donald would have raised taxes on the people of Wisconsin, and he thinks the Republican governor who defeated the public unions and survived a recall election is “divisive.” No matter. The people of River City are desperate to believe, and so the man who wrote “The Art of the Deal” is leading in the national polls.
Is anything going on here other than clinical egomania?
Yes, and it’s no laughing matter.
The American anxieties Donald Trump has tapped into are real and rational. It is not the Mexican border. It’s what everyone in politics, including Hillary Clinton, knows has been the No. 1 concern of the American people for years: the U.S.’s underachieving economy.
The stark reality of the nation’s growth numbers could not be more clear. The U.S.’s average postwar growth rate is 3.3%, and has often been higher. Across the entire 61/2 years of the Obama presidency it has been about 2%, and often lower. The result is a populace that is becoming resentful, surly and anxious for a way out.
Fewer than 30% think the country is on the right track, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. A highly cited Wall Street Journal/NBC poll last year found that 76% of adults doubt their children will have a better life than they do. The Great Recession ended in June 2009, six years ago; in May, a Fox News poll found that 60% of registered voters think we are still in a recession.
The labor-force participation rate, 62.6% last month, is at its lowest level in 38 years. In human terms, 432,000 people dropped out of the workforce in June, and nearly two million are called “marginally attached to the labor force” by the government. Why shouldn’t people think we’re still in a recession?
After his 2009 economic stimulus of $831 billion produced so little, Barack Obama off-loaded responsibility for the economy to the Federal Reserve, which has repeatedly overstated its growth projections. For much of the private economy, the Obama presidency has been almost seven years of “Survivor.”
Some conservatives believe the “Celebrity Apprentice” ringmaster has revived an inchoate “radical middle,” upset over “what the country has become.” If so, that’s just one more symptom of the core problem. During America’s dynamic, upward-moving economies of the 1950s, ’60s, ’80s or ’90s, no one whined about what the country had become. They banked it and led happy lives.
Other Trumpified conservatives argue that Ronald Reagan’s economic solutions to Jimmy Carter’s malaise are now irrelevant, which opens the door to Mr. Trump’s shapeless populism.
Here is what Reagan’s tax and regulatory policies produced from 1982-89: an economy that grew by a third and a standard of living, as measured by real disposable income, that grew by 20%. Sounds relevant to me.
Donald Trump’s one idea to reverse America’s Obama-driven descent into a chronically flaccid economic existence is that he would “force” Mexico to erect a fence. While Hillary Clinton this week proposed building a half-billion solar panels. The good people of River City deserve better.
Write to henninger@wsj.com.
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