What’s really going on in mid-2024 is that one party is staging a production of The Music Man while the other one is staging King Lear.
I was going to quip that while everybody wants American politics to be Hamilton or 1776, what’s really going on in mid-2024 is that one party is staging a production of The Music Man while the other one is staging King Lear. But mulling it over, I came back to a point I observed on the liveblog during Thursday night’s interminable Trump acceptance speech, particularly Donald Trump’s affecting tribute to fallen supporter Corey Comperatore and his insistence on doing a full Trump rally speech instead of a more focused speech pitched to a general election audience. Maybe the Music Man analogy is more apt than I realized.
Recall the story of The Music Man, the 1957 Broadway musical that was made into a 1962 film starring Robert Preston and a 2003 film starring Matthew Broderick. “Professor” Harold Hill is a con artist who has managed to be run out of Illinois (this is how you can tell the show is set over a century ago), and he shows up in the sleepy Middle America town of River City, Iowa. He claims — in a falsehood that turns out to be provable — to have graduated from a music conservatory in Gary, Indiana. He actually knows very little about music, but he is remarkably persuasive and talks the townspeople into making him a youth bandleader. It will be good for the moral fiber of the boys of this heartland town, he tells them. It’s actually a scheme to collect money to buy band uniforms and then skip town with the cash. The con is not just what he does; it’s who he is.
Hill always has his critics, of course — but they’re other traveling salesmen who are less concerned about his victims than about the fact that he competes with them too effectively and gives them a bad reputation with his shady antics.
But a funny thing happens along the way: He becomes a mark for his own fraud. He falls in love with a local woman. He gets emotionally attached to the boys in the band who look up to him. Then, it all catches up to him, and he gets caught and arrested. But the fake band is real. The townspeople decide that Harold Hill is what he pretended to be all along, even though they know he’s a phony — and he decides to be what he pretended. In the end, they spring him from jail and put him at the head of a surprisingly adequate marching band.
Has Trump, who arrived in Middle America nine years ago promising the moon and posing as something he wasn’t, become the Harold Hill of the musical’s last act?
Trump is incapable of change. But Harold Hill doesn’t really change, either; he doesn’t become a paragon of virtue, he just falls for the people he’s swindling. Watching how Trump relates to his diehard fans these days, it really does seem that he has genuinely come to love them and feel the bond they have forged (even if he can’t help continuing to swindle them out of their cash and talk them into investing in imprudent endorsements, because that’s what he is). He has, for example, reportedly had to shed his longtime germophobia to adapt to the world of retail political rallies, even during a global pandemic. Trump’s bond with his fans and his need for that bond was on more display than usual Thursday night, because The Donald was sincere and vulnerable in the aftermath of his assassination attempt in a way he’s never publicly been before.
The MAGA rallygoers have, by now, been with him through so much. They followed him through victories and defeats, through an election many of them believe was stolen, through two impeachments, four indictments, a criminal conviction, and now an assassin’s bullet that came a quarter-inch from taking Trump’s head off. Their faith in him has never wavered, not even when good sense and all the evidence of political realities should have chased them away. One of them just took a fatal bullet attending a Trump rally. A brush with death has to make a 78-year-old man think about such things, no matter how little inclined he is to reflection.
You don’t have to admire Donald Trump or think him a changed man to look at all that and understand that he’d have to be made of stone for it not to affect him. Indeed, the outpourings of love for Trump at his rallies must be especially important for a person as emotionally needy as Trump. Like Harold Hill, he loves being the bandleader he pretended to be. He may still not know much about the music, but he genuinely seems as if he’s fallen for the people he came to town to con. He needs them as much as they need him.