"It's absolutely amazing. But under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than he could with a hit." - Milo Bloom, The Producers
A business case: A man realizes he can scheme to enrich himself and his friends through an otherwise failed enterprise. No one will notice the dishonesty and criminality involved, because no one pays attention to an enterprise that failed. Then the scheme backfires: the enterprise accidentally becomes a success.
The above case describes the plot of the 1967 Mel Brook movie The Producers, in which the characters Max Bailystock and Milo Bloom plan to raise, and keep, a great deal of money by producing an flop Broadway musical only to have the scheme unravel when the musical becomes a success.
It also describes Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. That scheme went like this: Donald Trump wanted to prove to doubters that he could get the Republican nomination for President. He wanted to make a lot of money and become an even bigger TV star than the already was. At the same time his friends and family would ride his coattails to success. So, lose the Presidential election by a narrow margin, claim the election was stolen, raise a lot of money from supporters and clean up as the number one critic of the new Democratic administration on mass media.
And I suppose the funniest part of the whole thing is that I can compare the Trump campaign to The Producers without even alluding to the fact that The Producers was also about a Broadway musical called Springtime for Hitler. But I digress. And I must confess that the comparison between the Trump campaign and the Mel Brooks comedy is not my own.
From an article by journalist Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:
Certain that they would lose the election, "As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. "I can be the most famous man in the world," he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.
"This is bigger than I ever dreamed of," he told Ailes a week before the election. I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.""
"Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern. The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit."
"From the moment of victory, the Trump administration became a looking-glass presidency: Every inverse assumption about how to assemble and run a White House was enacted and compounded, many times over. The decisions that Trump and his top advisers made in those first few months — from the slapdash transition to the disarray in the West Wing — set the stage for the chaos and dysfunction that have persisted throughout his first year in office. This was a real-life version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, where the mistaken outcome trusted by everyone in Trump’s inner circle — that they would lose the election — wound up exposing them for who they really were."
"Now let's see, two thousand dollars. That isn't much. I'm sure I can hide it somewhere. After all, the department of internal revenue isn't interested in a show that flopped." - Milo Bloom, The Producers
A second comparison between Trump and the team of Bailystock and Bloom. Both assumed that their sure-to-fail enterprises would allow them to benefit from obscurity, drawing no attention to their breathtaking criminality. From the same article linked above:
"Almost everybody
on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound
to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn,
the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign
rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea
to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. "Well, it would only be a
problem if we won," Flynn assured them."
This brings us to 2020, a different election altogether in that it's clear that this time, Trump very much wanted to win. Why? First and foremost I think, because the President of the United States is immune to prosecution while in office.
From Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, written just before the November election: "No American President has ever been charged with a criminal offense. But, as Donald Trump
fights to hold on to the White House, he and those around him surely
know that if he loses—an outcome that nobody should count on—the
presumption of immunity that attends the Presidency will vanish. Given
that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump
are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more
perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian
Michael Beschloss said of Trump, "If he loses, you have a situation
that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of
the cell door clanging shut." Trump has famously survived one
impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of
sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people
have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well
end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term."
Second, Trump seems to think he can establish a political dynasty. Just two examples: there's talk his daughter Ivanka might run for Senate in Florida, and/or his daughter in law Lara running for Senate in North Carolina.
Unfortunately for them as Meridith McGraw and Nancy Cook of Politico observed on election day: "But if Trump loses, a family brand built on "winning" will be dealt an
embarrassing defeat after years of successfully side-stepping creditors,
bankruptcies and cultural comeuppance. Republicans might turn on the
Trumps. MAGA politics may fade. And the Trumps likely can’t retreat back
into the glitzy world of New York galas. Nor do they want to. Instead,
they’ll try to do what they always do, according to over a dozen current
and former senior administration officials and close associates of the
Trump family: Keep the Trump brand alive. Expand the family business.
Export it when possible."
"We're trapped. It's either the show or us. There's no way out. What can we do, blow up the theatre?" - Max Bailystock, The Producers
In the conclusion of the Producers, Bailystock and Bloom dynamite the theater where Springtime for Hitler is playing, only to be caught and imprisoned. Once in prison, their scheme begins all over again. Well, we've already seen Trump try to stop Joe Biden from becoming President by asking his supporters to storm the Capitol. Will we also see him try to stage a political comeback, running for office again, (hopefully) from prison? Actually, I'd love to see Trump as the nominee for the MAGA party he's been threatening to create, running for President from a cell in Sing Sing.
