On January 15, 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote proudly from Prague to his friend Baron Gottfried von Jacquin: “Here nothing is talked about except Figaro; nothing is played, blown, sung, and whistled except Figaro; no opera draws the crowds like Figaro. It’s always Figaro. Certainly it’s a great honor for me.”
Now, after more than two centuries of human progress, in great cities supposedly more advanced and more enlightened than the Prague of 1787, we have come to this: Here nothing is talked about except Trump; nothing is reported, analyzed, praised, and denounced except Trump; no candidate draws the crowds like Trump. It’s always Trump.
Certainly this is not a great honor to America. If each age gets the opera buffa it deserves, we should be less confident than we are in human progress. And if each age also gets the political leaders it deserves, we should also be less confident in human progress — for surely President Barack Obama does not compare well with the Austro-Hungarian emperor Joseph II.
Indeed, the two are related. If we had not suffered through seven tedious years of opera seria with Barack Obama, of sanctimonious liberalism and dangerous political correctness, fewer of our fellow citizens would be susceptible to the charms of Donald Trump. No Obama, no Trump, we suspect. Indeed, no Jeb Bush and the prospect of a dynastic Bush-Clinton race, no Trump.
But we are where we are. The Trump opera buffa is going strong — but it’s getting less funny by the day. We have enough trust in the American people to believe they will eventually bring the curtain down. And as in The Marriage of Figaro, where all efforts to persuade the count fail, our national opera buffa won’t end by convincing Donald Trump of anything: The vain protagonist with an overweening ego has to be humiliated or at least defeated if there is to be a happy ending.
So all hopes — and we, too, have entertained them — that Trump will suffer a embarrassment or two and abashedly withdraw from the race can be put aside. All hopes of conciliating Trump can be abandoned. Trump will have to be defeated. The decisive turn in the plot we’re anticipating will be Donald Trump standing in front of a crowd in a hotel ballroom in Des Moines on the evening of February 1 as a loser. And then Donald Trump standing once more in front of a crowd in a hotel ballroom, in Manchester, N.H., on the evening of February 9 — a loser again.
How likely is this? Quite likely. Right now, Trump leads Ted Cruz in Iowa in the Real Clear Politics polling average by only a small margin. He actually trails Cruz, and barely leads Marco Rubio, in probably the best recent Iowa survey, done by Monmouth University. I was in Iowa last week. The people with whom I spoke were not Trump aficionados. Their judgments may therefore be distorted. But their honest belief was that Trump had little room to grow — and that he might well fall, with many Iowans rethinking their initial attraction to his colorful braggadocio as the caucuses draw near.
As for New Hampshire—there Trump does lead, with a bit above a quarter of the vote. But a recent survey that tried to identify likely primary voters had Trump basically tied with Marco Rubio at about a fifth of the vote. And Trump is more likely to get weaker in New Hampshire than stronger. His overwhelming advantage in free media coverage will start to diminish as we approach actual voting. His recent call for the exclusion of all Muslims reeks not of strength but of desperation. He’s become an attention addict who needs to inject stronger and stronger doses of outrage. That works for a while. But it doesn’t end well.
As the curtain falls on Figaro, all the characters join in an ensemble:
Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte didn’t actually believe that love always wins out. Tough-minded plotting and bold action by the other protagonists are needed to produce the desired outcome. The same is true in our drama. Unlike in Figaro, we won’t see even a pretense of repentance and reformation from Donald Trump (though has the count, at the end of Figaro, truly mended his ways?). But if Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Chris Christie keep their heads and act with the same boldness and cunning as Susanna and Figaro and the countess, our little opera buffa can also end in contentment and joy.
