Who can forget watching in one’s youth the great sitcom Car 54, Where Are You? It aired for just two glorious seasons, from 1961 to 1963, on NBC on Sunday nights from 8:30 to 9:00 p.m. It was a memorable touch of wry reality, sandwiched between the fantasies of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and the drama of the Cartwrights of Bonanza. How charming were the comic adventures, the slightly ridiculous trials and tribulations, of those two lovable New York City cops, Officers Gunther Toody (Joe E. Ross) and Francis Muldoon (Fred Gwynne), whose patrol car was—you guessed it—Car No. 54!
And who can forget the great theme song, with its period lyrics from a time when Nikita Khrushchev still ran the Evil Empire and Kennedy airport was still named Idlewild?
Where indeed? And despite the double question mark at the end of the song, the fact is that Car 54 usually got there in time. And when they arrived on the scene, Officers Toody and Muldoon would successfully bumble through whatever pseudo-crisis needed attention. They wouldn’t actually do very much. But by the end of the episode, tensions were calmed, crises were defused, and the issues were, at least for the short term, satisfactorily resolved.
Things could have gotten worse. Yet they didn’t.
In this respect, Car 54, Where Are You? was, in its way, a deep meditation on government. Things are chaotic. Situations look as if they call for bold action. But sometimes doing little with a light touch produces the best possible outcome.
Surely this lesson isn’t lost on Donald Trump, who grew up in Toody and Muldoon’s New York. Perhaps he remembers the show? Paul Ryan, by contrast, wasn’t yet born when Car 54 was on the air. Perhaps that’s why he isn’t attracted to its lessons. His ambitious effort to repeal and replace Obamacare all at once and as quickly as possible is emphatically not in the spirit of the show.
That effort is already in meltdown. So Donald Trump must wonder: Might doing things less ambitiously and less hurriedly actually produce a better result? For example, can’t his HHS secretary, Tom Price, make some regulatory changes that would be widely welcomed, while his legislative staff figures out how to build consensus behind a sensible broader agenda?
And if Trump turns his attention from the morass of health care to take a look at what’s happening in the economy, what does he see? Good news—the stock market’s up and jobs numbers are strong. And Trump’s getting good grades for his management of the economy. But what actual management has he been doing? What has his economic program been so far? A few targeted deregulatory actions, a pro-business attitude, and the expectation not of an ambitious overhaul of the entire tax code but of some targeted tax cuts to make American business more competitive. That’s it. Despite lots of big talk during the campaign, Trump has wisely done little to damage the economy in trade and even immigration—and no one’s complaining much.
Similarly, in foreign policy, Trump has reverted to something approaching a normal attitude toward NATO and our Asian allies, he’s let the military intensify the fight against ISIS, and he’s been cautious elsewhere. And even though there’s much more that will have to be done, so far he’s avoided too much disruption or disaster.
Doing not too much hasn’t worked out too badly.
Obviously, Trump’s grandiose sense of himself makes him want to do a lot, to think and act big, to follow in the footsteps, as he sees it, of his heroes George Patton and Douglas MacArthur. Still, he presumably knows that MacArthur flamed out and that Patton would have done the same had he lived. And Trump may have enough self-awareness to realize that he’s no Patton or MacArthur.
The question is whether Donald Trump can learn the lesson of Car 54, Where Are You? Can he accept that he has a role to play more like that of Officers Toody and Muldoon than that of some faux-world-historical figure? If so, the show in which he’s currently starring could conceivably have a relatively benign ending.
