The swaggering business maverick has long appealed to a country that values muscle, spectacle, and showmanship.

 

 

 Bridget Read

In 1937 Napoleon Hill published what is perhaps the best-selling business book of all time, Think and Grow Rich. Handsome if slightly weaselly, eyebrows etched up in false supplication, perpetually slick and suited, Hill told Americans still scraping their way out of the Depression that wealth was, in fact, everywhere. The universe was infinitely abundant. Anybody in a bread line or working for a pittance simply wasn’t tapping into the right energies. It was a shrewd pitch that made tired and desperate people feel suddenly in control of their destinies, rather than buffeted by forces much larger than themselves.

Hill claimed to have learned the secrets to money manifestation by observing tycoons and visionaries like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Thomas Edison. But he was merely a violent huckster. He ran an automotive “school” that preyed on students, charging them to build cars he later sold, and a “success” school for which he was eventually prosecuted for securities fraud. As the journalist Matt Novak has written, he beat his wife and delivered at least one lecture to Klansmen. Nevertheless, the book sold millions of copies. It still goes viral every so often on TikTok and Instagram, rediscovered by would-be entrepreneurs.

I found myself thinking of Napoleon Hill as I saw images of a yam-colored Trump celebrating his victory—and not just because Trump is a devotée of Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister who repurposed many of Hill’s ideas in his own self-help bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Trump was steeped in Peale’s sermons every Sunday as a child, when his family traveled to hear Peale preach at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Trump said in 2016 that Peale called him his “greatest student of all time.”

In times of institutional chaos—or failure—the swaggering business maverick, rather than the staid Wall Street manager, has long appealed to a country that values muscle, spectacle, and showmanship. Trump, like Hill, never excelled at “business” in the traditional sense of making a profit. His real estate career was marked by failures, fraud, and bailouts, chiefly from his father. But he understood that in America you can make a living telling others that you know a secret route to prosperity—otherwise known as the get-rich-quick scheme. When Trump was just a celebrity, the secret was health supplements, which he hawked via a multilevel marketing company for a few years after the Great Recession. As president during the pandemic, the secret was hydroxychloroquine. For some of his allies, the secret is cryptocurrency, another “business” heavily promoted to the everyman. On the campaign trail this time around, the secret was Trump himself.

To Americans who’ve tried and failed at bootstrapping, the secret must come as a relief. It’s easier to cast your lot with a rogue genius than to confront the material reality asserting itself with each boom and bust. Rather than infinite abundance, the system of private capital to which we’ve yoked ourselves seems to be producing more harm than good, and many of its profiteers are scoundrels, liars, thieves, and brutes. Better to believe the hype, stay for the sideshow, step right up.