Have you seen Laurence Olivier in the 1960 film The Entertainer? Olivier plays a seedy music-hall performer named Archie Rice. The film is a specimen of England’s gritty “kitchen sink” realism from the 1950s, but it’s also an allegory, in which Archie represents a declining postwar Britain. Archie loses his son—killed at the Franco-British rout at Suez—as well as his elderly father, formerly a more successful music-hall star, who, moments before a planned joint performance to bolster Archie’s sagging career, dies in the wings. “Better to be a has-been,” Archie’s wife, Phoebe, observes sadly, “than a never-was.”

Trump’s Davos speech (video; transcript) reminded me of The Entertainer’s haunting final scene. In a mostly empty theater, Archie sings a few bars of his theme song, “Why Should I Care?”:

If they see that you’re blue
They’ll look down on you
So why oh why should I …

Archie stops, thanks the audience for coming, then says with a downward swipe of the hand: “Let me know where you’re working tomorrow night. I’ll come and see........

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