Does Dallas offer a vision of a Trumpian America?

ASK ORDINARYDFWDFWATTDFWDFWCEO Americans about Dallas and you are likely to elicit a few common responses. American-football fans will tell you that the Dallas Cowboys, once the country’s most formidable team, have seen better days. Soap-opera junkies, at least those alive in the 1980s, may reminisce about the long-running series named after the north-Texas city. The few who paid attention in history class may recall that it is where Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy. You will probably not hear breathless comparisons to the world’s industrial capitals.Unless, that is, you are talking to captains of industry, especially those who are happy to see Donald Trump back in the White House. Dallas is their idea of heaven. Forget snooty New York, libertine Los Angeles or woke San Francisco. In America Inc’s fever dreams, more cities turn Dallas-like in their —and America as a whole transforms into a continent-size small-government Texas.There is, therefore, no better place than Dallas to understand why many chief executives held their noses and voted for Mr Trump, despite his various shortcomings. And also why they did so regardless of the ideas he campaigned on, such as and mass deportations, that could hurt the city, and its home state, disproportionately.Dallas may lack physical topography—pancakes have starker reliefs—but its commercial ascent in recent years has been about as breathtaking as it gets. Public companies collectively worth $1.5trn are based in the Dallas-Fort Worth () “metroplex”, which encompasses Dallas’s sister city 30 miles (50km) west and spills into the surrounding towns and prairies. That is double the amount from five years ago. And unlike Houston (an oil boomtown in south Texas) or Austin (which has the state capitol and a tech cluster), Dallas’s big businesses are among the most diverse of any American city.’s five most valuable listed firms make diggers (Caterpillar), manufacture chips (Texas Instruments), run telecoms networks (&), offer brokerage services (Charles Schwab) and distribute drugs (McKesson). Three moved there in the past five years: Caterpillar from Illinois, Charles Schwab and McKesson from San Francisco. Toyota put its North American headquarters nearby in 2017. Goldman Sachs is increasing its local headcount from about 970 in 2016 to a planned 5,000, behind only New York, at a new campus it is building uptown. “It’s fun living in a growing city,” says Aasem Khalil, who runs the bank’s office there.In contrast to Tesla and Oracle, two Californian tech giants whose right-leaning founders to Austin in part to troll progressives, corporate newcomers to are driven by pragmatic considerations. Some of these are Texan more broadly. The state levies no tax on corporate profits or personal income (which amounts to a 5-10% pay rise for Californians or New Yorkers earning over $70,000 a year). It hates red tape and has a can-do attitude to building things. Roads, pipes and cables are typically in place before new homes arise from the featureless prairie. Oncor, the state’s biggest grid operator, is investing $27bn over the next five years to that effect. “When a six-lane highway gets congested, we put in a seventh lane,” points out a local honcho.Other attractions are -specific. These include a handful of excellent universities, a vast freight hub and the world’s third-busiest airport, with direct routes just about anywhere in America in under four hours and as far afield as Sydney, Shanghai and São Paulo. By next year Dallas may boast its own stock exchange, with lower fees and fewer rules than in New York.The city boasts an enviable standard of living. Scorching summers are a small price to pay when a typical house costs a fifth less than in Austin and half as much as in San Francisco. “You don’t need to know some secret handshake to get your kid into a private school,” gushes a banker. Co-workers raise eyebrows when you do not go to your child’s 2 o’clock school play, marvels another.Best of all, enthuses a venture capitalist, Dallas is “unabashedly American” in its embrace of meritocracy and free enterprise. “If you are successful, any prejudice melts away,” agrees a . The result is a virtuous circle. Business begets growth, growth brings people, people draw restaurants, culture and buzz—in the past week or so Dallas got its first Michelin star and a satellite town hosted a Netflix-sponsored boxing match between Mike Tyson, a 58-year-old former heavyweight champion, and Jake Paul, a YouTuber half his age. This attracts more businesses, and so on.The consensus view among corporate chiefs is that this process was sped up by the leftie lunacy of coastal cities, which kept schools shut and faces masked for too long during the covid-19 pandemic. They are equally unanimous in their belief that Mr Trump and his Republican Party, which controls all levers of power in both Washington and Austin, will not be so stupid as to derail it with their own right-wing madness.At the state level, Dallas business elites acknowledge, anti-abortion and pro-gun laws could scarcely get nuttier. But so far these have not scared away their liberal employees. Deporting millions of migrants? to pull off. And the chaos at the border really does need to be stopped, even if the resulting labour shortages cost Texas half a percentage point of output in the short run. Although Mr Trump’s idea of slapping a 10-20% tariff on all foreign goods would hurt a state which imported $383bn-worth of them last year, second only to California, it is seen by many bosses as little more than a threat to be used in negotiations. “The fly is circling the ointment,” acknowledges a financier. The belief in Dallas is that it will never land.