The Ringmaster’s Picks

By John Hobbins

Suddenly a bright spotlight comes on in the big tent and the portly ringmaster in the red hat and tie announces the start of the show. The light then focuses on the shiny VW bug as it is driven into the center ring. The tiny car then extrudes the clowns one by one while the ringmaster announces their names and titles: Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff (smug orchestrator of mass deportation); Elon Musk, Co-director of Fiscal Something-or-other (the ringmaster’s giddy, absurdly rich lapdog); Matt Gaetz, Attorney General (a lawyer for only two years with no prosecutorial experience who is the most disliked member of Congress. After allegedly having sex with a 17-year-old, he became a person of interest in a sex trafficking investigation); Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense (Fox “News” talking head with a rape charge in his past, who is purported to have white supremacist leanings, and whose only qualification is that he served in the military); and Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence (a Putin-friendly political convert with little intelligence experience and administratively is ill prepared to run this huge and sensitive operation). Finally, out pops the over-tanned Robert F Kennedy Junior, the head of Health and Human Services (an anti-vax zealot whose wacky views on science and medicine could have a disastrous effect on the delivery of health care in the United States).

The ringmaster then asks the VW occupants to sit in a circle around of the ring like tchotchkes while he delivers a word salad riff about imaginary jugglers, acrobats, and dangerous lions, tigers, and Haitians. His Chief of Security, Hulk Hogan, in a tank top designed to feature his deltoids and biceps, but long enough to cover his 70-year-old belly, patrols the periphery to make sure nobody in the audience leaves or yawns. Meanwhile, staffers pass through the audience collecting the $59.99 from each attendee for their Chinese-made Trump Bibles– a purchase requirement for admission.

This is what is in store for us. All because a mere 1.6% more voters thought the guy in the red hat would put more money in their pockets and would prevent those immigrants with black and brown skin from competing for their jobs or from causing them bodily harm.

But the voters were grossly misled. Although some prices of some goods have risen over the last four years, the well accepted markers of the economy have shown remarkable improvement during that time. It did not matter that the ringmaster’s cure for the economy is to apply huge tariffs to many foreign-made products, an action that economists say would pass the increased costs onto the consumer (and not be absorbed by countries making the products, like China). Regarding the ringmaster’s repetitive “robbing and raping” assertions, recent data show that violent crimes by immigrants are substantially lower than those committed by our home-grown population and many of the jobs they are now filling are the ones few of us seem to want ……. You know, the ones that keep our country going.

Also, the ringleader, with support from his not-so-merry clown car crew and others, has promised to overturn the Affordable Care Act and gut Medicaid and Medicare, and maybe even Social Security. These messages did not seem to register with most voters who either did not hear them from their chosen news source, or simply did not seem to care. Why? Because inflation-related grocery and gas prices did rise, and voters, not caring why this happened, felt this was reason enough to listen to the ringmaster’s promise to shake up the status quo.  Another reason these messages were blown off was because his campaign rhetoric teased out some core prejudices in some people that made race and gender their top priority.

If the new administration’s pre-election promises come true, right-leaning voters will find many government services on which they depended to be drastically pruned or stripped away completely. Then these individuals may have a different perspective in two years when elections involving the Senate and House of Representatives come up — if they are adequately informed by a (still) free press.

Within a year, if some policies drafted by the new administration benefit many Americans, then this should be acknowledged by the mainstream press. However, if policies result in adverse outcomes and/or if there is evidence of flagrant anti-constitutional end-arounds, then these results and digressions must be documented and shared with the public.

Right now, most vehicles for this type of information are dominated by big money flowing in from the right and social media platforms that have no guardrails to filter out false information. So, grassroot strategies must start now to make sure the voters hear all sides of the political narrative, including unvarnished versions of policy fallout. An emphasis now must be to skip around the big dispenser of misinformation through news/opinions based on fact published in local papers (like this one).

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