Clowns on an epic scale

Mike Mahoney -

Donald Trump’s favorite metaphor is the witch hunt, the idea that people keep persecuting him for crimes he did not commit.

But the real metaphor of this administration is the clown car.

The deal with clown cars was that the circus would choose a really small car and an unlimited number of clowns would emerge. They couldn’t possibly all be in there, but They keep on coming.

It’s a great metaphor for what’s going on in the Trump Administration, I think. Incompetent officials keep surfacing, with little or no government experience, drawn from the ranks of podcasters, Fox News, billionaires, or tech bro employees of Elon Musk, with quite a few lawyers thrown in from the Trump defense team.

Some Trump appointees once had promising careers or positions of promise (Marco Rubio), only to humiliate themselves by bowing to his will or scrape by as right-wing commentators while he was out of office.

You know many of them: Pete Hegseth, from Fox and now the star of Signal, where he posts attack plans for colleagues and family to see; Kash Patel, who leads the FBI after lots of anti-FBI rhetoric; his new deputy director at the FBI, Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who found his true calling at Fox and podcasting; Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor now appearing frequently in paramilitary gear in raids against immigrants as Secretary of Homeland Security; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of a master politician who has found his way into the land of anti-vax conspiracy theories and bogus healthcare remedies; and my favorite, Tulsi Gabbard, now serving as Director of National Intelligence, often accused of espousing Russian views and propaganda.

But it’s not just the people that keep coming out of the clown car. It’s the policies that keep emerging, too:

  • Tariff policies and threats against economic rivals and valued trading partners without distinction, game plan, or negotiating strategy.
  • Dismantling efforts to fight foreign disinformation campaigns.
  • Dismantling investigations of cryptocurrency abuses.
  • Tearing down the U.S. Agency for International Development, an instrument of soft power and American generosity throughout the world.
  • Massive cuts to medical research.
  • Massive cuts to the IRS, particularly on investigative staffs.
  • Efforts to abolish or decimate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
  • Attempts to rewrite American history to fit MAGA whims.
  • Repeated forays into the Social Security Administration’s records, computers, and operations — as well as forcing senior leadership retirements and layoffs.
  • Executive orders and administrative initiatives to attack law firms, museums, universities, and non-profit organizations.
  • Freezing grants that would feed the hungry in the U.S. and internationally.
  • Halting programs responsible for vaccinations against disease in poor countries.

Okay, these are the first few crazy personnel decisions, policies and initiatives that I could think of — all coming out of the clown car in quick succession. And it’s impossible to know when or where the seemingly inexhaustible initiatives of hurt, grievance, and lawlessness will end.

The clowns and their policies sometime come together. Like with Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, a Christian nationalist, proponent of more religious influence over national affairs, and an opponent of what conservatives have labeled critical race theory.

I don’t know, but his comments sound hurtful to me, especially about federal employees that safeguard our health and environment:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. . . . When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

So, what is the clown car that keeps producing these individuals and policies? It wasn’t hard to identify. It was Project 2025, the handbook for government destruction and hurtfulness that Vought and many others helped write.

But Vought, Hegseth, tariff designer Peter Navarro, Patel, RFK Jr., have only just begun. It has only been 100 days. And the clowns keep on coming.

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What I’m reading that I wish everyone could see: David Brooks, in The Atlantic, “I Should Have Seen This Coming.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-populism-power-pursuit/682116/ Here’s a brief quote:

Day after day, the administration works to create a world where ruthless people can thrive. That means destroying any institution or arrangement that might check the strongman’s power. The rule of law, domestic or international, restrains power, so it must be eviscerated.