(Dobbs) There's Nothing Funny about this Clown Show
It's just sad, shocking, sometimes sinister.
There are two kinds of clowns. They’re not all funny.
The first kind we think of is the happy kind, like Bozo the Clown, a dull-witted but warm-heartedly fun fixture on mid-20th Century television.
But there are sad clowns too, epitomized in the same century by Emmett Kelly, whose downtrodden persona was popular with the poor during the Depression.
I point this out because the Republican Party right now is a clown show, but there’s nothing funny about it. With every passing day, what was once the proud and distinguished Grand Old Party is even sadder than it was before.
An easy target when it comes to the clown show is Donald Trump, but never more than two weeks ago when he splashed “Major Announcement” on his website, only to reveal in a pitiably clownish video that his “major announcement” was the debut of an online store where for $99, we could buy a digital trading card, an NFT (whatever that is!) with his cartoon likeness on its face. There’s Trump as an astronaut, Trump as a western sheriff, Trump in a Superman shirt. “Very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting,” the-man-who-bewilderingly-was-once-our-president wrote on his website.
Remember, this was exactly one month after he declared that he is running for president again, after which he went silent. Yet his first “major announcement” was this. Even Trump’s partner-in-crime Steve Bannon found it anything but exciting, exasperatedly saying on his podcast, “I can’t do this anymore.” Since Trump released his video just as we were learning that the January 6th Committee would ask the Justice Department to prosecute him for insurrection, Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” quipped only half tongue-in-cheek, “After this week I think he’s pretty much locked down an insanity plea.”
By the way, Trump dug deeper in that video, opening the trading card pitch by introducing himself as “hopefully your favorite president of all time. Better than Lincoln, better than Washington.”
That makes him even sadder than Emmett Kelly and more dull-witted than Bozo.
But it takes us to the next episode of the Republican clown show: within twelve hours of Trump’s announcement, all 45,000 trading cards sold out. Do the math: people spent almost $4,500,000 to enrich Trump. And make no mistake, the money didn’t go to his political party or his political action committee. It went to Donald Trump. (And it makes me wonder, how will he declare this as a loss to the IRS? If history is any guide, he’ll try). Add this to the quarter-billion dollars that Trump raised through emails and websites, according to the January 6th Committee’s report, in the weeks after he launched his big lie about the “rigged” election. Most of it was directed to his newly-formed “Save America” fund, which he is permitted to spend as he sees fit. Evidence shows that through the course of last month’s midterm elections, he spent precious little on politics.
What this means is, when the clown show goes on the road, there are millions of gullible Americans paying fool’s gold for a ticket.
In a different clown show performance, we’ve now learned that just as advisors privately told Trump after the 2020 election that there was no substance to his spurious avowals of fraud, his most avid acolytes in the media knew it too. In depositions for the lawsuit brought against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, which was slandered by Fox hosts when they spread the story about Dominion’s “rigged” voting machines, Sean Hannity was asked, under oath, if he ever actually thought the story was true. His response? “I did not believe it for one second.”
Fox’s Tucker Carlson, also under oath, “tried to squirm out of it,” according to Dominion’s chief lawyer.
Yet as another sign that circus showman P.T. Barnum was right when he said, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” Fox News for the 7th consecutive year is the top-rated cable news network in America.
Then there’s the Republican clown show in Congress itself.
Exhibit A: the QAnon-conspiracy-preaching congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene. She openly and eagerly cavorts with white nationalists and anti-Semites. Then again, why wouldn’t she, since the-man-who-would-be-her-president does too. But here’s the thing: almost no one in her party speaks up. To the contrary, the party’s leader and presumptive Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, shamelessly catering to extremists to win their support, apparently has promised Greene a “powerful” committee assignment and, as she herself boasts, “is going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway.”
Exhibit B: When the House passed a series of electoral reforms, some of which would prevent a future vice president from single-handedly overturning the results of a presidential election, as Trump wanted Vice President Pence to do.
The measures won with 229 votes but take note: 203 Republicans voted against them. Most of the nine principled Republicans who sided with the Democrats on the Electoral Count Act were the same ones who had voted for Trump’s impeachment after January 6th. The 203 who voted against election reform are the same ones who voted against the impeachment.
But the biggest clown show is yet to come: an investigation, probably several investigations, into Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop. That’s not to say that the incoming Republican House won’t find egregiously unethical and maybe even criminal behavior surrounding business transactions by the president’s son, then try to tie it to the president himself. A Republican strategist says they’ll look at "Who profited? Was the law broken? Was it not broken? Were there serious national security issues?”
But it is to say, no matter what conduct they uncover, nobody died. Don’t forget, Donald Trump encouraged a mob to go to the Capitol on January 6th where people did die, but the moment Republicans take power in the House, they will forget that, in fact their stated goal is to investigate the January 6th investigators. Furthermore, Donald Trump might be prosecuted for stealing, then recklessly storing top-secret national security documents at Mar-a-Lago, but these undemocratic diehard Republican representatives dismiss that as a partisan witch hunt, while they are sure to deduce dire threats to our security from Hunter Biden’s laptop.
It is a clown show, top to bottom. But there’s nothing funny about it. It’s sad, shocking, sometimes sinister. But there’s nothing funny at all.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
In The Gladiator, there’s a moment in the Coloseum when having defeated all comers he shouts to the crowd of Roman Plebians, “Are you not entertained?”
How can so many Americans think these are serious people whose sole purpose is disruption and chaos?