Stop Calling Trump a ‘Clown.’ He’s Not One of Us.
Trump is no clown. Please stop calling him one. (That means you, too, Mr. Biden!) Yeah, yeah, we get it. The overly large suits, silly wigs, face paint, tiny-little-hands-on-a-puffed-up-body, popping in and out of a fancy white house as if it was a birthday cake, shooting off firecrackers and confetti cannons….
But look around. Trump’s agenda is seriously un-funny. He’s not a clown, he never was. We clowns tried to warn you.
It was July 2016, in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. A pie’s throw from the Republican National Convention, clowns came out in protest. We rallied in defense of the good name of Clowns, denouncing the slander of our noble profession in describing the presumptive Republican nominee. We linked arms, we waved our cardboard signs. We shouted with our loudest, squeakiest voices.
“Trump’s no clown!” we cried. “He’s not funny!” But people were taken in by his con. “A buffoon!” they chuckled. “A joke!” they squealed. “No… he wouldn’t, he couldn’t!” they gasped. Now we know better. He wasn’t. He isn’t. And he did.
Sure, fiction and the movies are replete with loathsome stereotypes of our kind. Krusty, Joker, Pennywise and the like… “Killer clowns.” Yeah, yeah, we’ve seen it all. Ghoulish monsters in grease paint triggering phobias and fear. These works of fiction are meant to play on our anxieties, to destroy our notion of innocence, of safety, of fun. Sound familiar? Like Trump, these goons have done much to sully our reputation, but they are not the Real Deal. They do not represent us.
Real clowns, we make people happy. The best of us, we make people laugh.
Behold the clown as she produces a flower from thin air. A shiny nickel from behind a child’s ear. With a gentle hand, a clown will coax a simple balloon into a colorful poodle. A sassy parrot. A crown, a light saber, a magic wand, a swan. We fail to hit all the right notes, but make music nonetheless; we pratfall, we rebound, we take a pie in the face. The show is for you, for your delight. Remember that feeling? It’s happiness. Happiness courtesy of a clown.
It’s time to set the record straight. If you must name-call Trump (and we’re totally ok if you do), please do so accurately, so that people will respond appropriately: He’s a meanie. A bully. A liar, a hater, a cheat. An ignoramus. A sick, sick piece of caca doo-doo. But not a clown. Never a clown.
This man separates babies from their mothers and fathers. He loses track of where they were sent away. That is not the work of a clown. There is no word for that pain. A nation mourns its dead. He shrugs. “It is what it is.”
Here’s another tell-tale sign. You’ll notice Trump has no sense of humor. Weird, right? Watch him. He does not laugh. He mocks, yes. He scolds. He harangues, he scoffs, he preens. But he does not laugh.
On our third day of protest in 2016, a fellow protester set himself — his pants — on fire. Pants on fire — funny, right?! No, scary. The pants-burning would later be determined an accident, a flag-burning gone awry. But we didn’t know that at the time. People went running. There was confusion and mayhem on the ground. Rumors spread, police were engaged. We clowns sheltered in a nearby storage unit with our props and rubber noses, full of dread. There was panic in the air. That night, it was all over the news.
Looking back to 2016, we reckon with our failure to stop Trump. Were we just too dang cute? Should we have set ourselves on fire, too? Torched our funny hats, melted rubber, gnashed our teeth? A clown on fire is no laughing matter — the stuff of nightmares. It would have scared the bejeezus out of the kids, but would we have gotten your attention? Would you have heard us then?
Trump’s no clown. Never was and isn’t still. And the machine that put him in power? It is not a circus. Enough is enough. We must free ourselves from this malignant, humorless monster.
Otherwise, the joke’s on us.
#VOTE2020 #ActualClownsAgainstTrump #NotFunnyCleveland #UpWithClowns #DownWithTrump
