The top 4 headlines right now at Real Clear Politics are all about Trump:



ADDED: The Matt Gillow piece in the Independent begins:

Mention the President of the United States in day-to-day conversation and you’ll get the inevitable; a sigh, a shake of the head, a brief eulogy on how Donald Trump is unfit to be president. I’m no different. I’m the first to criticise Trump. I wouldn’t have voted for him if you’d paid me, and think he’s got some pretty damaging, regressive points of view.

But during a recent, daily grumble about The Donald, I got thinking; if you look past the ridiculous Twitter pronouncements, and the President’s general veneer – what has he actually done? How bad has the 45th President of the United States actually been for the country?

The answer, it might surprise you, is not that bad at all....

Of course, that's not the one that's not like the others. The one that's different is the "clown car" one in The New Yorker, which — as I see it at the link — is titled "Donald Trump and the Stress Test of Liberal Democracy/Resistance must take the form of the affirmation of the values and institutions that the President has scorned and threatened." No clowns. The text does begin with the "wheels coming off the clown car" metaphor:

Minute by minute, the wheels are coming off the clown car that is the Trump Administration. The circus animals are deserting, wriggling through every available window and door....

Bad metaphor. A clown car is a little car full of clowns, not the entire circus. There are no animals in it. Only clowns:




Either call it a circus or call it a clown car. Commit to your metaphor and make it work.

And then there's a whole other metaphor going on. It's in the current title and appears only in a stray paragraph in the middle: the stress test.

The next significant chapter in this stress test for liberal values will be the midterm elections of November, 2018. If the Democratic Party fails to win a majority in either the House of Representatives or the Senate, Trump will be further emboldened. His capacity for recklessness will multiply and go unrestrained. The Republican leadership, which has already proved shocking in its cowardice, will be even less inclined to challenge him.

I don't like the arrival of a completely different metaphor. We're nowhere near the circus anymore. Suddenly, we're in the doctor's office and our "liberal values" are some kind of human body that is getting monitored while it runs on a treadmill to figure out how well it functions. The shift in metaphor would be less annoying if the text committed to that metaphor and made it work. But Remnick only seems to be saying that the Democrats need to win in the 2018 elections. How does that work within the metaphor? If Trump is "further emboldened," isn't the body doing well? I guess the "liberal values" are running and running on the treadmill, huffing and puffing and we'll see if they — the "liberal values" — have greater strength than the illiberal values that are — I don't know — running on some other treadmill.

AND: Meade prompted me to look up this post from May 26, 2015 — as various Republicans were announcing their candidacy for President  — "I'm keeping track of the media's use of the 'clown' metaphor to describe the GOP":

My theory is that this is a tell and that what it really indicates is anxiety about there only being one candidate on the Democratic side. The "clown" idea is usually expressed as "clown car." That is, it's a way to say there are an awful lot of individuals crammed into a space that shouldn't be able to hold so many.

But this morning I'm seeing "clown show," which either assumes we know the "show" is the old car routine or hopes to get away with simply portraying Republicans as ridiculous:

"The Koch brothers try to rein in the GOP presidential clown show." (A WaPo headline for an article that doesn't contain the word "clown." This article currently ranks #1 on WaPo's "most read" list.)

ADDED: Remember the time Obama was portrayed as a clown? It was a time of outrage! 

If the use of "clown car" to describe Republicans is a tell for Democrats' anxiety about their own predicament, it may help us understand what lies behind Remnick's disheveled remarks. Remove the fright wig, and there is a frightened man.