America’s Three-Ring Circus: Politics Under the Big Top

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, to the grandest spectacle in modern politics — the American Three-Ring Circus! Under this tattered red, white, and blue big top, the spotlights spin wildly, the ringmasters shout over one another, and the audience can’t decide whether to laugh, cry, or just walk out before intermission.

Ring One: The Immigration High Wire Act Without a Safety Net

The mass incarceration/deportation of immigrants of both legal and undocumented status is taking place in the main ring of our American Circus. Politicians from both parties hurl flaming rhetoric at one another while human lives are their juggling pins. Migrants are cast as helpless victims or dangerous intruders to excite the crowds on the right and left bleachers. While the crowd roars, the once barely adequate social safety net has been frayed and fallen into disrepair while the citizens walk the bureaucratic tightrope high above—navigating convoluted laws—and are falling.

Ring Two: The Epstein Magic Trick

In ring number two we have the Epstein Files hidden under a cloth while the magician tries to make them disappear. Subpoenas vanish and key witnesses fall through trapdoors or die under mysterious circumstances.

Watch in amazement as names vanish, documents disappear, and accountability gets sawed in half before your very eyes. Inconvenient truths are whisked away for “security reasons.” Justice is a “now you see it—now you don’t” magic trick that leaves many wondering if this trick is incompetence, corruption, or the oldest magician’s ruse of all: distraction.

Ring Three: Tariff Juggling and the Tightrope of Global Commerce

In ring number three we have the tariff juggler causing global turmoil in economic markets, while a daredevil international act of economic negotiators walks a tightrope high above trying to avoid a misstep that could send the entire economy into a dive. Tariffs meant to punish rivals boomerang back, raising prices for the hometown crowd. Rivals smirk, allies frown, and American manufacturers, farmers, and consumers fall into the unraveling safety net below.

The ringmaster assures the crowd that all is well but the chaos would suggest otherwise. He tells the crowd that it is all part of the act. He says he only wants to level the playing field but the only thing that gets leveled is that everyone is equally annoyed.

The Sideshow: Where Real Weirdness Happens

While the Big Top is alive with activity, there is the Sideshow of other attractions—it is a midway of political oddities. We have the wars in Gaza and Ukraine where moral outrage and political aspirations collide. We have the Texas Sideshow of partisan gerrymandering to head off a mid-term election result that might otherwise more closely reflect the desires of the voters.

See the judicial puppet show starring SCOTUS, the US Attorney General, and a collection of judges appointed for their partisan loyalty where rulings and investigations depend more on political favor than the law. There is a veritable funhouse of crazy mirrors where justice looks severely distorted depending on your viewpoint. Also in the funhouse are blasts of hot air from unexpected places designed to startle but not amuse.

The Final Curtain

As the band plays, the confetti falls, and the crowd heads for the exits—the fans are exhausted but no closer to understanding what they have witnessed. The audience has seen the spectical, their pockets are lighter, spirits lower, and no one truly knows what just happened.

Under this American Big Top, the show is designed to keep the spotlight moving, the crowd divided and confused, and the money pouring in. The goal of this circus is not to solve your problems—it is to keep you watching.

This is the only show in town where the clowns run the tent, the ringmasters don’t know which ring they are in, and the audience gets charged double at the concession stand. The real horror of this circus is that it never ends—the acts change costumes, the clowns swap makeup, but the tent stays up, the show goes on, and the real ringmasters — the money men in the shadows — keep counting the ticket sales.