I saw and heard a MAGA racist propagandizing in the motel breakfast room Sunday morning. He wore a ridiculous plastic red firefighter hat emblazoned with “TRUMP” and “Make America Great Again” (what, we’re not great already, with diesel at $6, inflation above 3%, GDP below 2%, and America’s international reputation nearing zero?) and pantslegs tucked into his boots to show off the American flag stripes on his uppers (all of which costuming he shed an hour later in the parking lot when he got into his work truck, which was not a firetruck). He lingered around the coffee machine for over an hour, making sure he was seen by every traveler coming in, making sure everyone could hear his mutters about some people hate America so much… ought to leave the country… pure evil. These mutterings effectively baited some fellow travelers into hateful conversation about nobody should get reparations… educated idiots… should just send them all back to Africa… sold their own people into slavery….
I ignored this faker in favor of my eggs. But when I went back upstairs to get ready to hit the road, I found political scientist Tom Schaller’s apt firefighting analogy for the racist breakfast-room mutterer and others who have fallen for Trump’s ineptitude and broken promises:
…Trump ran on immigration reform and taking all the immigrant labor out of the country. And of course, he ran on tariffs. And if you thought about those two policies for a moment: one is essentially an inflationary policy on domestic production, because it raises labor costs when you eliminate some of the most efficient and lower-paid workers. And the second, of course, tariffs, as we already discussed, is just a tax, a retail tax on imports. And so Trump was campaigning to end inflation on two inflationary policies.
It’d be like if you and I were picked by our local town to sit on a panel to pick the new fire chief. And we interviewed a guy, and he was kind of brusque and he didn’t have good manners, but he had two really great ideas when he explained to us his philosophy of putting out fire. One is, he shows up with a giant flatbed truck of dried hay and he dumps that on top. And then if that doesn’t work, he brings a tanker of kerosene and sprays that on, because we know that liquids douse fires. And we said, let’s hire that guy, what a genius.
And then, halfway through his term—now I’m analogizing to the Iran war—he said, well, no, what you really do to put out a fire is you throw a bunch of firecrackers in there, because that disseminates the fire and that puts it out. So this is the person that Americans hire to fix the economy, even though he can’t do basic percentages, much less understand global macroeconomic politics [Tom Schaller, in Greg Sargent, “Transcript: As Trump Unravels, Even Fox Cringes at His $5,000 Giveaway,” The New Republic, 2026.09.11].
It’s not reparations or over-educated liberals or pure-evil immigrants or any other bogeypeople taking my money or yours. It’s faithless Donald Trump and his inept policies. A real political firefighter wouldn’t stand around the motel breakfast room stoking flames of racism and ignorance; he’d hand out “Vote Democratic!” cards and elect a Congress that will work to put out Trump’s fires and impeach the economic arsonist-in-chief.