‘The Trees and the Axe’

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor F rom Aesop’s Fables: A man came into a forest and asked the trees to provide him a handle for his axe. The trees consented to his request and gave him a young ashtree. No sooner had the man fitted a new handle to his axe from it, than he began to use it and quickly felled with his strokes the noblest giants of the forest. An old oak, lamenting when too late the destruction of his companions, said to a neighboring cedar, “The first step has lost us all. If we had not given up the rights of the ash, we might yet have retained our own privileges and have stood for ages.”

A similar tale, spun to incorporate politics into the lesson: “The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood, he was one of them.”

The moral we can draw from this story is something along the lines of how we often give those who would do us harm the means to do so, either by accident, by our own misguided actions or by trickery. It’s possible we may be watching this idea play out right here in America before our very eyes.

Now, I’m not one of those people who think that the 2024 election necessarily spells doom for the good ol’ U.S.A. No, my preferred candidate did not win, but I’m all about the will of the voters, so I went into “Trump 2: The Return of MAGA” with an open mind. It has been a little over a month now, so I’m not sure it’s report card time, but I’m not super-excited about what I’ve seen so far.

The most baffling thing to me isn’t that he’s trying to reshape the country into what he truly believes is “great” – and I really do believe that’s what he thinks he’s doing. It’s not even that he’s circumventing the other two branches of the federal government to push his agenda. I mean, if no one is going to stop you, why not, right? A lot of Democrats were urging President Biden to do exactly the same thing when he was in office, and failing to do so really gave him an air of inaction and ineffectiveness.

What I’m baffled at is the motley crew he has chosen to surround himself with this time around. When he was running for the presidency in 2016, the biggest appeal to uncommitted voters he made was a pledge to “drain the swamp” and appoint people to positions in his administration that would help him run the country like a business. And he largely did that, drawing from the corporate world and from industry experts to fill key positions.

This time around though? It’s a circus. Many of these appointments seem like he has purposefully recruited people to see just how wacky things can get or just how inappropriate those picks can be. In what universe does Linda Mc-Mahon, the wife of professional wrestling promoter Vince McMahon, have any business heading up the Department of Education? She has never been in the education world. And besides, isn’t Trump dismantling the Department of Education? I don’t get this one at all.

And Robert Kennedy Jr.? Look, I get it. He dropped out and endorsed Trump. Quid pro quo and all that. Fine, RFK scratched Trump’s back, so now, he’s the Secretary of Health and Human Services? Wasn’t there someplace less vital we could have stuck him? Postmaster General or something? Couldn’t Trump have found someone to head up HHS that didn’t, a) have a brain worm, b) dump a dead bear in Central Park, c) cut the head off a whale with a chainsaw, d) believe all sorts of weird vaccination conspiracy theories, e) have a history of heroin use and a felony conviction for heroin possession? On that last one, we’ve come a long way since we roasted Clinton over the coals for smoking pot in college.

But of course, the ringmaster for this three-ring circus is Elon Musk. The craziest part of Elon playing Robin to Bat-Don is that a year ago, Musk was bashing Trump and Trump was talking trash about Elon, but I guess ultimately money talks. And speaking of talking, boy does Elon do a lot of talking … or tweeting … or whatever. I’m not going to even bother with the whole “Is he a Nazi?” stuff. I’m more concerned with how he talks like a 13-year-old boy in a video game chatroom. He actively calls people “retarded” and tells them to “kill” themselves. One thing I can tell you with almost complete certainty – this “bromance” will not last. Trump and Musk will turn on one another long before 2028 rolls around, probably once Elon starts cutting programs that the poor folks who voted for Trump need to survive.

And it’ll be their fault. They gave him the axe.