.jpg)
March 10, 2025 Editor, The News-Gazette: As a literature teacher, I loved bringing characters to life. When I taught “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at PMHS, I never imagined I’d see the Duke and the Dauphin reincarnated in our leaders today. Masquerading as royalty, “King” Trump and his unelected sidekick Elon Musk are as untrustworthy and corrupt as that duo of grifters who travel down the river to cheat the locals in one con after another. Whatever the scam, be it “The Royal Nunsuch” or Trump University, these criminals escape justice to do it again.
King Trump and Dauphin Musk follow the same playbook used by Twain’s “King” and Dauphin. They pretend to love ordinary people (“I love the poorly educated!” croons Trump) while really despising them (those “losers and suckers!”). They flatter their victims and even promise to reward them (“money saved from firing federal employees will be returned to taxpayers”), while really planning to rip them off (through huge tax cuts to the wealthy, funded at the public’s expense). They set up fraudulent facades (“Department of Government Efficiency”) as covers for illegal activities (Duo of Government Elimination), to ransack public investments for their profit.
Pulling the false alarms of “Fraud! Waste!” and “DEI!”, these hucksters just abolished the Department of Education to rob students, especially low-income and special needs students, and funnel their desperately needed funds to the privileged: discriminatory and unaccountable private schools and billionaires like Musk who funded Trump’s campaign.
None of their phony schemes could work without a gullible populace. Trump “loves the uneducated” so much that he is taking measures to keep them that way, denying them a good education and college loans. Why should he improve students’ reading and critical thinking skills when “prejudiced chuckleheads,” to use Huck’s phrase, are so much easier to deceive, manipulate, and swindle? Like the Duke, Trump can brag, “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” DEMAREE PECK Lexington
