Ralph Jimenez of Concord served on the Monitor editorial board.

Last summer, as I watched first a young grifter then an old mountebank take the stage at the University of Georgia in Atlanta to hold what was billed as a political campaign rally, I thought, where have I seen this act before?

The event wasn’t a typical political gathering, more like a nightclub act with flags featuring two insult comics who weren’t funny; all insult, no humor. There was no talk of rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, uniting the American people, spreading democracy around the world, making housing affordable, or even guaranteeing a chicken in every pot. And, after the hottest month of the hottest year in human history there was not a single mention of climate change by former president Donald Trump or his running mate J. D. Vance.

Instead, there were promises to greatly increase the extraction of planet-warming fossil fuels. Now that they’ve been elected, it’s a promise they will keep at the planet’s peril.

As the rally wore on it came to me — the Duke and the Dauphin. They were the two guys, each separately fleeing an angry mob of duped townspeople, who were rescued by Huck Finn and taken in his canoe to safety aboard the raft with Jim, Huck’s friend and a runaway slave. Mark Twain, the great American journalist and humorist, made those characters up. Trump and Vance, sadly, are real.

Vance is young, just 40. Trump is 78 and the oldest president ever elected. The purported Duke was, Huck guessed, about 30. The alleged Dauphin, the rightful King of France to hear him tell it, was about 70.

Vance, who achieved fame with the publication of his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” is sort of one of the Dukes of Hazzard, the hillbilly moonshiners and the stars of the famous television series of the 1970s and ‘80s. The Dauphin, though a printer by trade does “a little in patent medicines; theater-actor — tragedy, you know; take a turn to mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing-geography school for a change; sling a lecture sometimes — oh, I do lots of things — most anything that comes handy, so it ain’t work.”

While aboard the raft on the Mississippi with Huck and Jim, the pair of con-men concocted a caper to keep them financially afloat, a theatrical production they dubbed The Royal Nonesuch.

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The posters, printed by the Dauphin, read in part:

AT THE COURTHOUSE! THREE NIGHTS ONLY!

The world-renowned tragedians

DAVID GARRICK THE YOUNGER! AND EDMUND KEAN THE ELDER!

. . . In their thrilling tragedy

THE KING’S CAMELEOPARD or THE ROYAL NONESUCH!

Admission 50 cents. Ladies and children not admitted.

“There,” says he, if that last line don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansaw!”

Like the Dauphin, Trump, though a real estate developer by trade, has tried his hand at a lot of things. There was Trump University, Trump Airlines, Trump steaks, Trump vodka, a Trump magazine, a mortgage company, casinos, a Trump board game, a travel booking site,” and just for something to fall back on, a Trump Home Mattress company. All closed or went bankrupt. Yet Trump’s skill as a salesmen of spectacle proved superior to those of the legendary circus promoter P. T. Barnum. A majority of the public, like men who paid to see the Royal Nonesuch perform, bought what he was selling.

The courthouse was packed for the first performance which, after a frothy introduction by the Duke, the curtain went up on the “King” as a cameleopard, his naked body painted in stripes of many colors, prancing about the stage on all fours. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The crowd roared with laughter then, when the curtain quickly closed grew angry. “Is that all?” someone yelled. The men were about to riot when a well-dressed local rose and said he didn’t want to be known as one of the people so easily fooled. “We don’t want to be the laughing stock of this whole town, I reckon, and never hear the last of this as long as we live.” …Better that the attendees “talk this show up and sell the rest of the town. Then we’ll all be in the same boat.”

The courthouse was packed for the second performance but on the third night, the hall was filled with men bearing rotten eggs, cabbages and worse intent on exacting their revenge. The Duke, as the show’s promoter, barker and ticket taker, collected admission fees but, a few minutes before the curtain was set to rise, paid a local a quarter to collect admissions for him. He turned to Huck backstage and said, “Walk fast till you get past the houses, and then shin for the raft like the dickens was after you.” The “King” was on the raft with Jim, having never gone into town at all that night. The group fled downriver in the dark with their loot, having duped the locals three nights in a row.

The Trump and Vance show, an act that could turn out to be an actual tragedy, will soon play in the nation’s capital. It too is a Royal Nonesuch. There’s no such place as the failing America Trump and Vance describe, no such enemies as those they claim are poised to poison the minds of the nation’s children, no such need to make an America that is the envy of the world, great again. But the curtain on the Nonesuch future will soon open.

Somewhere up there, Mark Twain, in his white suit and puffing his cigar, is looking down and saying, “Well son-of-a-gun, it’s happened again.”