Be advised: This essay is pure satire. It’s intended to show the silliness of existing political and social conditions by exaggerating them. It’s a shame that satire must be labeled and explained as such, but those unfamiliar with comic traditions need to be warned, for legal reasons. That’s the world we live in these days.

For the rest of you: spoiler alert. Sorry.

Yet another crisis awaits President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican dominated Congress. No, we’ve already counted ISIS, Obamacare and the economy. This time it’s the circus.

The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — the Greatest Show on Earth — is going the way of the dinosaur, ending its 167-year run in May.

Kenneth Feld, chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment, the circus’ parent company, cited several factors in the sad decision.

Ticket sales have declined and expenses have increased steadily over several years. But the death blow followed the circus’ decision in March 2015 to retire the elephant acts from its road shows.

Ever since Phineas Taylor “P.T.” Barnum bought his first elephant 135 years ago, the great beast has personified the circus more than any other animal. Indeed, elephants typically lead the parade when a circus comes to town.

But for the past several decades, activists have campaigned against such pachydermal subjugation. They say elephants are complex, intelligent animals being pressed into a dirty, difficult life of emotional deprivation — even cruelty. The activists have made circus elephants a civil rights cause célèbre.

Their campaign has worked unexpectedly well.

“The biggest issue is, there’s been a lot of legislation in different cities and different municipalities,” Feld complained in a New York Times interview in 2015. These rules, regulating the use and treatment of animals, have spawned litigation and scheduling issues in many cities where the circus performs, making it financially impossible to tour with performing elephants.

What’s ironic is that a government now dedicated to slowing and complicating circus used to bend the rules to accommodate it, even going so far as to exempt circus trains from travel restrictions during periods of wartime fuel rationing. The circus’ mission of escape entertainment was considered that important to the national spirit.

You’d think now more than ever, we could use such entertainment now.

Trump and the new Congress should do all it can to preserve the tradition, and to make the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus great again. Maybe turn that into a slogan, put it on a ball cap.

Maybe they should enact legislation — the Affordable Circus Act — to prop up the circus, and restore dignity to the elephants along with the trapeze artists, big cats and high wire performers.

Then, all we would need to do is get those clowns in Congress to agree. And keep the budget and regulatory contortionists from throwing anything out of joint.

By the way, the elephants have been working for peanuts. They deserve a higher minimum wage, along with decent housing. Because elephants never forget — unlike most of the electorate.