It is March and the lovely @enigmarch people have challenged puzzle designers to write a puzzle inspired by today's word: "joker", as in "clown."
Oh no! The USA *clown* President Trump (egged on by his buffoonish adviser Elon Musk) has decided to run the USA like a business. After all, all businessmen know that once you learn how to run one business, you can run anything, sort of like how you might use a Joker to form different poker hands depending on what other cards you have. Alas, Trump never even learned how to run one business, unless you count "ran it into the ground." (How many bankruptcies is he up to now?)
Here are clues to some word pairs. In each pair, the words differ by one letter; we got a
to stand in both places. Write the letters that
stands for in the two blanks off to the side. But what to write in the very left-hand blank? Look at the table down below. Using the two
letters, look up a single letter in the table. We filled in the first row already: hoUse and hoRse have the
letters U and R. We look up U and R in the table and get W. (Don't worry; if we swizzled the order and looked up R and U instead, we'd still get W; you can't get that wrong.) When you're done, the letters in that left-most column should spell out a word for "joker".
Full puzzle text, hints, and solution at https://lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us/new/2025/03/14/enigmarch-joker/