As some of you may know, I draw my syndicated cartoons over the weekend to be released to LGBTQ newspapers and magazines, and the weekly ones hit the newsstands the following Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Has anyone else noticed how often these days last weekend's news seems like it happened ages ago?
Before Hurricane Harvey decided to park itself over Houston for most of this week, Donald Joffrey Trump issued a memorandum aimed at ridding the U.S. military of transgender service members. Before that, he held one of his campaign rallies in Phoenix, Arizona to tease his pardon of Joe Arpaio, the sadistic anti-Latino former sheriff of Maricopa County, convicted of contempt of court.
Stealing that particular show was a guy placed prominently in the audience standing behind Trump; he wore a white t-shirt proclaiming that Trump and the GOP are not racist and repeatedly holding up a hand-made "Blacks for Trump" sign. He certainly caught social media's attention, and people checking out the web site advertised on his t-shirt discovered that he also believes that Hillary Clinton was colluding with ISIS to wipe out all black and white women, and that Cherokee Indians are "the real KKK slave masters."
So while I'm usually hesitant to joke about the mentally ill, I still worry about a nation where seemingly insane ideas are cherished as gospel by astonishing numbers of Americans. The man at the podium and his loyal fans are particularly susceptible, believing that thousands of invisible Americans swelled the crowd at Trump's inauguration, Mexican rapists are hurling 60-lb. bundles of marijuana over our border fences, and transgender soldiers are bankrupting the Pentagon. We've got anti-vaxxers, birthers, Jade Helmsters, and people who actually buy the powdered bone drink mix hawked by Alex Jones.
There are people who firmly believe, all evidence to the contrary, that tax cuts will balance the budget. People still believe that shifting the cost of society from the people who make the money to the people who do the work is a recipe for properity. Wisconsin is betting that a $3 billion subsidy to lure Foxconn here will be worth the investment, even though the state is unlikely to break even for another 25-40 years — even if you believe Foxconn will still be around in 2058.
But people believe that stuff, because they desperately want to.
Heck, a full third of respondents to a Fox News poll released yesterday believe Trump is "drawing the county together."
So, yeah, I totally made up that transgender Latino soldiers for Trump guy for this cartoon.
Only because I've completely lost faith that such a person couldn't possibly exist.
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