Trump on the Drawing Board

"William Howard Taft" by Oliver Herford in Confessions of a Caricaturist, Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1917

Matt Wuerker had a wonderful post at Politico the other day in which eight of the top U.S. editorial cartoonists share their thought processes about drawing Donald Joffrey Trump. Included are videos in which you can listen to Pat Bagley, Barry Blitt, David Horsey, Kevin Kallaugher, Mike Lester, Ann Telnaes, Signe Wilkinson and Matt himself describe their approach to the subject while their drawings come into being before your very eyes.

All eight offer variations on the opinion that D.J. Trump is the easiest president to draw in the history of the Republic, which I'd like to take issue with.

We cartoonists end up thinking every president is the easiest thing to draw.

When Gerald Ford became president after less than a year as veep, the conventional wisdom was that he was a disaster for cartoonists, a bland face devoid of caricaturable features. "Cartoonists' first attempts at capturing the quintessential Ford," Newsweek wrote in its August 26, 1974 edition, "have been bland enough to raise the risk of mistaken identity."

Cartoons by Tom Darcy (Newsday), Don Wright (Miami News), John Fischetti (Chicago Daily News) and Hugh Haynie (Louisville Courier-Journal) reprinted in Newsweek, August 26, 1974

"Jerry Ford's face," sighs Miami News editorial cartoonist Don Wright, "has a striking similarity to the backside of my thumb." Few of Wright's colleagues would go quite that far, but it seems clear that not having Richard Nixon to caricature any more has sent the U.S. cartoonist corps into a technical tizzy. "Nixon's face was covered with things that said what you wanted them to say," observes Pat Oliphant of The Denver Post. "But Ford is the most challenging political figure I've had to draw."

But by 1975, even high school newspaper novices such as myself could draw him in our sleep.

With Trump, the challenge is that he presents a visual overload: the meticulously overworked comb-over, the jowls, the squinty pale eyes, the elastic mouth from his Mussolini pout to his Joker rictus.

But I'm tired of the overly long tie. Whenever possible, I like to draw him not in a suit and tie, but golfing (which allows me to include two other overloaded features: his paunch and rump), or keeping Melania awake with his pre-dawn Twitter addiction. He is not presidential, and I'd rather not draw him looking presidential.

From my sketchbook

Sadly for us cartoonists, that orange skin tone is fading away; I guess he hasn't moved his tanning bed into the White House. It will live on in our cartoons until he becomes as pasty-white as the bags under his eyes and we can't ignore it any more.

And someday — a day which can't come soon enough — we cartoonists will have to move on to some other Easiest Thing To Draw. Unlike with Gerry Ford, we've had plenty of time to hone our visions of Mike Pence; and even if the Democrats put up someone we've never heard of before, we've been through that with Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

We'll do just fine.