I can’t believe that four years after the last time we were here on the precipice, our Graphical History Tour has to repeat this stop. But apparently there are a lot of Americans whose memories of the Donald Berzelius Trump administration are not just hazy, but positively gauzy.
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| March, 2016 |
His immediate priority upon assuming office in 2017 was to staff many of his cabinet departments with people opposed to those departments' missions.
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| March, 2017 |
For the Department of Education, public education foe Betsy DeVos.
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| March, 2017 |
For the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights, civil rights foe Roger Severino.
Few of us noticed Trump also tossing the Obama administration's preparations for pandemic response into the garbage. But have no fear. Trump is promising to put brain worm-addled Robert "Let's Strap A Rotting Whale Carcass On Top Of The Car And Drive Down The Highway" Kennedy Jr. in charge of the nation's health in his second reich.
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| June, 2017 |
Starting under Administrator Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency abandoned its mission, repealing nearly 100 environmental protection rules and regulations.
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| July, 2018 |
And then there was the Trump foreign policy. Bashing our NATO allies. Fawning over Kim Jong Il. Keeping even his translator out of his private meeting with Vlad the Defenestrator, his handler at the Kremlin.
I don't even have a cartoon about the time he wanted to bomb Mexico and pretend someone else did it.
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| March, 2020 |
Then, we come to the defining moment of his presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic. His first reaction, as it has been with immigration, was to wall off the whole country against foreigners, returning tourists and business people, imports, birds, and wind. When it became painfully obvious even to Trump that it was too late for that, he discovered that he could be the center of attention by going on television every day to promise that the pandemic would miraculously be over by Easter. Then summer. Then Columbus Day.
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| April, 2020 |
He spouted ridiculous phony cures, from horse tranquilizer to bleach to shining bright lights up everybody's ass. And the death toll kept mounting. Although Kim Jong Il did not end up on that list.
We didn't know that Secret Agent Trump sent a COVID-19 test machine to Putin at Kremlin headquarters when they were still scarce in the country he supposedly wanted to make great again.
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| October, 2020 |
Turned out that Trump was COVID-positive himself when he appeared on stage to debate Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Trump's utterly unhinged performance that night was but a foretaste of the shitshow Trump and his gangsters thrust upon the nation after we decisively voted to toss him out of office. Refusing to concede, he sent his consiglieres to argue a pack of lies in the courthouses, on the airwaves, and over the intertubes.
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| January, 2021 |
The cartoons I drew of Trump protesting his election loss paled next to the riot he fomented at the U.S. Capitol. The assaults on police officers. The wanton vandalism. The threats to kill the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and any other member of Congress they might happen to stumble upon.
The Senators who were sent scurrying for their lives only to come back and decide that no impeachable offense had ever occurred.
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| February, 2024 |
Revenge upon his political enemies as a campaign theme wouldn't poll well, to Trump decided to make vilification of darker-skinned immigrants the primary focus of Trump 2024. The issue was so important that he made sure that the bipartisan immigration reform bill hammered out in Congress never made it to the floor of the House.
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| September, 2024 |
Just in case those brown-skinned immigrants miraculously stopped showing up at the southern border, Trump had another target for persecution: American transgender persons.
Oh, I haven't even gotten around to his stealing thousands of classified government documents he had never gotten around to reading and stashing them in his bathroom, ballroom, and garden shed. Or his holding Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds for ransom, then showing up to throw paper towels at people. Or his history of sexual assaults. Or his 34 felony convictions.
I could repost more cartoons, but frankly, this post is way over the limit already.
For now, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that enough Americans will decide that Donald the Grouch Trump was in the wrong end of that big ass garbage truck this week.
