Q Toon: A Little Song, A Little Dance

Phoning in to the Fox Noise panel program "The Five" last Thursday, Donald Commodius Trump made the bizarre claim at the heart of my editorial cartoon today.

“Now I think I did very well with the gay vote, OK? I even played the gay national anthem as my walk-off, OK? And I think it probably helped me. But I did great. No Republican’s ever gotten the gay vote like I did and I’m very proud of it, I think it’s great. Perhaps it’s because I’m from New York City.”

The "gay national anthem" Trump referred to is the Village People's "Y.M.C.A.," one of the staples of his 2024 presidential campaign appearances (including the one where Trump appeared on stage and called for a 34-minute impromptu concert, after the crowd had already been standing for hours listening to music while waiting for him to arrive).

For dropping their cease-and-desist order to stop playing their music at Trump rallies, the Village People were rewarded by landing the gig to perform "Y.M.C.A." at Trump's "Make America Great Again Rally" and the Turning Point USA Inaugural Ball on January 19, 2025. 

I hope they were paid enough to be worth it, because I would argue that "Y.M.C.A." can no longer be considered the gay national anthem. Not only is it now a staple along with "Mambo #5" and "Electric Slide" of different-sex wedding receptions, the Village People front man and co-author of the song Victor Willis has disavowed its gayness:

“There’s been a lot of talk, especially of late, that Y.M.C.A. is somehow a gay anthem. As I’ve said numerous times in the past, that is a false assumption based on the fact that my writing partner was gay, and some (not all) of Village People were gay, and that the first Village People album was totally about gay life. 

“This assumption is also based on the fact that the YMCA was apparently being used as some sort of gay hangout and since one of the writers was gay and some of the Village People are gay, the song must be a message to gay people. To that I say once again, get your minds out of the gutter. It is not."

Don't count on being able to convince Secretary of Excursions Pete Kegsbreath to enlist "In the Navy" as a recruitment tool, however.

There are plenty of other nominees for Gay National Anthem, any of which is unsullied by association with the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime. There's "Born This Way," "I Am What I Am," "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)," or "Supermodel (You Better Work)" — just for starters.

Dozens of new ones come out every summer, and I haven't even gotten around to the Lesbian National Anthems, Bisexual National Anthems, Transgender National Anthems, Queer National Anthems, and all the Plus National Anthems.

If you saw Monday's sneak peek, you will have noticed that I completely changed the last dialogue balloon. Originally, I had Trump "weaving" to the topic of his pens, the subject of a five-minute monologue during a recent televised cabinet meeting.

After I had nearly finished inking the cartoon, it occurred to me that it would be better to have him show off his ability to identify the five Village People. Just in case you thought he knew their actual names.

Inking on top of white-out doesn't work very well, so I wrote the substitute dialogue on a sheet of bristol board that I have used for drawing backgrounds for repetition in multi-panel cartoons. What I failed to consider was that the sheet of bristol board was from a bundle susceptible to bleeding. Instead of staying where I draw it, ink spreads out along the fibers of the paper. 

Not far, but not neat.

That's fine for backgrounds, which aren't meant to be in focus anyway. Lettering has to be neater, though, so I ended up spending a considerable amount of time cleaning up that lettering in PhotoShop.

So if someday you notice that I've switched over to using Comic Sans, cut me some slack. I'm not planning to do it, but lettering is probably the least favorite part of any cartoonist's job.

Q Toon: 107 Days

Former Vice President Kamala Harris published a memoir of her thwarted dash for the Oval Office last week, and it caused quite the hubbub in Washington (until our Felon In Chief and his Martini Martinet bombed in front of a command audience of every general, admiral, and space marshall  in the U.S. military).

No doubt, books like 107 Days will be of great value to future historians trying to figure out how American democracy came to a tragic end. But for now, it joins a select few literary tomes by presidential runners-up — Hilary Clinton's What Happened and Richard Nixon's Six Crises come to mind — laboring to deflect the blame for coming up short in the Electoral College.

In so doing, Harris steps on a few toes.

Would we be better off had President Biden recognized his declining faculties? Well, duh. Nearly everybody in the Democratic Party wishes that Dean Phillips and Jason Palmer weren't the only ones willing to step up and advocate for a little age discrimination.

Would it have helped if Tim Walz had gone more forcefully for JD Vance's jugular in their televised debate? Well, maybe. But if you pick the Governor of Minnesota as your running mate, don't be surprised if you get a heap o' Minnesota Nice.

Harris explains that she passed over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro because he was too interested in the top job someday. Which is a hoot, because Harris herself was a rival to Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2020. Besides, I don't know where she could possibly have found a Democrat qualified to be Vice President with no interest in redecorating the Oval Office.

Her reasoning against naming Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg as her running mate was that while she likes him personally and politically, she didn't think U.S. voters were ready to elect the ticket of a Black-Asian woman with a Jewish husband and a gay man with a husband of his own.

Buttigieg has responded that he was surprised by Harris's reasoning, and believes in "giving Americans more credit" in accepting the possibility of having a First and Second Gentleman at the same time. Harris might have had a point, however; the Trump campaign was able to successfully attack Harris as being "for they/them" even without Buttigieg on the ticket.

107 Days also includes swipes at Democrats Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, J.B. Pritzger, and Mark Kelly. Since just about every Democrat I've named in these paragraphs is considering a run for the presidency in 2028 (maybe not Joe Biden — I sure hope not), I'm pretty sure that Kamala Harris is not on their short lists for their own running mate.

Not that she'd be interested in the vice presidency.

Thomas Marshall, John Nance Garner, and Selina Meyer could tell you why.

Q Toon: Catching Up

It is finally time to extricate Leo the Liberal from Trumplinka Concentration Camp and extrajudicial expulsion to Shitholistan, so I've decided that his partner, MAGA Max, finally checked his phone messages and discovered that Leo was waiting for him at the Ottawa airport.

How they will explain returning to the United States without any luggage I leave to your own imagination.

Having recently traveled by car through southern Ontario, I can report that passing into Canada at Niagara Falls was a breeze, whereas coming back into the U.S. at Port Huron entailed a twenty-minute traffic jam at customs. The questioning at either border was friendly and non-problematic; we did see one car directed aside for further examination, but of course, we have no idea why.

But while a real human being who was returned from unjust banishment to a Salvadorian concentration camp is now being threatened with expulsion to Uganda, I'm going to let Leo fall between the cracks of Trump's lawless deportation purges. Probably.

The stumbling block I had to surmount for this cartoon (besides the Canadian flight attendants union strike) was Max's dialogue in the second and third panels. It doesn't quite sound like something a MAGAzoid would say.

But for the past several months, Trumpian fascism has affected Max directly. Now that it no longer does, Max, like the rest of the MAGA flock who used to see threats to democracy and the Constitution everywhere, will go back to blind Trump l'oeilty.

In 2020, Trump's blustering, blundering response to the COVID-19 pandemic was something that affected all of us directly, and helped convince a majority of the U.S. electorate that he had to go. 

Four years later, few of us were still directly affected by COVID-19; the pandemic seemed manageable. So a majority of the U.S. electorate decided, hey, what the heck, better to elect a manifestly corrupt, lying, self-absorbed, dim-witted, venal, seditious convicted felon who nearly got us all killed, than that Black woman.