Q Toon: Exit Stage Right

Far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos found himself the latest victim of the Leopards Eating Faces Party last month.

ICE arrested British-born Yiannopoulos at Louis Armstrong International Airport on Friday for overstayng his visa. Fellow fascist Laura Loomer is claiming credit for ratting Yiannopoulos out to the Feds; he was arriving in New Orleans for a concert by Kanye "Ye" West, with whom Yiannopoulos has been associated in recent years.

Identifying as gay in the '00's and ’10's, Yiannopoulos made a career out of being an offensive internet troll, insulting women and Muslims, and basically anyone to the left of Emperor Palpatine. As a columnist for Andrew Breitbart's website from 2014 to 2017, Yiannopoulos had been an early and vocal advocate for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, especially his anti-immigration plans. 

In February of 2017, he was forced out from Breitbart, cancelled at CPAC, and lost a book contract, after audio surfaced of him defending some sex between teens and adults as “perfectly consensual” and calling some teen-adult sexual interactions “coming-of-age relationships." Exactly the sort of "groomer" stuff conservatives have long used to vilify LGBTQ+ people.

Since then, he has decided that he is no longer gay, telling a Catholic anti-abortion website that he was "living as brothers" with his then husband. (To nobody's surprise, that marriage has not lasted.) In 2022, he signed up to be an intern for then Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene; he also got in on the ground floor of Kanye West/Yeezy/Ye's 2024 abortive presidential campaign.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Yiannopoulos entered the U.S. legally in 2019 on a tourist visa, which he overstayed. A final order of removal was issued for him after he missed an immigration hearing in July. 

Yiannopoulos last summer tweeted of masturbating to videos of ICE raids, so it is impossible to muster any vestige of sympathy for the guy.

Besides, England agreed to take him back. It's not like ICE dumped him in South Shitholestan somewhere.

Deciding how to draw Mr. Yiannopoulos wasn't easy, by the way. The guy has changed his hairstyle more often than Cher, and has packed on the pounds and shed them back off. In most photos, he's wearing glasses or shades, which didn't seem appropriate for the setting of the cartoon. I opted for his signature 2017 look, but in what is either his passport or current mug shot, he appears to have quit bleaching or dying his hair, and sports a modest mustache with a modicum of jaw-line whiskers.

Has to be a mug shot. You have to can't have stuff in the background of a passport photo.

Q Toon: Besmirching Her Good Name

Watching Homeland Security Secretary Cosplay Kristi Noem's press announcement defending her ICE agent killing a woman in Minneapolis as she attempted to drive away from him — and her and Border Czar Tom Homan's appearances on the Sunday morning news programs — I couldn't get over the cognitive dissonance between their talking point that people need to cool their "overheated rhetoric," and all the overheated rhetoric making up the rest of their talking points.

We've all seen the videos of what really happened, but Noem, Homan, and the rest of the Lawless Trump Regime continue to push a fantasy narrative in which the shooting victim, Renee Macklin Good, was a radical left-wing domestic terrorist who charged her minivan directly at ICE agent Jonathan Ross with intent to kill.

Vice President J.D. Vance has argued that Ross shot Good because he had been struck once before by a vehicle driven by a suspect. But that only demonstrates that Ross uses the foolhardy but common border patrol tactic of getting in front of a moving vehicle in order to justify shooting at its driver.

You may wonder why I have drawn for the LGBTQ+ press a cartoon about this story, or why I inserted "with her lesbian co-conspirator" in the first panel.

Initial reporting stated that the youngest of Renee Macklin Good's children, a six-year-old boy, has been left without parents (his father having died in 2023). Most media and other editorial cartoonists have accepted that as fact, but Advocate and other LGBTQ+ publications, followed by local newsmedia and NPR, have reported that the woman with Renee Good when she was shot was her wife, Becca Good.

I certainly feel terrible for the boy, but at least he still has a step-mother. I hope that she and the boy's grandparents (who, I gather, are not Minnesotans) can remain on amicable terms while working out custody and visitation rights, so as not to make his tragedy even worse than it already is.

Out-of-state politicians and the mainstream media had been glossing over Renee and Becca's relationship, even though Becca was right there when Ross murdered her wife. Trump called Becca Good her wife’s “friend"; even John Stewart called Renee “a single woman” on Monday night’s Daily Show.

On the other hand, the Lawless Trump Regime's ironically-called Department of Justice has reportedly launched a criminal investigation of Renee Good's widow, which has prompted six federal prosecutors in Minnesota to resign in protest. (They include the lead prosecutor in that Minnesota day care fraud case Republicans would much rather talk about.)

Matt Sepic, Minnesota Public Radio: "In a statement, Assistant Attorney General Todd Blanche says, quote, 'There is currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation.' The DOJ says ICE has its own internal investigation underway that runs parallel to, quote, 'any FBI investigation.' But the same source we mentioned earlier, who's not authorized to speak on the record, tells me that this is untrue and that there is no internal ICE investigation of the shooting."

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey posted on social media that, "The people pushing to prosecute Renee's widow are monsters"; Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) added, "The family and loved ones of Renee Good deserve justice, not political attacks."

Sadly, justice is not a priority of the Lawless Trump Regime, and political attacks are.

The Year I Almost Broke Up Max and Leo

This week's Graphical History Tour looks back on the year 2025. You may have heard of it.

I was going to post enough of my cartoons to give a more-or-less thorough overview of the year; but, gosh, there was a lot of news these past twelve months ! Most of it bad. You know something? It's just too damn soon to relive the whole damned year.

Instead, I'm pulling together the story line that developed after I drew characters Max and Leo getting swept up into the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Administration's ethnic cleansing spree.

February

MAGA Max and Liberal Leo first appeared in 2024 as my way of commenting on the widening political divide in the U.S.: a same-sex couple with widely divergent opinions on issues not exclusively of LGBTQ+ concern.

I initially thought I could wrap this story line up after a few episodes, but I had no idea that the reality was going to be much worse than anything I had in mind.

March

Max's first step to try finding out what the thugs and goons at ICE had done with Leo was to contact the deep state a government agency, only to find that Elon Musk's Dogeketeers were busy destroying government's ability to function. I purposely left vague what government department this fellow worked in, save that it was apparently not Homeland Security.

April

I never specified where the prison holding Leo was; I called it Trumplinka in my blog, but not in the cartoons. Early reports were that the U.S. was flying detainees to remote locations in Columbia and releasing them with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Originally, I thought Leo would end up being dumped with other prisoners somewhere in South America, then contacting Max to come bring him his passport.

Then we learned that the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime was sending its hapless victims to CECOT, a Dante-esque concentration camp in El Salvador, without even those clothes. 

April

I had no plan for breaking Leo out of that hell, so I had to think of something else.

Having him deported to the Heard and McDonald Islands wasn't going to work out, either.

I could have involved Leo with either of two LGBTQ whose kidnapping by ICE made news in 2025 (statistically, there must be others), but the Trumpsters have consistently lied or feigned ignorance of their status. One was Georgia barber Rodney Taylor, a double amputee seized because of a past juvenile offense for which he had been pardoned. Liberia-born Taylor was brought to the U.S. by his mother for medical treatment; his pending application for U.S. residence has been put on hold while he remains incarcerated.

May

The other was Angelo Hernandez, a gay Venezuelan stylist wrongly accused of gang affiliation due to tattoos and deported to CECOT.

Tattoos were the supposedly incriminating evidence against another man the Trumpsters sent to CECOT, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. While the State Department tried to prevent Democratic members of Congress from meeting with Abrego Garcia, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Cruella deNoem got herself a photo op with overcrowded CECOT prisoners behind bars as her backdrop, and the White House resorted to PhotoShopping tattoos onto Abrego Garcia's hands.

July

By summer, the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime was flying deportees off to foreign countries, to which the deportees seldom had any ties, including Guatemala, Honduras, Uganda, Belize, and Paraguay — with little or no notice, in order to stymie any legal effort to get them their day in court. So I decided that I had better get Leo out of the Trumpsters' clutches one way or another. 

August

You don't hear much about last summer's catch phrase, "Trump Always Chickens Out" (TACO) any more. He's been doubling down on riveting his name onto everything from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to his latest fantasy of gold-plated coal-powered Trump Classy  battleships.

July

In a movie, TV series, or adventure comic strip, there would have been exciting scenes of the American plane attempting to escape the crossfire only to crash in a huge explosion. The deportees would have wrested the keys to their shackles from that stranded ICE agent. Then, during a ceasefire negotiated by the Canadians and the E.U. long enough to evacuate their embassy personnel — oh, I'll let Leo pick up the story from there:

August

I draw a weekly cartoon, however, which runs in some newspapers and magazines that publish biweekly or monthly. And some of them may have elected to run cartoons I had drawn on other topics during the seven months when this story line dragged on.

In any case, my Better Half and I were taking a road trip to an out-of-town wedding in August, meaning that I'd be away from my drawing board for a while. There was no better reason to wrap the story up in a cartoon I could draw ahead of time — provided Trump didn't declare war on Canada in the meantime. (Especially since our return trip took us through southern Ontario.)

August

So now I have to figure out where Max and Leo go from here.

Assuming Max continues his loyalty to the Trumpreich, how does Leo not end every argument with "Don't you remember, your fascist Trump bastards arrested me without charge, held me in prison for months without due process, and sent me to some third world hellhole in the middle of a civil war?"

Maybe, to borrow a phrase, the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But if this couple can stick it out together in spite of everything around them, maybe there is still hope for the rest of us.

Q Toon; A War of Words

One would think that having his partner caught up for months in the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime's lawless concentration camp program would have soured MAGA Max's enthusiasm for anything associated with the Felon-In-Chief.

But then how would I be able to address the very destruction of the Republic in an editorial cartoon feature that is supposed to be about LGBTQ+ issues?

I created these two as a device to discuss the sharp political divisions in this country, which the present regime has worked diligently to widen.

Strike that. What the present administration is working overtime to achieve is not to widen political divisions, but to crush dissent. Pardoning the January 6 rioters who sought to overthrow the duly elected government in Trump's name, purging everyone in the Justice Department and law enforcement who worked to bring them to justice; strong-arming any media into obsequious servility that might challenge their distortion of the truth; hauling those who have ever stood up to him into court on trumped up charges; the mawkish spectacle of cabinet officials assembled before cameras for the express purpose of heaping flattery upon the boss — the Trump regime models itself not on our Founding Fathers, but on the worst tyrants history has to offer.

One need look no further than that mandatory assembly of all the nation's admirals and generals in one auditorium to be harangued by Trump and his martini martinet at the Department Formerly Known As Defense. Much attention has been paid to the military brass refusing to whoop and holler the way ensigns and privates will at these events, the applause lines that fell flat, and the meandering blather of a president who never has an unspoken notion.

But what was chillingly important about Trump and Pete Hegseth's diatribe duet was their central message: this regime is declaring open war on anyone, anywhere, who stand in their way.

Hegseth declared that this regime will "untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”

Trump made it clear that those "enemies" include all American citizens with the temerity to dissent from his rule: "We have war zones on both coasts — blue areas. The real enemy is more dangerous than China, Russia… [it is] the enemy from within.”

"These people don’t have uniforms," Trump bellowed. "At least when they’re wearing a uniform, you can take them out... We can’t let these people live.”

Calling this fascism is not exaggeration, hyperbole, fear-mongering, or stoking division. And it's definitely not fake news.

It's recognizing a clear and present danger.

Like shouting "fire" in a burning theater.

Q Toon: The Great Escape

The saga continues...

I can't vouch that the chain of events in today's cartoon are entirely plausible; I just want to bring the story of Leo Jefferson's captivity to a close.

Had I been drawing this for a daily cartoon strip, I could have embellished the story with all sorts of details. It's possible Leo made it onto the Canadian evacuation flight because he bears some resemblance to an embassy staffer's husband. I could have had some Afghanis on their way back to face the Taliban deciding to stay in the war-torn shithole country rather than risk ending up en route to Kandahar again.

Details such as what happened to the shackles and handcuffs the concentration camp prisoners were wearing when they got on that plane would have had to be explained. 

I suppose that the ICE gestapo with the keys might have been fatally caught in the crossfire at Shithole International Airfield, but that ought to have sparked an international crisis if it were to happen in the real world. It might even have at least driven the Jeffrey Epstein story to a back burner for a day or two.

Let's just imagine that the keys fell out of his pocket, then.

Q Toon: Fire and ICE

I really do have to wrap up this story arc, and soon. Berkeley Breathed is taking over the job of sentencing a comic character to languish in a Trumpster gulag, and I would rather not risk my Leo and his Opus the Penguin reaching for the same jokes.

Or running into each other.

I’m sure that Breathed will handle the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime’s suspension of human rights under the U.S. Constitution deftly and with insight. After all, the 1987 Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial cartooning could have centered his concentration camp story on Bill the Cat, which would just be damned silly.

For the benefit of any readers who have entered the theatre late, Leo is the liberal half of a gay Odd Couple; his partner, Max, has fallen under MAGA’s sway. In February, Leo was swept up in an ICE Gestapo raid and disappeared to Trumplinka Prison. A guard there misinterpreted a tattoo on Leo’s buttocks as an MS-13 insignia, which has now landed him and some fellow detainees on a third world airport tarmac.

Where a civil war is underway. 

I am confident that neither Emperor Trump nor Cruella de Noem nor Oberbefehlshaber Tom Homan nor what is left of the State Department would know nor care what is going on in this unnamed country. I imagine that its head of state agreed to accept custody of American non-persons in exchange for buying up our overstock of Trump Sneakers.

While we wait for the next exciting installment of this gripping saga, let us hope that the government and rebel soldiers fighting over control of the airfield have all learned their marksmanship from the Imperial Storm Troopers of Star Wars Inc., and that Leo is presently rescued and returned to his Max, to argue happily ever after about tariffs, climate change, and Konservative Kancel Kultur.

Q Toon: Whatever Happened?

Since Max has asked:

A weekly editorial cartoon might not have been the best medium for an extended story arc. I have publications running my cartoons that only publish biweekly or monthly, for one thing. There are other news events worthy of comment a lot of the time. And installments like today’s lack a specifically LGBTQ+ element.

Last February, I drew a cartoon in which Max, the MAGA half of the Max and Leo household, discovered that Leo had been swept up in an ICE abduction action while volunteering at a food pantry. I anticipated that this Completely Corrupt Trump Regime's modus operandi would be similar to that of its previous iteration: incarcerate people in cells and cages, and dump them back in their nations of origin.

Instead, the Trump Troopers are now sentencing its captives without due process or fair trial to life imprisonment in squalid, Kafkaesque concentration camps in third world dictatorships, notably El Salvador, South Sudan, and Florida. 

You may have thought that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution protect persons against unreasonable search and seizure and deprivation of liberty without due process, and guarantee trial by an impartial jury. Our professed "strict constructionists" on the republic's highest court, however, have discovered a much looser interpretation of the nation's founding document.

Meanwhile, it has been three months since an ICE guard at the concentration camp where Leo has been held took note of the tattoo of Max’s initials on Leo's butt and misread it as "MS13." 

Given our polICE state enforcers’ policy of Deport ’Em All, Let History Sort ’Em Out, it doesn't seem reasonable to imagine that someone at Stalag Trumpteen would suddenly realize that Leo was swept up by mistake in that ethnic cleansing sweep back in February and send him home now.

Nor has the Trump regime chickened out on their goal of an Aryan Nation. Rather, when it comes to reining in executive branch overreach, it is the current Supreme Court that Always Chickens Out.

Q Toon: Where the Decisions Are Made

The story so far: I introduced the characters Leo and Max to stand in for the sharp political division in this country. Leo is the liberal: woke, environmentally conscious, and fully vaccinated. Max, on the other hand, is full-on MAGA and even has his very own presidential pardon for taking part in the January 6 Trumpster insurrection at the Capitol.

In February, I decided that Leo got himself swept up in an ICE raid while volunteering at a food bank. At the time, it seemed likely that he would end up stranded on a tarmac in some random Latin American country among a plane load of braceros, roofers, hotel maids, short order cooks, guitarrónistas, and Operation Enduring Freedom veterans.

The Trump regime’s depths of depravity, however, are more abysmal than anything I imagined in February. Venezuelan immigrants and refugees have been sentenced with no due process to die in a sweltering concentration camp in El Salvador. 

Afghani women and men who assisted our soldiers in their country before Trump pulled the rug out from under our allies there are being sent back for certain persecution and probable stoning to death by the Taliban.

Misappropriated FEMA funds have been purloined for the hasty construction of Florida’s flood-prone-and-that's-hardly-the-worst-of-it Alligator Gulag. 

The Trump team is now shanghaiing people to South Sudan, a country perpetually in the midst of civil war.

All this ethnic cleansing is the wet dream come true of white supremacist ghoul Stephen Miller, aided and abetted by Trump's cabinet of martinets, lickspittles, and wackadoodles, a Congress dominated by knuckle-dragging yahoos, and a right-wing Supreme Court that has ruled that under any Republican President, civil rights aren't worth the paper the Constitution is written on.

When last we saw Leo in Trumplinka Prison, a faceless ICE gestapo trooper was grilling him about a tattoo of Max's initials, which they misread as the Salvadorian street gang "MS13." So WTF am I to do with Leo now? 

Maybe he'll be freed by an AI Marco Rubio imposter. Unless that comes too close making light of our descent into lawless dictatorship.

But how else can I get back to having Leo and Max argue about Big Bonkerful Abomnibus Bills, Zohran Mamdani, and Eau de Trump No. 5™?

Q Toon: Tattoo Tale

We return to the thrilling saga of Liberal Leo and MAGA Max this week. As you will no doubt recall, Leo got swept up in an Ignoring Constitution Extralegally raid while volunteering at a local food pantry back in February and Max's efforts to find out where he is incarcerated have so far been thwarted.

I've finally had to give Leo a last name, since the faceless ICE agent in the cartoon wouldn't be friends on a first-name basis. I considered giving Leo a last name like Blue (or Teal, as in Stop the Teal), but decided to name him after the author of American democracy (not to mention Sally Hemming's kids).. Max now has initials; I suppose it might be fair to give him the last name of a conservative philosopher such as Burke, now that it has to start with B.

We'll see.

I'm going to have to come up with some reason why Leo does not end up getting on a plane to El Salvador's notorious CECOT concentration camp, insofar as ending up there is supposedly being sentenced to slave labor and death. Rather than head toward a tragic end to this tale, I would rather get Leo home at some point to argue with Max about other policies of the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime.

I did have a plan when I started this story line, but various real-world news events along the way keep making the original denouement problematic.

So I can't rule out having Max wake up to see Leo stepping out of the shower because it was all a dream.