Toon: As If There Had Been Any Doubt

The Corrupt Trump Administration hit the fan yesterday.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced his resignation. Mikes Pence and Pompeo scuttled off to Turkey to ratify Erdoǧan's ethnic cleansing of Kurdish Syria. Trump dealt himself a G-7 summit at his own $800-a-day Florida golf resort. And Acting White House Chief of Staff Slash Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney stood before the Washington press corps and admitted that the administration had demanded that the Ukrainian government dish up some dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden before it would release aid authorized by Congress.

"We do that all the time in foreign policy.... I have news for everybody. Get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy.... That is going to happen. Elections have consequences. Foreign policy is going to change from the Obama administration to the Trump administration."

In arguing that there was no difference between Obama administration concern that aid to Ukraine not fatten the pocketbooks of Ukrainian officials and letting the Trump reelection campaign's opposition research squad run foreign policy, Mulvaney was admitting the quid pro quo that the Corrupt Trump Administration had up to then denied.

AWHCoSSOoM&BD Mulvaney has since been desperate to let us know that he didn't mean what he said, which hardly comes as a surprise. It's very difficult for the apparatchiks to keep their lies straight when the guy at the top can't get his lies straight, either.

Q Toon: No More Mr. Nice Guy

Donald Trump — or whoever took charge of his Twitter account Friday afternoon — posted the first acknowledgement of LGBTQ Pride Month of his presidency last week.

Was that really Donald Trump, or did Ric Grenell hack the presidential Twitter account? There are no misspelled words, sentence fragments, or gratuitous digs at President Obama. And there are only two words that were capitalized unnecessarily.

Whoever it was, I have to wonder if he or she knows what the "T" stands for. Or that LGBT does not stand for "Lesbians & Gays Backing Trump."

The "T" stands for Transgender, a group that has endured sustained hostility from the Corrupt Trump Administration. I've drawn before about their determination to remove protections for transgender prisoners and to boot transgender soldiers out of the military; now they have moved to block transgender civilians from medical care under the Affordable Care Act.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Friday it plans to remove gender identity from the class of people protected from discrimination in health care.
The agency said it is revising a section of Obamacare that provides protection against discrimination in health care on the basis of race, color, national origin, disability and age. A rule published under the Obama administration in 2016 confirmed that transgender people were protected under the law’s provisions that prohibit discrimination from providers and insurers.

Earlier in the week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development put forth a ruling allowing homeless shelters to discriminate against transgender persons.

Nearly one-third of transgender Americans who responded to a 2015 survey have experienced homelessness in their lifetime. Requiring transgender people to stay in shelters that don't match their gender identity can put them at further risk of violence and harassment, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. 

Last year, I was willing to consider the possibility that the anti-transgender policies of the Corrupt Trump Administration were due to a select cabal of underlings pushing an agenda of Special Rights for Evangelicals, but I have become increasingly convinced that there's a porn star out there somewhere whom Trump found to be somewhat other than advertised. And who didn't settle for a measly $130 grand to keep quiet.

Trump has, so far, pushed one anti-transgender policy after another upon the Departments of Defense, Health & Human Services, Housing & Urban Development. Labor, Homeland Security and the Justice Department can't be far behind.

Before he gets driven from office, look for similar edicts protecting anti-transgender discrimination by energy companies, national parks, and the IRS.

Q Toon: Resolutely Fabulist

From the outside, it looks like January has been a bad month for Mercurial American President Donald Joffrey Trump. Nancy Pelosi called his bluff on shutting down the government over Trump's Ugly Border Wall, and Trump punted.

Robert Mueller is coming down hard on Trump's lawyers, co-conspirators and trusted confidantes, and they're all singing like canaries, hitting the talk-show circuit with their tell-all books, or, in the case of Rudy Giuliani, establishing their insanity defense.

Testifying before Congress, his own highest ranking intelligence advisers publicly disagreed with him on the level of threats posed by ISIS, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Latin America, NATO and Jared Kushner.

And he had nothing to serve the collegiate champion Clemson Tigers but junk food from the drive-thru window.

But lest you forget, Trump gets to shut the government down again on February 15, and Nancy Pelosi won't be able to take away his State of the Union privileges then!

And you know what? He can still rely on the loyalty of Roger Stone. Just look at the guy. You can always trust a fella who dresses like a Batman villain and has a tattoo on his back of the only President ever to resign in disgrace. He certainly seems like a stable genius, just like Trump himself.

Speaking of which, Trump knows so much more about foreign affairs than all those people who actually bothered to do any research on the subject. Books? Experience? A lifelong career in the CIA? Who needs it? Trump is the foremost expert on everything anyone ever needs to know about anything from Nambian health care to Swedish terrorism! Brains? He don't need no stinking brains! Trump has his gut!

Furthermore, he's been feeding that gut nothing but KFC nuggets, McDonalds Big Macs, and Taco Bell salad bowls all his life. That gut got him elected President of the United States in spite of the worst second-place finish of any candidate since John Quincy Adams. So there!

Besides, the Supreme Court said he could go ahead and kick all the transgender service members out of the military, at least while their appeals make their way on up to the Supreme Court. Gee, I wonder what the GOP majority on the Supreme Court will decide when they're asked to rule a second time?

Clarence Thomas's wife met with Major Bonespurs the other day. Perhaps she knows.

Resign and Replace

Six members of the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) resigned en bloc on June 16 to protest the Trump administration's disregard of their concerns. They announced their resignation in an open letter in Newsweek magazine. (A seventh PACHA member, Dr. Jeffrey Akman, has also resigned, although without public explanation.)

As one of the six, Dr. Michelle Ogle explained to Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio:

OGLE: Since the inauguration, the first thing that happened that was a clue — the Office of National AIDS Policy website was removed. And to our knowledge at this point, that website has not been restored. Also, we've made attempts to communicate with this administration. We sent a letter to Secretary Price and to Mr. Trump to basically let them know what the advisory council does, our goals, how we want to — you know, hope to work with them. And we've just gotten nothing but a very lackluster response from the administration.
INSKEEP: OK. Let's make sure we're clear here. Is it that he doesn't care about the issue or just that he's not listening to your advice?
OGLE: No, he doesn't care about the issue. The budget proposal that he sent forward shows that he doesn't care about the issue. Also, the American Health Care Act, the bill that he's put forward that they celebrated in the Rose Garden with, shows that he doesn't care.

The commission was formed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and renewed by George W. Bush and HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson in July of 2001.  Some 17 or 18 members of the commission remain, and, given the corrupt Trump administration's disinterest, one wonders who, if anyone, will fill the empty chairs now.

Trump couldn't even be bothered to tweet out a 140-characters-or-less congratulatory message for LGBTQ pride month, for crying out loud. He left that apparently onerous duty to daughter Ivanka, who is perhaps the closest thing to an LGBTQ ally in Daddy's administration as there is ever likely to be.

Okay, so it wasn't Jared and Ivanka's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It was Eric and Lara Trump's wedding planner whom Daddy hired to head Region II of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

She’s arranged tournaments at Trump golf courses, served as the liaison to the Trump family during his presidential campaign, and even arranged Eric Trump’s wedding.

Now President Trump has appointed longtime loyalist Lynne Patton — who has zero housing experience and claims a law degree the school [Quinnipiac University School of Law] says she never earned — to run the office that oversees federal housing programs in New York.

The sum total of housing or urban development experience in Ms. Patton's résumé is found in her five — count 'em on one hand: five — months as HUD's Director of Public Engagement from January to June, 2017.

But she's black, just like HUD Secretary Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who by some amazing coincidence also has zero experience in housing or urban development. I don't know if that means that Trump doesn't have any white friends willing to work in the department, or if he thinks that Urban=Black and Those People are all interchangeable anyway.

So that's how I feel about the Trumps. They're all pretty interchangeable.

But I probably need to figure out how I want to draw Eric, and, for that matter, Donald Jr.  As long as the U.S. of A. is a wholly owned subsidiary branch of Trump Enterprises Inc., it makes more sense to be familiar with the people who are really in charge — as opposed to those titular heads of cabinet departments.

Q Toon: Go Away, Kid, You Bother Me

I shouldn't admit this, but the one thing that doesn't work in this cartoon is its very premise.

Not the part about Ivanka's tweets. That much was real.

But if there's one thing you and I know about Mr. Donald Joffrey Trump, it is that he is not really, really busy making policy decisions with his staff this month. He's watching TV today, phone in hand, ready to cast self-serving — check that, make that deranged — tweets about Jim Comey's Senate testimony.

He's also not dedicated to any philosophy, antigay or otherwise, other than continuing the con job that has so improbably propelled him from real estate swindler to Trump University scammer to children's charity fraudster to President of the United States. The men on the other side of the table in this cartoon may be dedicated to slashing the budget for HIV/AIDS, blessing discrimination against same-sex couples, and keeping transgender persons out of public lavatories, but Trump is interested only in keeping the suckers who have thus far fallen for his con job from turning against him.

On top of all that, doesn't Jared have something he's supposed to be doing, like bringing peace to the Middle East, running the Office of American Innovation, setting up super-secret back channels to the FSB, diverting the doomsday asteroid, or something?

I've Got a Little List

Mick Mulvaney, Office of Management and Budget

As someday it may happen that a victim must be found,
    I’ve got a little list – I’ve got a little list
Of societal expenses who might well be underground,
    And who never would be missed – who never would be missed!
There's the students who eat breakfast at their schoolhouse every day —
    And the oldsters who get meals on wheels — what bloody use are they?
All writers and musicians and artists of all kinds —
    All teachers dedicated to expanding little minds —
The veteran, the ranger and the foreign analyst —
    They'd none of 'em be missed — they'd none of 'em be missed!

You may put 'em on the list — you may put 'em on the list;
And they'll none of 'em be missed — they'll none of 'em be missed!