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.

BECY 2014

Pelican Books' Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year for 2014 is out, and I'm pleased to say that I have four cartoons in this year's edition.

The 2014 edition skews conservative when it comes to the Obama administration. It is tempting to attribute that to its editor, Dean Turnbloom, a naval civilian who was, briefly, a dogmatic conservative cartoonist. (To the best of my knowledge, at least, he no longer draws editorial cartoons.) A conservative bias on Turnbloom's part might explain why there is only one cartoon in the book by brilliant liberal cartoonist Pat Bagley.

But 2013 was, on balance, not a good year for President Obama, so there are plenty of cartoons in this book attacking him not only from the right but also from the left. Yet for all the cartoons lambasting Obama for the clumsy launch of Obamacare, drone strikes, and supposed scandals over the IRS and Benghazi, there are no cartoons lampooning Chris Christie's Bridgegate, Senate Republicans' abuse of the filibuster, or the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the ensuing Republican push to disenfranchise voters. *

Self-selection could also be a factor in a conservative bias in this year's BECY. The cartoonists themselves pick some of their own cartoons to submit to the book's editors (as contrasted with the Best Political Cartoons of the Year, published from 2005 to 2010, for which editors Daryl Cagle and Brian Fairrington determined which topics would be in the book and selected cartoons from Cagle's stable of cartoonists to illustrate those topics).

To demonstrate how this self-selection process plays out, here are the topics of the five cartoons in Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year 2014 by rigid conservative cartoonist Michael Ramirez:

• Mocking Obama's claims that he had no prior knowledge of "Fast and Furious," leaks of national intelligence secrets, a Benghazi cover-up, IRS targeting conservative groups, or Justice Department phone taps of Associated Press reporters.
• Blasting Obama as a fake Superman amid a rubble of debt, incompetence, scandals, lies, foreign policy, spending, IRS, jobs, and economy.
• Depicting the problems of the Obamacare website as merely the tip of the iceberg.
• Showing Obama blithely riding an Iranian nuke a la Slim Pickens as it falls toward the U.S. Capitol.
• An anti-abortion cartoon.

Compare that with the cartoons by persistently liberal cartoonist Joel Pett:

• Decrying an ineffective social safety net.
• Alleging that the Republican elephant would deny Pope Francis a green card over his statements on social issues.
• Lamenting the illegal ivory trade.
• Apologizing to Martin Luther King Jr.'s statue for the plight of African-Americans 50 years after his "I Have a Dream" speech.
• There are only four Pett cartoons in the book. Son of a gun. I thought there were five.

Yes, there are cartoons criticizing Congress, albeit mostly from an "A pox on both your parties" standpoint. And, yes, there are cartoons criticizing the Tea Party, but mostly in a generic sense; there are but two cartoons critical of Senator Ted Cruz and only one cartoon critical of Michele Bachmann. There is no criticism of any Republican that quite equals the harshness of Mike Lester's cartoon of President Obama feeding a huge, vicious IRS attack dog from a bag of "Pure Tyranny."

The BECY series has always been edited by a conservative, and for the most part, it showed. From its initial 1972 edition until his death, it was compiled by Birmingham (Alabama) News cartoonist Charles Brooks. Last year's edition was edited by Steve Kelley, late of the New Orleans Times Picayune, earning him praise for a well-balanced tome. I've been trying to find R.C. Harvey's review on line, but apparently it's behind a subscription wall. (It should be at the February 13, 2013 post's link down this page.) I'd like to quote from the review anyway:

"To the extent that Kelley's selection reflects a bias, it is probably a bias in favor of cartoons that attack, which editorial cartoons are better at than they are at supporting a particular point of view. Based on the content of this book, I find it impossible to determine which side of the political aisle Kelley favors, which is undeniably a desirable outcome."

I look forward to Harvey's review of the Mr. Turnbloom's work.
* Rereading the book, I see that there are one cartoon about the Supreme Court decision and one cartoon about the new voter disenfranchisement law in Texas.

This week's cartoon

With apologies to Billy Mays, David Carradine, and whatever celebrity should happen to pass away this afternoon:

One of the poorly kept secrets of editorial cartooning is that eulogy cartoons are some of the most popular things we draw, but most cartoonists despise them. In our heart of hearts, of course, we cartoonists all hope to draw the cartoon that outlasts us, like Bill Mauldin's famous cartoon of the Lincoln Memorial weeping after the assassination of John Kennedy.

But since Bill Mauldin already used that idea, cartoons of (fill in the blank) crying all seem derivative. Countless cartoonists drew the Statue of Liberty crying on 9/11. Off the top of my head, I remember seeing cartoons of Alice Kramden crying when Jackie Gleason died, the Virginia Tech mascot crying after the shootings on that campus, the NBC peacock crying after Johnny Carson died, and who could forget the weeping guitars when George Harrison passed away?

The other cliche is the cartoon showing the deceased person's arrival at the pearly gates, where St. Peter says something moderately clever. I've drawn one or two of those myself. Alternatively, cartoonists take the liberty of welcoming a disliked deceased person to hell, where, if he or she isn't greeted by the devil himself, he/she is in the company of Hitler or Stalin. (I can't think of any actual Welcome To Hell cartoon about a woman, but I'm sure Mike Lester has one all ready for Hillary Clinton someday.)

Of my own eulogy cartoons, my favorite was for Quentin Crisp. I didn't think he'd have appreciated being in a eulogy cartoon, so that's what I drew.