Q Toon: Or a Steal at $2.44 Each

The cartoonist who's all about the LGBTQ+ issues wants to draw about the federal debt this week? What gives?

Well, folks, since Trump's Treasury Secretary is openly gay, I'm taking that as an opening to draw about fiscal policy once in a while. I did try to draw about transportation issues during the previous administration occasionally, although Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was a little more public about his private life than Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is, so some of those cartoons had nothing to do with policy.

When Donald Commodus Trump named Bessent to his cabinet in 2024, the conventional wisdom was that Bessent would be one of the few adults in the room. Unlike the rest of the cabinet of random MAGA hotheads and docile spineless lickspittles, he was supposedly qualified for his post. In my first cartoon about him, my characters Max and Leo predicted that because of this, he'd be gone in ten months.

It turns out that I, Max, Leo, and conventional wisdom were all wrong.

Scott Bessent has gone from being a George Soros and Democrat backer to full-fledged, pass-me-the-Kool-aid, Trump-ass-kissing drone. And if that's not enough metaphorical imagery for you, it looks like he ain't leaving any time soon. There may be time for him to show up in plenty more cartoons.

When  Trump had the East Wing of the White House demolished, Bessent had the windows on that side of the Treasury Department building covered up so that nobody could get a look at, or photo of, the travesty across the street. When Trump wanted Treasury to add his own signature to U.S. currency, Bessent quickly ordered the engravers to get right on it.

When Trump decided he wanted to have his face on a proposed $250 bill, Treasury officials balked because federal law stipulates that "only the portrait of a deceased individual may appear on United States currency and securities." Bessent, however, told Kaitlan Collins, "I don’t think that there’s anything untoward about having the President of the United States on the 250th anniversary bill." 

Apparently, 31 U.S. Code § 5114, on the books since 1866, hasn't stopped Bessent's Treasury Department from minting a bunch of gold-plated one-dollar coins with Donald Still Alive And Bleating Trump glaring out at the suckers willing to shell out $2.44 to own one.

Because what are you going to do with it? Spend it? It is nominally worth only 41% of what you paid for it (or 65% of the $154 you'd splurge on 100 of them). Assuming that it doesn't become a modern day Confederate Dollar on January 21, 2029.

At least the coin has some gold leaf on the outside — perhaps a bit more than you would be able to strain out of a bottle of Goldschläger. That's more than the folks who fell for Trump Bitcoin will have when the con folds up his game and jets back to Mar-a-Lago in his Qatari Trump Force One.

Obsessive minds might have noticed that the number for how many times 1.54 goes into 40 trillion is strangely repetitive. (Had I not rounded the result off to the nearest whole number, those five digits would have continued on forever.) I suppose I could have used the unit price for a single Trump Commemorative Buck, which would have meant the Treasury needing to sell 16,393,442,622,951 of them.

But that sales figure sounds so much more attainable.

Toon: You Can't Miss It

In their continuing mission to feed Donald Commodus Trump's bottomless ego, the bootlicking sycophants of the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime™ announced this week that U.S. passports (required by the SAVE Act if you want to exercise your right to vote) will now be adorned with Dear Leader's scowling face.

This is on top of adding his scraggly signature to paper currency, minting gold coins bearing his likeness, tacking his name above John F. Kennedy's at the Kennedy Center, proposing a fleet of so-called Trump class battleships, and unfurling ginormous banners of his puss (when you're a star they let you do that) outside every government building in D.C.

Not to mention the Arc de Trump and that goddamn Gaudy Ballroom, intended as permanent monuments to the nation's shame for having elected such a preening peacock, not once, but twice.

Even Hitler, Mussolini, and Kim Jong Un never put their faces on German, Italian, or North Korean  passports.

I'm so glad I renewed my passport last year.

Q Toon: Make America Date Again

Turns out gay MAGAs can be incels, too.

Somebody in the Facebook group "Conservative Gay Singles" made a snarky post threatening a class action suit against "the Dems" because hook-ups refuse to sleep with him once they find out his MAGA proclivities. 

The post went viral on Threads (with the original poster's identity redacted), earning howls of derisive chatter from the very sort of people who have been swiping left on the guy's Grindr profile.

Now, I thought Republicans were enthusiastically in favor of discrimination based on deeply held beliefs (especially against gays), which might be the Achilles Heel of that Conservative Gay Single's class action suit. 

Mr. Conservative Gay Single wasn't content to limit his proposed class action suit against non-MAGA gays. He invited the rest of the CGS group to join him in suing family members and former friends who have shunned them over political differences. 

Gee, the poor guys can't get laid, their friends have ghosted them, and their families won't talk to them? What could be the problem?

Oh, yeah, must be the Democrats. I almost forgot.

Good thing those guys are so good at "owning" us libs. Maybe they ought to learn how to be happy with that.

Q Toon: Kennedy-nial of Care

During Donald Joffrey Trump's first term, I drew a cartoon about his transphobic policies that suggested that he was only pursuing them to satisfy his supporters on the religious right. They are hardly a factor in his second term, so I have to conclude that his persecution of the transgender community is central to his psyche.

Somewhere along the line, there's a girl in his past who turned out to have a little something extra downstairs, and the experience haunts him like Freddy Krueger.

Trump has found a kindred spirit in Robert Felcher Kennedy. The erstwhile environmentalist readily forsook advocacy for renewable energy and fuel efficiency in favor of feels-based health care.

Don't like pills and needles? You're in luck. Newly revised Health & Human Services protocols recommend against vaccines in favor of poultices, whale blubber, and burning some parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. 

Suffering from gender dysphoria? You're in luck, too. Kennedy and the Republican establishment have declared that it doesn't exist any more. If you're unhappy looking in the mirror, botox, lip injections, and rhinoplasty are all hunky-dory, but everything below the chin has gotta stay just as God made it.

And they have ways of making you get used to it.

The ban takes the form of two new proposed rules from Medicaid and Medicare. The first prohibits doctors and hospitals from receiving federal Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care provided to transgender patients younger than age 18. Medicaid is the health care program that covers low-income Americans.

The second rule blocks all Medicaid and Medicare funding for any services at hospitals that provide pediatric gender-affirming care. Virtually every hospital in the country takes Medicare, which covers older Americans and the disabled. Because hospitals rely on Medicare, the rule would have a wide-ranging effect.

Supporters and opponents of transgender rights agree that, taken together, the forthcoming hospital rules could make access to pediatric gender-affirming care across the country extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Even non-chemical, non-surgical approaches are verboten. The Trump Food & Drug Administration has sent warning letters to companies that manufacture and sell chest binders, used by transgender men and some nonbinary people to flatten their chests. The FDA charges that the companies failed to register their products as Class I medical devices with the FDA, in violation of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.  “Failure to adequately address this matter may result in regulatory action being initiated by the FDA without further notice. These actions include, but are not limited to, seizure and injunction.”

I don't imagine that the FDA is going to send that same letter to the makers and sellers of girdles and brassieres.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary claimed that the brands were guilty of “illegal marketing of breast binders for children, for the purposes of treating gender dysphoria.”....

Makary did not cite evidence that any of the brands market their binders to children; Them found no such marketing copy supporting Makary’s claim on the brands’ websites. Conservatives have claimed for years that discussions of gender identity alone are harmful to children, and their rhetoric has escalated over time; during the HHS press conference, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz falsely claimed that trans youth regularly receive vaginoplasties and phalloplasties costing up to $150,000; in fact, the vast majority of gender-affirming surgeries performed on minors are breast reduction procedures offered to cisgender boys.

The House has also passed bills this month making it a crime to provide gender-affirming care to transgender minors and prohibiting Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care for youth. Neither bill has much chance of passing the Senate unless tucked into other must-pass legislation ― such as the next temporary government funding bill.

All of which will be worth remembering every time Republicans try to tell you that they are not the party of big, obtrusive, over-regulating government.

P.S.: Merry Christmas, and Happy Miscellaneous Holidays!

Q Toon: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Few of us editorial cartoonists are known for drawing cartoons that second what a politician has said, but given the distressing events of the past week, I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

Former President Joe Biden gave a brief speech, from which today’s cartoon is excerpted, to the annual International LGBTQ+ Leadership Conference last week. The LGBTQ+ Victory Institute, an organization of elected LGBTQ+ officials, had invited Mr. Biden to attend, the first former president to do so, to present him with their Chris Abele Impact Award for his contributions to the LGBTQ+ community.

The Victory Institute emphasized that Biden’s administration set records for LGBTQ+ inclusion. Nearly 15 percent of Biden’s appointees identified as LGBTQ+, far surpassing any prior administration. They include former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Human Rights Campaign Senior Vice President for Campaigns and Communications Jonathan Lovitz, who was a Biden appointee in the Department of Commerce, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Admiral Rachel Levine, and Ambassador Chantale Wong. Beyond representation, the administration reinstated and expanded federal civil rights protections, reversed the ban on transgender military service that Trump has now reinstated, strengthened antidiscrimination rules in employment and health care, and expanded protections for LGBTQ+ youth and families.

In his speech, Mr. Biden noted that as Vice President, he had gotten out in front of the Obama administration in publicly advocating for marriage equality. “I just couldn’t remain silent anymore,” he said. “I expressed my support for gay marriage a little earlier than some folks had been expecting.”

“America is the only country founded on an idea,” he told his audience. “We hold these truths to be self-evident … all are created equal, all deserve to be treated with dignity throughout their lives.” Though the country has not always met that ideal, he said, “we’ve never walked away from it.”

His remarks stand in stark contrast to the wildly offensive, divisive, and disgraceful ravings that are the stock in trade of the current occupant of the Oval Office.

“Folks, Donald Trump and his Republicans are trying to derail and distort our fight for equality. They’re trying to turn it into something scary, something sinister. But folks, it’s not really about anything that’s all that complicated. At its core, it’s about giving every American an opportunity to be treated with the basic decency, dignity and respect they all deserve.”

Biden closed his speech by audience members currently serving in elected office to stand up (that's one way to get oneself a standing ovation). “We just have to get up. Remember who in the hell we are. We’re the United States of America … and there is nothing beyond our capacity when we act together.” 

I'm not quite ready to draw a "Miss Him Yet?" cartoon, but I sure do miss an administration that embodies everything — dammit, anything — Mr. Biden said.

This Week's Sneak Peek

The Trump maladministration won't tell you, but today is World AIDS Day.

Last week's cartoon mused that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Health and Human Services Department could use the occasion to spread unscientific garbage about HIV/AIDS. Instead, the State Department has issued a directive that forbids anyone in the executive branch from even mentioning World AIDS Day.

The state department has directed its employees and grant recipients not to use US government funds to mark the event – which falls annually on 1 December – and not to promote the day publicly. The news was first reported by the journalist Emily Bass and confirmed in an email viewed by the New York Times. ...

[T]hey should “refrain from publicly promoting World Aids Day through any communication channels, including social media, media engagements, speeches or other public-facing messaging”.

The email also reportedly said the government’s policy is “to refrain from messaging on any commemorative days, including World AIDS Day”, even though Donald Trump has issued proclamations for dozens of other observances, including Anti-Communism Week and National Energy Dominance Month.

As Emily Bass notes,

[U.S. Government] personnel may attend external, locally organized World AIDS Day events but may not speak at these events or promote their attendance via social media or media channels.

I suppose it's better than promoting the sort of half-baked crackpot fantasies that are the hallmark of the present regime.

But yes, Silence = Death.

Q Toon: Wrecking Crew

Okay, since he was in the news, I wanted to draw a cartoon featuring gay Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this week. A parody of Evita for his $40 billion dollar bailout to Argentina, perhaps? A take-off of Green Acres for his claim to be a soybean farmer?

Donald Quattorze Trump's demolishing of the White House East Wing to make room for his latest vanity project is emblematic of so many other issues — Republican Party persecution of transgender people is merely one that happens to be of particular interest to the LGBTQ+ publications that run my cartoons.

Other cartoonists have drawn Trump taking a wrecking ball to the Constitution, the U.S.A., and facts; further possibilities are almost endless. One could just as easily drawn him destroying the economy, education, health care, our standing in the world, free speech, cities, DEI, Palestine, campaign promises, his own cognitive capabilities...

Or how about the Epstein Papers? Mustn't forget the Epstein Papers.

Oh, never mind. It's all been done.

Zero Days Since His Last Outrage

I mean, how is a cartoonist supposed to keep up with this .... stuff?

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: 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: Consider This Your Trigger Warning

The 988 National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline of the U.S. Health & Human Services Department is set to stop providing tailored support options for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults on July 17.

The general 988 Lifeline offers free mental health support via call, text, or chat. It is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a subsidiary of the US Health and Human Services Agency (HHS). 

Currently, LGBTQ young people can select option 3 from a call menu in order to connect with counsellors. After the changes, the remaining 988 Lifeline services would "focus on serving all help seekers", including those who previously chose to access LGBTQ youth services, SAMHSA said.

But the hotline would "no longer silo LGB+ youth services," SAMHSA wrote in a statement, omitting the "T" and "Q" that refers to transgender and queer people in the LGBTQ acronym.

Given the Trump-DOGE regime's emphasis not on devotion to the mission of one's agency, on expertise, and on competence — but rather on fealty to Generalissimo Trump and a fierce commitment to banishing "wokeness" in all its forms — LGB+ youth cannot expect a sympathetic ear or helpful advice from whatever de-silofied government employees remain at the other end of the phone.

I have to suspect that T and Q youth are guaranteed not to.

If you don't believe me, believe Rachel Cauley, a spokesperson for the White House Office of Management and Budget, who described the present LGBTQ+ lifeline to NBC News as "a chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by 'counselors' without consent or knowledge of their parents."

I don't have any scientific studies to back this up, but I'll bet there is a significant subset of LGBTQ+ youth considering suicide for whom one or both parents are at least as LGBTQ-hostile as Ms. Cauley is.

Here are ways to reach privately funded LGBTQ youth suicide prevention hotlines:

• Trevor Project LGBTQ Crisis Hotline: 1-866-488-7386 or text START to 678-678
• Trans Lifeline (run for and by trans people): 1-877-565-8860 Monday-Friday, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm Central Time

Please note that reports of Canada making its hotline available to U.S. citizens are false.

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.

Q Toon: Where in the World

I introduced Max and Leo as a way of commenting on the deep political divide between the Trump cultists and the rest of us: an odd couple in a relationship who stay together in spite of their profound disagreements.

Had Republicans lost the 2024 election, Max and Leo would still be bickering over fiscal policy or, I dunno, white males being shut out of Kamala Harris's cabinet. But instead, we have been forced to endure the Criminal Trump Regime. It hasn't even been 100 days yet, and there are black vans of Trump's Gestapo disappearing civilians on suspicion of having unauthorized tattoos and opinions.

I figured I could comment on that by having Leo mistakenly caught up in an anti-immigrant sweep. Eventually, I'd have the courts step in, or someone in charge would realize ICE's mistake, and Leo and Max would be reunited, once I had figured out how to make a point with it.

Yet now it turns out that the Criminal Trump Regime doesn't care what the courts rule, or who gets swept up because of whatever mistake made by his minions. They've discovered a fellow tyrant down in El Salvador who's got a tropical gulag where they can ship their victims en masse, where nobody is afforded due process whatsoever. Instead, they are stripped naked, shaved, and put on display crammed together like sardines for Kristi Noem's Zoom background.

One of the real people trapped in this dystopian nightmare from hell is a man named Kilmar Albrego García. He had come here years ago from El Salvador to flee from the MS-13 gang there; a judge here had ruled that if the U.S. government wanted to deport him, it was forbidden to send him to El Salvador. 

ICE knew this, and decided it didn't care about the rule of law. Up and down the chain of command, they decided to just follow orders. The Department of Homeland Security acknowledges that García was the victim of an "administrative error." The Supreme Court has told the Criminal Trump Regime to "facilitate" García's return.

The Criminal Trump Regime's response is to pretend that it can't do a damn thing to rectify its administrative error. They invited El Salvador's self-described "coolest dictator" Nayib Bukele to the White House to claim that he's helpless to bring an innocent man home to his wife and children. After all, if he freed one innocent man, he'd have to free every innocent man, wouldn't he?

LGBTQ+ media have taken interest in Andry Hernandez Romero, a Salvadoran hairdresser and make-up stylist seeking asylum in the U.S. because he is gay and was facing persecution in Venezuela who was deported to the Salvadoran Sağmalcılar. Chicago media have been reporting on the case of Yeison Rodrigo Jaimes-Rincon, whose partner only found out he had been kidnapped to CECOT when she saw him behind bars there on television. 

And there are dozens, if not hundreds of others in their predicament whom you have never heard of.

There is a reason why we all know the tragic story of Anne Frank; only if you pass through a Holocaust museum will you learn of any other individuals among the six million others slaughtered by the Nazis' extermination machine. Nor was Alexei Navalny alone. 

There are photographs of a fraction of the victims of the Khmer Rouge at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh, yet they all remain anonymous to most of us. Ditto the victims of Stalin's purges, the Rwandan massacres, the deliberate slaughter of Palestinians...

It can be easy to resign oneself to the idea that it's too hard to care about what happens to uncounted foreigners. 

Until it happens to somebody you know.

In that disgusting Oval Office performance by Trump and Bukele, the tyrant occupying our White House promised that it certainly will. Trump wants to abduct enough U.S. citizens off to El Salvador that Bukele will need to build "about five more" CECOTs to hold them all.

Oh, sure: our Felon-in-chief said that he only wants to suspend the Constitution when it comes to the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of worst of the worst.

You'll just have to overlook the occasional administrative error.

Q Toon: A Message from Don Trumpleone

Just when I hoped I could take a break from drawing cartoons criticizing the Trump regime, they pull me back in...

In the spirit of March Madness, the Trump Maladministration has been doing a full-court press against academia, arresting and deporting students and faculty.

Of particular interest to LGBTQ+ collegians (and perhaps my readers at Philadelphia Gay News), the Trumpsters also successfully pressured the University of Pennsylvania to reverse its policy allowing a transgender athlete to compete as her true self.

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration has suspended approximately $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania over the participation of a transgender athlete in its swimming program, the White House said Wednesday. [17.5% of UPenn's total federal funding]

The Ivy League school has been facing an Education Department investigation focusing on in its swimming program. That inquiry was announced last month immediately after President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls' and women's sports.

But the federal money was suspended in a separate review of discretionary federal money going to universities, the White House said. The money that was paused came from the Defense Department and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Education Department, or what little is left of it, has also opened reviews of San Jose State University volleyball and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association.

UPenn is the alma mater of swimmer Lia Thomas, who won a Division I title for the school in 2022. Having begun the process of gender reassignment after the onset of puberty, she has since been barred from further athletic competition by World Aquatics, and has been ineligible to compete in  trials for next year's Olympic games. Trump maladministration diktat will, of course, force all transgender youth to wait until adulthood to align their outer gender with their inner one.

Another Trumpster offer UPenn couldn't refuse resulted in the firing of Lecturer Dwayne Booth, who draws under the nom de toon Mr. Fish. Booth has incurred right-wing ire for publishing cartoons critical of the Netanyahu government's wholesale slaughter of Palestinians — especially the one in this blog post. (Nota bene: If one is going to draw Israeli government officials drinking wine, it had better be Chablis or Pinot Grigio.)

The above is only a hint of the authoritarian police state that the U.S. has now become under Trump. His ICE is now disappearing legal residents of this country who have deigned to speak up on behalf of the Palestinian people: Khalil Mahmoud at Columbia, Badar Khan Suri at Georgetown, and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts for just three examples (Mahmoud for organizing campus protests; Suri because of his father-in-law's former association with Hamas; Ozturk merely for co-authoring an op-ed). 

The Trumpsters promise more such extra-judicial arrests, and want universities to ban the wearing of masks in order for police surveillance to identify anyone else attempting to exercise their right of free speech. Only the arresting agents from Homeland Security are entitled to keep their faces hidden.

For now, they have been disappearing foreign-born protesters and op-editorialists who mistook the United States for a free country. But at some point, the shadowy, masked government goons jumping out of black vans will be abducting native-born citizens for daring to voice thoughtcrime, too.

Q Toon: Desperately Seeking Leo

Max probably doesn't get a lot of sympathy wearing that cap into a government office.

Plotting out the dialogue for this week's cartoon, I immediately realized that Max and Leo do not have last names; the government worker here should have addressed Max as Mr. Whatever-his-last-name-is rather than by his first name. Unless they already knew each other, I suppose.

In any event, Max is getting a taste of the chaos he voted for, courtesy of the Deepstate Oligarchy's Generalissimo Elon. Musk is bringing the same reckless management style to government that he brought to Twitter: fire everybody and find out.

The resulting chaos is not a bug but a feature. Musk shares with his fellow South African expatriate  billionaire Peter Thiel a contempt for minorities, the working class. Their stated target may be bureaucracy, but it is in fact democracy itself.

That is no exaggeration or hyperbole. In Thiel's own words, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

The New York Times reported on the Paypal mogul last October:

As the internet blossomed, Thiel began to encourage a new set of even more provocative thinkers. At their center was an ex-programmer named Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug, sketching out the framework for a nascent reactionary movement — later called the new right — aimed at deposing the cabal of liberal elites running the country. Yarvin saw democracy as a “destructive” form of government, instead proposing a techno-monarchy run by a national chief executive. Americans, he said, had to “get over their dictator phobia.” ...

Substacker "Just Plain Kris" ties Musk into Thiel's Make Apartheid Great Again movement:  

Elon Musk, while not a formal part of the neo-reactionary movement, has been linked to its ideas through his actions and statements. Musk’s political philosophy reflects a skepticism of democratic institutions and a preference for corporate-style governance (The Atlantic, 2023). His attempts to influence government operations and his support for far-right political movements align with the neo-reactionary belief that democracy leads to social decline (Financial Times, 2024). 

In Donald Joffrey Trump, the Afrikaners found their ideal front man: a blustering, racist of extremely limited intellect, all ego but no self-awareness, easily malleable with flattery and money (remember how he used to be stubbornly opposed to electric cars, cryptocurrency, and TikTok?). As an added bonus, he is anti-democratic, polarizing, mercurial — and expendable. Back to NYT:

As Thiel became wealthier and more powerful, he continued to help like-minded men accumulate their own wealth and power. They included a lot of Stanford Review alumni, like Josh Hawley, now the 44-year-old senator from Missouri, but also others who came to him via different routes — most prominently JD Vance, who has cited Yarvin as an influence himself. ...When Vance ran for Senate in 2022, Thiel was by far the biggest donor to his super PAC, giving $15 million.

If the day ever comes when Trump overplays his hand, his luck runs out, he outlives his usefulness, or gets to be the star at a state funeral, the Afrikaners' hand-picked protégé is right there presiding over the U.S. Senate. Even without impeachment and conviction, or the 25th Amendment, JD Vance will be the heir apparent in 2028 to continue the dismantling of democracy.

To which end Musk will have all the data he needs on every voter, polling place, and computer system in the country to pre-determine the outcome of any election he wants.

And no pesky bureaucracy in his way.

see also https://www.truthdig.com/articles/elon-musk-and-peter-thiels-war-on-democracy/

Toon: Beyond Waving Their Little Paddles

I've seen a lot of editorial cartoons, opinion columns, and social media posts complaining that the Democratic Party isn't doing enough to resist the onslaught of ruinous actions from the unelected bureaucrats at DOGE, facilitated by the Brazenly Corrupt Trump Maladministration™, the Freakdom Caucus in Congress, and the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court, and the Quislings in legacy media.

Well, there's a reason for that.

Given the way the U.S. governing system here are significant tactical advantages Republicans have over Democrats. When Republicans were in the minority in Congress, they had the power to gum up Democratic legislation by threatening to shut down the government. 

Now we have demonstrative proof that shutting down the U.S. government was never just a tactic; it has been the #1 goal of the Republican Party since the days of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay.

Democrats, on the other hand, are the party of a functioning government able to get things done. What are they going to do when it comes time to raise the debt ceiling, if preventing it forces the government to default on its loans and shut down? Send Chuck Schumer out to chant cringe-worthy slogans again? Flood my e-mail with twice as many dozens of daily pleas for donations?

Even if Democrats can win in 2026 and 2028, despite the baked-in advantages red states have over blue ones, new Republican roadblocks to suffrage, and the mischief Elon Musk and his merry Muskrat minions are making in federal databases, repairing the damage Trump and the Republicans will have wrought will be a formidable task. 

They will need to flood the zone with an agenda every bit as audacious as Trump's gish gallop has been.

Firing Trump as head of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts will be easy, even if Democrats replace him with Laverne Cox or Elliot Page.

But it will be a heavy lift to restore the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, USAID, Occupational Safety & Health Agency, Department of Education, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Labor, the Civil Rights Divisions of every surviving cabinet department, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, National Parks, Obamacare, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. Heck, we'll probably need Congress to authorize re-application for membership in NATO.

In the meantime, if Mitch McConnell really wants to be useful in his waning months in the U.S. Senate, maybe he could give Chuck Schumer some tips on how to be an effective leader of The Opposition.

Q Toon: A Letter from Camp

A Letter From Concentration Camp, that is.

Obsessive readers of my toons will recall that Leo here got himself caught up in a dragnet of brown-skinned immigrants at the food pantry where he was volunteering. Having sent him off on this misadventure, I feel obligated to follow Leo’s story line and see where it goes.

I had originally intended for Leo and Max to stand in for our deeply divided country, engaging in a back-and-forth, getting each others' goats, and yet somehow remaining a couple. If I ever get Leo out of Trumplinka, I’m sure I’ll get back to that. 

Americans' divisions cut straight through family lines, as I was reminded during a big pre-Lenten party my husband's family has every year. I'm talking about a huge get-together of a hundred or so descendants of his great-grandparents, who came to the U.S. from Italy in the early years of the 20th Century. 

Most of the family recognizes that their forebears weren't exactly welcomed to this country with open arms. Yet until 1923, all they needed to do to be legal immigrants was secure passage on a boat, and once they came ashore, answer some questions from Port Authorities who spoke no Italian.

Those immigrants and their children opened up butcher shops and grocery stores, and/or went to work in the automobile factory. They built churches, founded social clubs, and went to war. More than a century later, some of the family are solid union Democrats and others are dyed-in-the-wool MAGA Republicans. Even among my husband's immediate siblings, nieces, and nephews, political conversations can get heated.

So, as an in-law, I didn't want to get into an argument when one of the cousins at Sunday's get-together started telling me how she only voted for Trump this time around because she operates a small business and Trump was supposedly good for small business. I wish nothing but the best for her small business, but I can't pretend that the Tigers Eating Faces Party is anything but a disaster for LGBTQ+ families like mine.

Or for Ukraine. Or for Palestinians. Or for our National Parks. Or for airline safety, Social Security, cities, farmers, home and auto buyers, health, the environment, our international alliances, or the price of eggs.

Or for the stock market. Or for the economy.

Or for small businesses.

We're starting to hear from Trump voters who are already getting hurt by Trump maladministration policies and are beginning to second-guess their votes. Unfortunately, the U.S. electoral system doesn't allow for do-overs.

One just has to hope that in 2026 and 2028, there will be enough of these voters who will have realized that there are issues more important to them than persecuting transgender people and Latinos.