Toon: He Calls It As He Seized It

I was considering drawing a cartoon naming Donald Joffrey Trump as Vladimir Putin's "Apprentice" (get it? get it?). Then I decided I'd rather go with a more up-to-date reference.

Brevity being the soul of wit, I'm sure that if this conversation between Trump and Putin ever occurred, Trump would go on and on about how nobody knew that dumb has a "B" in it and he's so surprised that he hadn't thought of this clever wordplay before now; and then he'd repeat the joke and congratulate himself for being such a stable genius, much better than that Jimmy Kimmel fellow who gets such lousy ratings and ABC ought to lose its broadcast license, just like CNN and the failed New York Times because everybody says Trump should have gotten the Nobel Prize for bringing peace to the Gulf of America but they refuse to report it—

All the while, Putin would have shut off the portion of his brain that translates English to Russian much earlier.

Toon: Very Fine People on Both Sides

Former White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly has written a book of his experiences in the Donald Schickelgruber Trump White House. According to an excerpt in the New Yorker Trump expressed to Kelly his admiration of "German generals" and wished that American generals were more like them.

"Do you mean Bismarck's generals?" Kelly told the Atlantic he'd asked Trump. He added, "I mean, I knew he didn't know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, 'Do you mean the Kaiser's generals? Surely you can't mean Hitler's generals?' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, Hitler's generals.'"

Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the last sixteen months of Trump's presidency, is quoted in Bob Woodward's latest book as calling Trump "fascist to the core." Two of Trump's Secretaries of Defense, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis and Army Lt. Col. Mark Esper, and one of his National Security Advisers, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, swell the chorus that Trump must never again be Commander In Chief of the U.S. military.

The White House and cabinet officials letting it be known that Trump is a fascist wannabe dictator who holds up Adolph Hitler as a role model only confirm what we've seen from the outside. Anyone who has been paying the slightest scrap of attention these past eight years knows that he worships the ground Vlad the Defenestrator Putin walks on, wants to be BFFs with Kim Jong Il, and adores what Viktor Orbán has done to Hungarian democracy.

Once upon a time, being exposed by that much military brass as Adolph Hitler's biggest fan would have been enough to send Trump slinking off in ignominy to Mar-a-Lagoon and thence to Argentina. But apparently, half the population of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina (and overwhelming majorities elsewhere in Dixie and the great plains) just don't care. 

For reasons that defy rational analysis, they enthusiastically plan to vote for an actual, literal, bona fide Nazi sympathizer for President of the United States.

Anything to get transgender folks out of the nation's rest rooms and defend the nation's aryan purity of essence. To Trump basest base, nothing else matters.

My cartoon today updates one by the great Australian-British editorial cartoonist, David Low. "Rendez-vous 1939" depicted Hitler and Joseph Stalin greeting each other: "The scum of the earth, I believe?" "The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?" At their feet lay Poland, slain under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact partitioning the country that had separated them.

President Putin's policy since assuming power at the turn of the millennium has been to reconquer the nations that declared their independence from Moscow in 1989-1991. Trump will pull the rug out from under the government of Ukraine, which has been trying to fend off Russian aggression since 2008. Just as he pulled the rug out from under the government of Afghanistan.

If Trump is returned to the White House, no country in Eastern Europe will be safe from Russian lebensraum. No country anywhere else will be able to trust in United States assurances of friendship. There will be a new Axis of Evil, and we will be a junior member of it.

Dammit, this matters.

Q Toon: Couples Therapy

This week's cartoon was inspired by a pair of articles I had read recently. One, in Time magazine, claimed that Americans left and right aren't as diametrically opposed as your social media feed would have you believe. The other, in the New York Post, gave voice to complaints of "MAGA gays" who feel shunned and dissed by others in the LGBT movement — including their favorite bars and even their own spouses.

Mark Dorman, a retired teacher from Hell’s Kitchen, said he has been all but blacklisted from the Atlas Social Club, his local gay bar, since he spoke positively about the former president there last summer.
“I’m almost anti-gay,” a frustrated Dorman, 64, told The Post. “It’s an embarrassment to see this kind of behavior… I’d really invite them to go to Iran or Gaza. See what that does for you. See how fast they throw you in prison or kill you.”
“It feels like the Soviet Union, Marxist environment now,” he said. “With the gay community, they feel that Republicans on the far right have an anti-gay thing. ..."

The "Go To Iran or Gaza" is a common meme among Magazoids who deign to advise the LGBTQ+ community to ignore the chapters pertaining to us in Mein Trumpf: The 2025 Project. Yet somehow, I don't think that when Mark Dorman cites the Soviet Union, he has been following events in the Far Right Paradise that Russia has become under Trump's buddy Vlad the Defenestrator.

It's Dorman in the Post article whose marriage nearly ended over Trumpism (frankly, Dorman is their source for the whole article). Their marriage only survived because they agreed to stop discussing politics. So I hope for Dorman's sake that his husband never, ever, ever reads the New York Post.

I think we all have some family member/s with whom we have reached an agreement not to mention politics any more. Which is where the Time article comes in.

And divided we certainly think we are. The only thing Americans seem to agree on is that Americans cannot agree on anything. It’s hardly worth summarizing the headlines about doom and radicalization. In the prelude to a November ballot featuring the candidate synonymous with polarization, all the dapple and nuance of life is once again being reduced to a binary. Choose a side: red or blue.

Yet in the wintry interval between Jan. 6 and Inauguration Day 2021, that Populace survey, dubbed the American Aspirations Index, found “stunning agreement” on national goals across every segment of the U.S. population, including, to a significant extent, among those who voted for Donald Trump and those who voted for Joe Biden. On the few points where the survey registered disagreement (notably, on immigration and borders), the dissent was intense. But intense disagreement was the exception, not the rule. 

Oh, you could probably add abortion to the list of points where the dissent is "intense." But is not talking about divisive issues really what it takes to keep this country together?

Or is that just what they want us to think?

"We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be," [Heritage Foundationführer Kevin] Roberts told host of "Real America's Voice" Dave Brat, a former congressman who spent his brief time in government claiming the attendees of the Women's March are much more dangerous than white supremacists.

On the other hand, if Team Edward and Team Jacob can bury their differences now that nobody talks about the Twilight series any more, maybe there is yet hope that we will all meet again some sunny day.

Not the vampires, of course.

Q Toon: Tuckerview with a Vladimir

Useful idiot Tucker Carlson went to Russia to fawn over the clean subway and the Aldi-style shopping carts, and to interview President for Life Vladimir Putin last week. 

In the days after the interview was posted on X, an Egyptian journalist asked Carlson why he hadn't asked Putin about the imprisonment of Alexei Navalny, unjustly imprisoned in a Siberian concentration camp, or about the murder of dissident journalists, politicians, business leaders, and Putin's own military generals. Tucker whinged, “Every leader kills people, some kill more than others. Leadership requires killing people, sorry, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be a leader.”

Then Navalny turned up dead at the age of 47, three years into his 19-year prison sentence.

Even the National Review and Wall Street Journal were embarrassed for Tucker Carlson. 

By the way, I added the name of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to this cartoon at the last minute while inking it, and I should have fact-checked first. I have since learned that toward the end of the interview, Carlson did in fact ask Putin to release Gershkovich "as a sign of your decency." Putin, after complaining of a lack of "decency" from the West, suggested the possibility of trading Gershkovitz for some unspecified "reciprocal steps." 

My bad. I won't argue if editors choose to omit Gershkovich from the cartoon (or to replace him with ballerina Ksenia Karelina, arrested for treason after Tucker left Russia).

On the other hand, I think it's important to keep all these names in the public mind. Editors who leave mention of Gershkovich in the cartoon can just pretend that later, Tucker noticed that he had a couple minutes left for his interview and decided to risk bringing the Gershkovich case up as long as his getaway car was warming up outside anyway.

Getting back to the part that makes this cartoon relevant to the worldwide LGBTQ+ community, Russian courts have begun convicting citizens arrested under new laws criminalizing so-called "extremist" LGBTQ activity.

Russian courts have issued the first known extremism convictions arising from the 2023 Supreme Court ruling designating the “international LGBT movement” as extremist, Human Rights Watch said today. The Supreme Court ruling, which was handed down on November 30 but became public only in mid-January 2024, indicates that many more convictions may follow.

The Supreme Court ruling also declared the rainbow flag a forbidden symbol of the “LGBT movement.” Displaying the flag is the basis for administrative penalties in at least three cases that courts have tried in recent weeks. In late January, a court in Nizhny Novgorod sentenced a woman to five days detention for wearing rainbow-colored earrings after an individual accosted her and her friend in a cafe. Also in late January, a judge in Volgograd region handed down a fine over a rainbow flag published on a social media page. In early February, a court in Saratov fined a woman for posting a rainbow flag on social media.

A police investigation of supposedly extremist LGBTQ propaganda at a "My Little Pony" fan convention in Moscow forced organizers to shut down their event this week. Police apparently were unable to find any My Little Ponies with rainbow manes, or whatever was allegedly perverting the morals of impressionable little Russians.

Russia's LGBTQ+ community is, of course, not the only target of the Putin regime's eradication campaign against whomever it slaps an "extremist" label on.

Since a court banned three organizations affiliated with political opposition leader Aleksey Navalny as “extremist” in 2021, Navalny and five of his supporters have been sentenced to prison on a range of extremism charges for legitimate activism, while dozens more have received fines and short-term jail sentences. Six members of Vesna, a democratic youth movement, have been in pretrial custody since June 2023 on various spurious charges, including extremism. Hundreds of Jehovah’s Witnesses have been jailed since the organization was banned as “extremist” in 2017.

And now, of course, the ballerina who raised funds for a charity aiding bombed-out citizens of Ukraine.

But at least Putin makes the trains run on time. And so clean besides!

Q Toon: Esprit de Corps

Sergei Markov, a surviving former adviser to Vladimir Putin and now a talking head on Russian state TV, told viewers last month that Ukraine is using something called "neuro-linguistic" programming to unify its army "through gay sex."

"They have an artificial political science fascism created by American and British political technologists. They will turn them into zombies, into cult members. I think they will force some to become homosexuals," Markov said.

"Military theorists and historians know which army in Greece was the strongest, remember? The Spartans! They were united by a homosexual brotherhood. They were all homos. These were the politics of their leadership. I think they are planning the same for Ukraine's Armed Forces."

Granted, Russian state TV is about as responsible in its fact-checking as Faux News or Noisemax in this country.

It is nevertheless alarming that the Kremlin has uncovered the West's neuro-linguistic conversion therapy program to create semper fabulous super-soldiers. Moscow may have no choice but to instigate a Brokeback Mountain military mind control program of its own.

It's either that, or dipping their soldiers in the River Styx by the ankle.

It's All Connected Somehow

Thursday morning, news broke  the Biden administration had secured the release from Russian prison of Olympic medalist and WNBA star Brittney Griner. As you surely know, last February, Griner had been arrested at a Moscow area airport arriving with a tiny amount of cannabis oil in her luggage, for which she was sentenced to nine years in a labor camp.

Given Russia's invasion of Ukraine very shortly after Griner's arrest, relations between the U.S. and Russia have been at their lowest point since what, the Vietnam War? The Cuban Missile Crisis? The Berlin airlift? The only two things President Biden had to offer in exchange for freeing Griner were looking the other way as Russia pummeled Ukraine, and/or handing over a Russian arms merchant convicted in U.S. courts in 2011 for his role in supplying weaponry to various revolutionary and terrorist groups around the world.

Biden traded the latter for Griner, and quickly Monday morning quarterbacks (power forwards?) here lambasted the administration for not also securing the freedom of Paul Whelan, a Marine imprisoned by Russia since 2018 on accusations of being a U.S. spy. 

Lost in the criticism of President Biden for not winning Whelan's freedom is the fact that his administration at least tried to include Whelan in the deal, whereas there was no indication that Donald Trump, who happened to be president in 2018, ever gave one bit of thought to Whelan before last Thursday.

He has, of course, had plenty to say about him since, taking some time away from his obsession with the idea that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him. At the moment, his story is that it was stolen by Twitter, because it didn't cooperate with right-wingers' efforts to whip up a scandal around Biden's son Hunter. 

You may recall that the New York Post published an exposé concerning a laptop containing compromising material Hunter Biden had supposedly left at a repair shop and never picked up.

The compromising information dealt with Hunter trading on his father's name in business (Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka must be shocked, shocked!), his drug use, and, we are now told, dick pics. If Papa Biden wasn't eager for this stuff to be spread across the internets, and if the folks then in charge of running Twitter thought it was tawdry, sketchy bullcrap, the incoming Republican majority in the House plans to make every effort to make daily headlines of this stuff from the moment the 118th Congress arrives in D.C.

Struggling to make the Hunter Biden laptop story seem relevant to anything going on today, the Republican conspiracy manufacturing mill is grinding away at full speed. Congressboob James Comer (R-KY) postulated on the GOP propaganda channel that there was somehow a direct link between Hunter and (did you ever imagine that I'd ever get back to the topic of today's cartoon?) Brittney Griner's release:

 “[W]e fear that this administration’s compromised because of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden have received from Russia and China. You look at just what happened yesterday. This bizarre prisoner swap that clearly was in the benefit of Russia, is another example of why we need to investigate to see if, in fact, this administration is compromised.”

You may rest assured that the Republican Truther squad will not rest until they have found how Hunter Biden fast-tracked the trademarking of Ivanka Trump-Kushner's couture line in China, authorized Don Jr. and Eric's tax cheating at the Trump Organization, and masterminded the fraud at the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

All part of a plot to cover up Barack Obama's birthplace in Kenya.

Q Toon: Mistakes Were Made

A Russian judge denied WNBA star Brittney Griner's appeal of her drug trafficking conviction last week. Arriving in the country to play on a Russian women's basketball team, Griner was arrested at a Moscow area airport in January with a small amount of cannabis oil in her luggage, something she claimed to have had for medical purposes and had forgotten to leave at home.

Days after her arrest, Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, incurring the condemnation of the Biden administration and the U.S.'s principal allies. Instead of expelling Griner from the country, Russia held her in jail for months until her trial, which ended with a guilty verdict and a sentence of nine years at a labor camp. 

Since then, America has tried quiet diplomacy to get Griner free. We offered to trade a Russian arms merchant for her and another jailed American. We sent Bill Richardson. We even sent Dennis Rodman.

I mean, c'mon, man!

One thing we absolutely should not be sending any more are WNBA players to beef up Russian basketball teams.

It's difficult to imagine anyone desperate enough to go, anyway.

Q Toon: Nothing But Nyet

 

The Russian trial of Brittney Griner is now in the sentencing stage. The Olympian and WNBA star faces a possible ten years in prison for having arrived at Sheremetyevo airport in January with a cannabis vape cartridge in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the charge and delivered an abject apology in court.

In the first days after Griner's arrest, the Biden administration was largely silent on her plight, and her wife publicly urged everyone to keep quiet in order to let the State Department work behind the scenes. Since then, Cherelle Griner, the WNBA, and the LGBTQ+ community have begun to speak out, more and more forcibly.

The State Department is publicly advocating for Griner's return to the U.S., proposing a prisoner swap of Brittney Griner and a retired marine convicted of spying, Paul Whelan, for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer currently serving time in a U.S. prison.

Born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to a bookkeeper and a car mechanic, Bout went on to train as an interpreter at Moscow’s Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages.

Rumoured to speak six languages, Bout developed a decades-long career by acquiring Soviet military transport planes and filling them with various weapons that were left behind after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Since then, Bout has supplied weapons to conflicts around the world including Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen.

For decades, governments and rebels fought each other with weapons that Bout sold to either side.

In 2008, Bout was arrested in Bangkok after he was caught on camera trying to sell weapons for use against Americans by undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration agents. He was convicted in a New York court in 2011 and was sentenced to 25 years at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois.

A third American, history teacher Marc Fogel, sentenced in Russia last year for having half an ounce of marijuana on him, has not so far been mentioned as part of any prisoner swap. If only we had another Russian "Merchant of Death" in Leavenworth or Florence ADMAX to sweeten the deal...

Putin's foreign ministry (and his foreign minions) have so far shown no interest in the Biden administration's proposal. Either Putin is waiting until the trial is officially over, or, following the example of the Iran hostage crisis, until the next administration is sworn into office.

Q Toon: From the Highest Court

 

The trial Olympic athlete and WNBA star Brittney Griner, accused of having cannabis oil in a vape cartridge when she arrived at the Moscow airport last winter, is set to begin sometime in the next few weeks. She was seen arriving for a pre-trial hearing last week, and a letter from her to President Biden asking for him to intervene on her behalf became public this week.

Clearly, she doesn't have much confidence in the Russian judicial system letting her return home any time soon.

My cartoon lawyer for her presents a gloomier picture for Mrs. Griner than the Russian legal system theoretically affords. She will, in fact, have an opportunity to address the court at the beginning of her trial and again before the judge, lay assessors, and/or jury decide on a verdict.* 

On the other hand, she is obviously being used as a political pawn toward the release of a Russian citizen convicted in the U.S. ten years ago of illegal arms dealing. Arms dealing vs. a trace of THC oil... yeah, sure, that's an even trade.

You can ask Alexei Navalny how fair the Russian judicial system is. (Well, no, you probably can't.) Russia having become under Vladimir Putin a highly autocratic state, even if Mrs. Griner should get a fair trial and either acquittal or sent home with a fine, authorities may not be done with her. Consider this:

The shakiness of the presumption of innocence in Russian criminal trials is reflected by the fact that acquittals are almost nonexistent. They occurred in only 0.36 percent of all cases in 1998. During the perestroika years the Soviet public was shocked by many stories of innocent people having been convicted due to coerced or tortured confessions and this was one reason why reforms were pushed, among them, that of returning to trial by jury. Indeed, juries have acquitted substantially more than nonjury courts, anywhere from 18–22 percent of the time. A disturbing development has been the refusal of law enforcement organs to accept acquittals. For instance, in November 1999 in Moscow, officers of the Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB, entered a courtroom in camouflage uniforms and black masks and re-arrested two defendants who had been acquitted at trial by a military court. Such occurrences are not rare.

And that's before Mr. Putin became President.

✍

I'm gradually making adjustments to my fictional lawyer for Mrs. Griner (first appearing here), including reversing the N's and R's in his dialogue balloons — realizing, of course, that they are not the Cyrillic equivalent of Roman N's and R's.

Check back on Saturday for some further thoughts on How To Draw A Russian.

✍

*Update: Brittney Griner has entered a guilty plea, according to this morning's news reports. That does not necessarily mean that the trial skips ahead to sentencing; the prosecution is still allowed to present its case.

Q Toon: Free Brittney

I freely confess that I struggled coming up with anything to draw about Brittney Griner, the WNBA star and Olympic medalist who has gotten caught up in the international standoff between Putin's Russia and the rest of the world.

On February 17, one week before Putin's invasion of Ukraine but well after his troops were poised at the border, Russian police arrested Griner at Sheremetyevo airport, reportedly having found a vape cartridge and hashish oil in her luggage. Whether there is anything to the charges or if they were completely trumped up, none of us in the cheap seats may ever know.

Her wife has pleaded with everyone to honor their privacy, which also limits what one might say in a cartoon. Nor has her plight worsened to the level of so many citizens of Ukraine; a representative of the American embassy has been able to visit Griner in detention and reports that she is in good health and spirits.

As an American, a lesbian, and a black woman, Griner faces an uphill climb getting a fair trial in Russia. Instead of an American-style legal system in which a prosecutor presents one side of the case and the defense presents the other, in a Russian court, an investigator appointed by the government presents a case file that determines what can and cannot be argued in court. Her defense is free to conduct its own investigation, but concepts such as an impartial jury of one's peers and a right against self-incrimination simply do not exist.

If found guilty, Griner could face up to ten years in prison, or even in a labor camp.

Griner did not come to Russia as a tourist:

Ms Griner had a second job, and that was why she had flown to Russia — to play for EuroLeague team UMMC Ekaterinburg, where she had worked since 2014 during the US off-season.

Roughly half of WNBA players compete overseas in the off-season. For most, it's a way to augment their domestic income: WNBA players receive roughly five times more in Russia than they do in the US.

"If she were Steph Curry or LeBron James, she wouldn't be over there at all because she'd be making enough money," [sports journalist Tamryn] Spruill said. 

After Griner's detention and arrest, I'm fairly sure that any remaining WNBA players moonlighting on Russian basketball teams are seriously reconsidering whether any salary is worth being set up to be a pawn in geopolitical brinksmanship.

Marching Across the Decades

We've all been dealing with news of COVID-19, the War in Ukraine, inflation, the high price of gas, and Kanye West's feud with Pete Davidson for so, so, long now. How about looking back on my salad days for cartoons about something a little more pleasant?

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers WI, March 11, 1982

Er, maybe the heightened tensions between the two nations with the world's largest arsenals of nuclear weapons 40 years ago doesn't quite qualify as "something a little more pleasant."

Most of this cartoon was drawn with india ink on typing paper, but some of the shading utilizes that charcoal technique I described last month. In this case, the surface behind the paper had parallel ridges; it might have been a book cover or the back of a clipboard. I liked the effect, particularly with whatever that background was; other backboards with dotted and pebbled patterns came in handy from time to time. But india ink remained my primary medium.

In retrospect, I think shading the foreground characters — and, for that matter, the foreground ground — in charcoal instead of with straight ballpoint pen lines would have yielded a more effective drawing.

I couldn't get the same effect when I switched over to drawing on bristol board not long after this; smooth finish seems more accommodating to pen and ink than vellum finish as far as I'm concerned, but less useful for charcoal. So I still had the same charcoal pencil ten years later when the editors of the UW-Milwaukee Post asked me for some cover art for their "Adventures in Buying" issue. 

As I joked earlier this week, I really dislike drawing architecture; but the "Adventures in Buying" issue was the Post's way of thanking its advertisers, and my approach was to draw a street scene featuring some of the advertisers the editors were especially keen to highlight.

in UWM Post, March 23, 1992

By the way, if there's one thing I dislike drawing even more than architecture, it's bicycles.

Charcoal is a particularly unforgiving medium. For one thing, you can't go back and erase any of the pencil marks left showing. And if you make any mistakes, india ink's problems drawing over white-out are minuscule compared with charcoal's, because the surface area won't match the rest of the drawing. (I had to paste a revision over the film titles on the Oriental Theater's marquee — probably to fix a perspective problem.)

One does acquire a true appreciation for the "Ashcan School" of cartoonists who used grease pencil or charcoal for their entire careers.

Here's how the drawing looked after a no-doubt unhappy colorist on the Post staff added some blue to it. The original, drawn full size to the page dimensions, was too wide for the office photocopier, so the sides got cropped off.

That was not one of my favorite drawings, but this is:

for Q Syndicate, March, 2002

If I had published a book of my own cartoons in the 'aughts, this would have been on the cover.

Since Roy and Silo, the same-sex penguin couple at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, were featured in national news reports, numerous other examples of same-sex coupling in the animal kingdom have come to light. In fact, homosexual behavior is well documented in many species, putting the lie to the old chestnut that same-sex attraction is "against nature."

It's so well documented that the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' and Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church preaches that the Russian military must stop the animal kingdom from achieving world domination. And the Florida legislature is crafting a bill to criminalize teaching about biology in their public schools.

Speaking of schools,

for Q Syndicate, March, 2012

I drew this cartoon after some pseudo-sincere apology from Rush Limbaugh in which he had excused whatever it was he had said that week — and I'm not interested in dredging it up again — by claiming to be an "entertainer."

What I'm interested in pointing out is that I used the map in the background as one of the cues to signal that the setting of the cartoon was set some 40 or 50 years earlier. I'm not sure whether a lot of people caught that, so dammit, I'm letting you know it was there on purpose.

Well, in light of current events, and boy oh boy do I detest drawing architecture, I'm going to wrap things up today by stepping outside of the Years Ending In 2 shtick. This 2014 cartoon showed up in my Facebook "Hey! Remember This? We do!" feed on Thursday.

for Q Syndicate, March 2014

Aw, heck, St. Patrick's Day falls on a weekend in two years, so I might just bring this one back for another Saturday retrospective post in 2024.

Who knows what Putin might be invading by then?

Has It Only Been Four Years?

January, 2017

Instead of reaching back a century for classic editorial cartoons, or a few decades for my early work, your faithful servant today limits today's post to the first two years of the Corrupt Trump Administration. His has been an extraordinarily long quadrennium, and it might be easy to have forgotten just how gawdawful his presidency was in the days before impeachment (remember that?) and COVID-19.

January, 2017

Donald Berzelius Trump's first priorities upon taking office was to erase every trace of Barack Obama's presidency, and one of the earliest things to disappear was the White House LGBT Liaison office and its corresponding web page.

March, 2017

From Day One, the principal qualification for cabinet and sub-cabinet posts in the Corrupt Trump Administration has been complete and total opposition to the department or agency one would be placed in charge of.

March, 2017

That includes Roger Severino, who is still in charge of dismantling HHS's Office for Civil Rights, and Betsy DeVos, still in charge of defunding public education.

March, 2017

Fossil fuel fanatic Scott Pruitt left the Environmental Protection Agency under a cloud of ethics violations in 2018. His replacement, coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is hardly any improvement.

October, 2017

As Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions led the Corrupt Trump Administration's assault on the rights of minorities, especially the LGBTQ community. His one saving grace was that he did not see himself as the Trump family's personal lawyer, which is why he was replaced by lickspittle William Barr.

August, 2017

Trump has expended a lot of energy targeting transgender persons in general, and especially in the U.S. military. One of his justifications he gave for working to drum transgender personnel out of the military was the "tremendous" cost of their medical treatment... the total of which has proved to be far, far less than the cost of Trump's frequent golf trips. 

January, 2018

By the way, it was an exceptionally crass Trump tweet in June, 2017, alleging that a female cable TV host had been bleeding from cosmetic surgery, that got me to vow always to draw Trump with a pig's snout. His tweet came on top of a vulgar tweet about another female cable TV host menstruating, another tweet remarking that a female Republican senate candidate's face repulsed voters, and a retweet of a meme contrasting a flattering photo of Melania Trump with an unflattering one of a Republican senator's wife.

There was a flurry of pig-Trump cartoons that week; I have kept it as a leitmotif ever since, even when reconciling the snout with the needed facial expression was a real challenge. I have often also given him pig's hooves, thus breaking away from the editorial cartoon cliché of drawing him with tiny hands.

July, 2018

Let us not forget Trump's foreign policy, which consists largely of pissing off our democratic allies and sucking up to autocratic dictators. Especially the murderous ones.

July, 2018

You thought I was pivoting from foreign policy to the topic of our judicial system, didn't you? Well, perhaps you were right.

November, 2018

Through it all, Trump has behaved like a petty dictator, which explains his affinity for dictators abroad. He has been assisted by the Republican politburo in the House and Senate, and their mission to pack the courts with right-wing activists (which we discussed here more fully on Thursday).

January, 2018

Within the White House, we have Trump's Ministry of Truth, demonstrating why it's not such a great idea to run government like a business.

August, 2018