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.

Comic Caper, Part Dos

Stripback Saturday returns to an old comic strip I drew about a murder mystery in the funny pages. I drew The Funny Paper Caper over the course of the 1983-84 school year for the UW-Parkside Ranger (that's four years before Who Framed Roger Rabbit... but I'm not actively considering suing Disney Corporation at this point in time).

When we left our story, our police lieutenant narrator had begun his investigation of the murder of Rufus T. Pornapple. Having just talked to Mrs. Pornapple, who thought he had arrived to take report of a burglary at their home, our intrepid detective is about to meet the neighbors.

In addition to the occasional picture on the wall of some bit of cartoon history, I mimicked the balloons and printing of the cartoon characters. I somehow failed to incorporate a gargantuan sandwich or a bathtub into this part of the story line, however.

I'm going to need to explain here the inside joke that Strollin Bowlin' was a mascot who appeared in UW-P Ranger advertisements for the campus bowling alley.

Mimicking their cartoonists' lettering, it was so much easier to cram a lot of dialogue into Kathy's balloons than Mr. Dumpstead's.

✒

How the Stephen Millers of the 19th Century Regarded Your Forebears

If I hadn't set the ball rolling on this Comic Caper nostalgia last week, I should probably have taken Trump's announcement of his No-Wretched-Refuse-Allowed immigration bill to present a more scholarly look back at 19th-Century editorial cartoons that warned against allowing your immigrant ancestors into the United States.

It's been done before, however. Here's an example that takes on almost every immigrant nationality, anyway (plus First Nations) (and even Canadians); and consider this your trigger warning that it's rather offensive.

"Please, Ma'am, May We Come In?" by Grant E. Hamilton in  Judge, 1893.

Fake Newsmakers

Just read it from left to right.

Now, I really wish I had posted this cartoon before Donald Joffrey Trump's little hour-and-a-half press tantrum yesterday. I had a little problem with my scanner this week, and it was the regular syndicated cartoon's turn to appear here yesterday, so I figured I'd just hold off until today.

Well, nobody's talking about the lies of Stephen Miller or Kellyanne Conway now.

Unless it turns out that they are the people who told Mr. Trump that his 304 electoral votes are more than Barack Obama's 332 in 2012, or his 365 in 2008, or Bill Clinton's 379 in 1996 or 370 in 1992, or George H.W. Bush's 470 in 1988.

Boy, I wouldn't want to be whoever that Trump loyalist was. I'll bet that person is in for a serious finger wagging.