Tag Archives: political cartoons

by

Minnesota isn’t the laughing stock, Mr President. You are! Zipp it!

Mr President, if you can’t open your mouth without inflaming an already tense situation—dangerous even—then please don’t say anything at all.

And if you can’t—or won’t—show leadership of your great nation, then please vacate the Oval Office as soon as possible*. I don’t think you have any understanding what true ‘leadership’ means. Other presidents have had it spades. Particularly your immediate predecessor.

Since the day of your inauguration, you have demonstrated on a daily basis just how unfit you are for public office. You are not exactly full of the milk of human kindness, but are morally bankrupt, devoid of empathy, narcissistic and, frankly, stupid. Despite your many protestations to the contrary, I don’t see any evidence of your stable genius. You have failed!

Heaven knows we have a dearth of leadership on this side of the Atlantic. Boris Johnson is, in my opinion, the worst Prime Minister in living memory (well, my memory at least and I’m 71). But we should be thankful for small mercies. He’s not Donald Trump.

By Andy Marlette, The Pensacola News Journal

While the emergence of Covid-19 per se cannot be laid at Trump’s door, his government’s pathetic response to the pandemic has brought about a catastrophe beyond all measure. More than 100,000 deaths from the virus, and while not the highest per capita toll (unfortunately I believe that ‘accolade’ belongs to the UK) it is a terrible indictment of what the USA has become under the Trump presidency.

As for the economic fallout, with a calculated 40 million job losses that disproportionately affect those already worse off in US society, Trump and the Republicans do not seem to care. They have, it seems, been more concerned about bailing out big business than providing real support to the needy. And now US society has to contend with demonstrations (some violent) that have sprung up across the whole nation.

By Clay Bennett, The Chattanooga Times Free Press

Over the past week, Steph and I have watched with horror as the United States has fractured once again along racial lines following the killing in broad daylight of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The nation-wide civil disturbances that this outrage has sparked come in the midst of a health crisis unprecedented for a generation or more. In terms of health care, race relations, and the economy, the USA is in turmoil.

There is surely a clear connection between the killing of George Floyd last week and Trump, early in his presidency, encouraging law enforcement officers to be more ‘vigorous’ with suspects. No wonder many saw this ‘signal’ from the man in the Oval Office as a licence to continue to threaten, subdue, and brutalise an already downtrodden sector of society.

By Chris Britt, creators.com

Now he wants Governors and mayors to get even tougher.

I could go on. Others have written more cogently than I ever could, so I am not going to repeat their observations on Trump’s presidency and all of its many failings perhaps numbering more than the lies he tells on a daily basis.

Some years back I wrote a piece about Watergate, and how cartoonists then very quickly got Richard Nixon’s measure. Cartoonists today have taken political commentary to another level when it comes to Trump. And they are spot on. Just take a look at the Facebook page Editorial & Political Cartoons (unless Mark Zuckerberg has temporarily taken it down for too obvious anti-Trump bias, as happens from time to time).

By David Rowe, Australia

Steph and I take a special interest in Minnesota, which we have come to know and love. So it has been distressing to see another side to the state through that appalling killing at the knee of a ‘rogue’ Minneapolis police officer (but how rogue?), and the protests that flared up in its wake.

Since retirement ten years ago, we have travelled to the USA each year. Had this had been a ‘normal’ year, we would probably be in Minnesota right now. Why? Our elder daughter Hannah lives with her family in St Paul, MN (the other half of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St Paul). Having resided there since attending university from 1998, Hannah became a US citizen last year. We’d probably be half way through one of our epic road trips that we have enjoyed across so many states over the past decade.

We hope that the civil disturbances die down very soon, and life returns to normal in most respects. But let the summer of 2020 be remembered as the year when finally Black Lives Matter becomes more than a slogan. Let’s hope for real change, and the departure of Donald Trump come the general election next November.

*Joe Biden spoke these words at City Hall in Philadelphia yesterday after I posted this story. He focuses on the lack of leadership.

 

by

Narcissus was an amateur compared to The Donald

Do any of these words describe the new resident in the White House? All of them? That would surely be a burden for anyone to carry. Not so, it seems, Donald J Trump, who has made a career out of being the High Priest of Narcissism.

narcissist-acts

It’s just two weeks since The Donald was inaugurated as the 45th POTUS. Good grief! It seems like a lifetime. Now that I’m retired, I often wonder to my wife where time has flown to. When considering all that’s happening right now in the USA, and the profound polarizing impact of this dysfunctional administration, it seems as though we are wading through molasses.

The next four years stretch out endlessly ahead of us (if DJT survives that long), because whatever His Orangeness says or does, affects everyone, not just the USA. He sneezes; we catch a cold.

Following his unbelievable (for all the wrong reasons) Inaugural Address from the steps of the Capitol in Washington, DC on 20 January, The Donald has ratcheted up his invective and vitriol. His minions on the White House staff (Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway come immediately to mind) have stepped into the fray and revealed themselves to be unthinking and deluded acolytes, following the Donald line without question. The GOP in both Houses of Congress appears to have rolled over to have its collective tummy tickled.

Yes. Donald Trump is a narcissist. It’s all about him. He’s playing at being President. It’s the ultimate reality show, only the stakes are much higher, and he’s the apprentice. I think he was in love with the idea of being President. That’s why he ran. He liked the attention he would receive, the fawning, the center stage. Now, everything he does will be scrutinised, and I have great faith in political cartoonists on both sides of the Atlantic to pull him down more than just a peg or two. I signed up for Facebook page called Editorial & Political Cartoons; it’s a great resource.

And because he is so notoriously thin-skinned, this will eventually get to him. Expect a YUMONGOUS reaction before too long, especially when they insinuate that he is just a puppet. Take this cartoon distributed by Pia Guerra on Twitter just five days ago. As the narcissist sans pareil, The Donald won’t stand for this.

c3yqndivcaareg_

Cartoonists are already focusing on Trumpian characteristics, such as:

  • his remarkable hairstyle;
  • the kaleidoscope of facial expressions (the snarl, the pursed lips);
  • his hands and fingers (small as they are) and exaggerated gestures; and
  • the over-long tie (more like an extended loin-cloth).

He has to be the center of attention, referring to all his ‘achievements’ (but not his multiple bankruptcies) as ‘great’, ‘YUGE’, ‘the best’, etc., while disparaging others. His disrespectful comments are too numerous to list.

His speeches—if you can call them such—are mostly incoherent ramblings often punctuated by his two favourite words: ‘I’ and ‘Me’. Here’s a good example, made at a breakfast recently in the White House to commemorate Black History month. It’s also hard to believe he made these comments at the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this week. And talk about disrespect. During his visit to the CIA a short while after his inauguration, and speaking to an invited (and ‘packed’?) audience in front of the CIA Memorial Wall, he couldn’t resist boasting about the number of times he had appeared on the front cover of Time, as well the unprecedented record crowds who had turned up to his inauguration. He was certainly obsessed with those ‘alternative facts’. It just galls him that he simply is NOT the best.

Anyway, to get back to my original theme of Trump’s narcissism. I posted this simple comment on my Facebook page a couple of days ago or so: Narcissus was an amateur compared to Trump. And that’s why I decided to elaborate on that here.

I also posted the famous Caravaggio painting of Narcissus, painted between 1597 and 1599. Then, lying in bed this morning, thinking about today’s blog post, I wondered if I could superimpose Trump’s head in the painting. However, Google came to the rescue, and I found someone had been there before me.

Furthermore, the author of Poppa’s Cottage had already visited the theme of Trump’s dangerous narcissism in August 2016, and who has written more eloquently than I ever could.

I guess we can all hope that Congress will regain its senses and tell The Donald in no uncertain terms: YOU’RE FIRED!

 

 

by

The prescience of political cartoonists

Tuesday 7 November 1972. The 47th quadrennial presidential election in the USA.

Richard Milhous Nixon defeated George McGovern in one of the biggest landslide victories in US presidential election history, taking 60.7% of the popular vote, and 520 of the 538 Electoral College votes. Nixon seemed set for a successful second term in office. After all, he’d already made some progress in foreign affairs, having begun the normalization of relations with China, for example.

That was before the scandal we’ve come to know as Watergate surfaced. Such was the impact of this scandal that almost any shady dealings in the public arena today are reported as ‘this-gate’ or ‘that-gate’. It was a significant development in the politics and political history of the late 20th century. And the outcome? Nixon resigned as 37th President of the United States on 9 August 1974.

But even as the Watergate scandal was unfolding, there was one group of media people who really smelt a rat – and I’m not talking about The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. No. I’m referring to a cohort of political cartoonists, especially Herblock and Oliphant, who had latched on to some of Nixon’s shady dealings very early on in the game, over 18 months before Nixon was forced out of office.

At the beginning of January 1973 I moved to Lima in Peru, and took a subscription to both Time Magazine and Newsweek. Once I’d read them I just put them to one side. However, when we moved apartments in August of that year, I took all the magazines with me (never could be sure why), and the pile continued to grow. In early 1974 I realized I had more than a year’s worth of magazines, most of which carried each week one or more political cartoons targeting the latest Watergate revelations – and beyond. What a cartoon treasure trove I’d assembled. It was then I decided to make a scrap book containing all the cartoons and related information I could get my hands on. Many of them hit the nail right on the head, and the cartoonists were well ahead of the other political pundits in exposing Nixon’s crimes.

Just click on Nixon’s image above to view my Watergate scrapbook. I think you’ll find it revealing and entertaining. It’s a large PDF file so it might take a little while to open.