My Political Cartoon Fail

It’s early June, a little over four months since an Inauguration where the President-elect stood with his arm held stiffly at his side, not deigning to rest his hand on the Bible, while the Supreme Court Justice who had just months earlier overseen a decision granting him arguably dictatorial powers, read him in once again. That day recalled for me the first weeks of the Iraq War, most clearly in the sycophantic news coverage, and I decided to try something I’d always wished to have done then. The idea had been to sketch political cartoons in which a hapless dad (me) would try to explain to his young son (Nick or Stephen, both toddlers) innovations like extraordinary rendition, black sites, enhanced interrogation, and whoppers about weapons of mass destruction, all of which had somehow suddenly become the American Way. I never did that, mostly because I was too busy launching a clinic, diapering the boys, and looking after my aged, ailing parents.

But now, all that behind me, the clinic defunct, the boys out of college, dear parents long dead, and myself retired, I thought this time around it might be possible to attempt a political cartoon a day about the looming dictatorship America had somehow voted for. And during the first 100 days of the Presidency, I pulled it off. Created a side account on the liberal Twitter knock-off called Bluesky (benttrumpeter.bsky.social) and posted each sketch, sometimes two a day, each with the date attached. I didn’t hope for an audience, didn’t imagine that amateurish sketches tossed into the void of the Internet would matter to anyone but me, but like a kid throwing spitballs in class, considered them my little act of rebellion.

Scrolling through them now plays like an incredulous lap-dissolve. It’s a sobering sequence, not least because of the primitive sketches, of course, but also because the actions that would have seemed preposterous under any other President are haplessly catalogued one-by-one, day-by-day. There was just so much gob-smacking meanness, so much to satirize, though as the weeks went by the effort came to feel more and more like whistling past a graveyard. Also, I knew that attending so assiduously to Trump’s feral unfurling of executive orders fed right into his hands. If our Narcissist-in-Chief cares about anything more than money it’s holding our attention (learned recently that his iPhone screen pic is his own scowling headshot: he even craves his own attention!).

Also, coming up with the next day’s cartoon, choosing the right atrocity to sketch, scanning the web to make sure I wasn’t using the same image or conceit that some professional cartoonist had already posted, inventing a pointed yet (to my eyes at least) funny cartoon, and then executing the notion as best I could proved surprisingly tiring and time-consuming. On my precious daily woods walk with our dog, when before I’d always strive to be in the moment, alive to bird song and creek trickle, I fretted over Trump. Instead of working on the book I was trying to write, I doom-scrolled. While making dinner, I listened to NPR and fumed. Keeping up with this blitzkrieg of unconstitutional behavior was driving me crazy.

So, at the end of April, when we went on vacation for two weeks, I threw up my hands and stopped. Trump, of course, has not. Last night learned that new applicants for federal employment must sign a loyalty oath -- not to the Constitution but to his highness Trump himself -- and must even compose an essay offering their thoughts on how they might advance what’s being called the Trump Agenda if they are so lucky as to don one of his brown shirts. The last thing I saw before shutting my laptop yesterday was camo-wearing masked thugs marching through downtown Akron, assault weapons at the ready, civilians phone-shotting the event as if that would somehow matter.

I’ve chanted in the crowd at all four protests here in Richmond this year and will gladly join the next, scheduled for Trump’s birthday, when he’ll quite pompously mimic his heroes Putin and Kim Jung Il, standing on his phantom bone spur and saluting from his Presidential box as a military parade passes down Pennsylvania Avenue (Eisenhower, who vetoed such an idea when he was President, must be rolling in his grave). I wish I had the courage to go to DC and stand in front of that parade, daring a tank to roll over me like the young man in Tiananmen Square did. Maybe someone – a disgruntled military veteran? -- will do so. We keep waiting for someone to step up. Clearly local protests are not doing the job. And I’m beginning to think that even if we can survive as a constitutional republic until next year’s elections, that there will be no blue wave. This week’s polls show Republicans trusted 2-to-1 over Democrats on the economy. This after four months of Trump’s Wheel-of-Tariffs game (one of my cartoons), the rolling out of the budget-busting, billionaire rewarding, Medicaid trashing Big Beautiful Bill, and all the rest.

Scholars interviewed on our local liberal radio station WRIR have called for a nationwide general strike, which they say is the only power working people hold against an oligarchic government. But they do note that organizing such a thing takes time, takes educating the workers about how to go about it and what they risk in attempting it, takes coordination and cohesion. Not to mention courage. Maybe by fall, I hate to say, if the effects of the tariffs hit our pocket books, if the stock market tanks for real, if businesses shutter, if interest rates spike, a general strike will be conceivable. Of course, that opens the door to the Reichstag Fire option, where Stephen Miller’s wet dream of a general emergency declaration, the dissolution of Congress and the Courts, and the institution of martial law comes true.

We are in a pickle. Right now the lower courts are doing yeomen’s work in challenging Trump’s flood of illegal arrests and federal worker firings, but how long can they hold out, and what happens if he just shrugs and ignores their rulings, which seems already to be happening in the case of people sent to foreign prisons without trial? Why aren’t our Democratic leaders doing something, we ask? Why can’t we stop all this? And how has this horrible individual, certainly the luckiest criminal in history, harnessed the worst impulses of the rich and callow to march us so quickly into what looks more and more like a textbook dictatorship? In just four months?

One Bluesky post, in a wry comment on our passivity (one I wish I’d thought of during my cartooning weeks) sums up the situation nicely, I’m sad to say: “By now we are all well-boiled frogs.”