Here are a couple of recent Trump-oriented works I have done this week. The first is really a photoshopped quicky I tweeted in response to right wing artist John McNaughton’s recently published painting, “Masterpiece.” This has become the most popular thing I have ever done, I think. Even The Huffington Post noticed it. Granted, I don’t think it’s the best thing I have ever done, but I’m glad people enjoyed it — or, in the case of Trumpanzees who called me a libtard, hated it.
The typical rejoinder was “Obama built the cages.” Okay, let’s take a look at that. Bea Bischoff wrote about Obama’s contribution to the problems of immigration detention a couple of months ago, and in every case Trump has managed to make every bad policy decision worse, and then added his own terrible ideas. People including children are dying under his watch, are living under horrendous conditions in concentration camps, are denied basics like soap and water (until a court order forced DHS to supply it) and are refused basic medical treatment, including the flu vaccine; now he wants to make detention indefinite. If you want to hold the US government going back to the Reagan years accountable for its treatment of immigrants, by all means propose a plan for doing so. Otherwise the whataboutism just serves the existing and worsening framework of policies that are violating human rights and destroying lives.
Anyhoo, while that was going on, the president decided to call American Jews who vote for Democrats “disloyal.” And when challenged on the blatant antisemitism of this statement, he doubled down, saying that to do otherwise would be “weak.” He had plenty to say about The Squad (Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, et al), but had zero to say about the ICE agent who drove through a group of Jews protesting his detention policies; or the white supremacist in Ohio who was arrested with a cache of guns before he massacred Jews; or the other white supremacist in Las Vegas with intentions to murder Jews; or any of the other four people with intentions to kill Muslims, Hispanics, Blacks, and possibly transgender people, wannabe shooters who were hyooge fans of the president (except for the one guy who is “fascinated” with mass killing and wanted a higher kill list; wtf.) Instead, the president took time to spread the “dual loyalty” talking point of both neo-nazis and the Israeli far right. Then he publicly thanked conspiracy theorist and birther Wayne Allyn Root for unironically praising Trump as “King of Israel” and the “second coming of God.”
Which all led me to this:
I am pretty sick of drawing this guy. That’s why I spend so much time drawing Fetch in his adventures in Otherworldly Goods. Even there he makes an appearance. American presidents, by virtue of the power the US has militarily and in the global economy, and due to the power the Constitution affords the executive branch (and that Congress has conceded the decades), always have an over-sized influence on the national conversation; their policies, and the ideologies that shape them, have long term effects on the lives we lead and how we define the eras we live through. Trump demonstrates that relying on the “good character” of a president is not enough to prevent abuses of that power; and he is pushing the country toward outright fascism. It will not be enough to vote him out of power. We need to seriously weaken the power of the presidency, for starters. A host of reforms — getting rid of the Electoral College, publicly financing elections, instant run-off voting, laws overriding the Citizens United decision — are only the start. We need a whole new politics.
