Political cartoonists on facing Donald Trump, again: ‘There is no consensus reality anymore’

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Zach Rabiroff | January 15, 2025

On the evening of Jan. 3, 2025, a vanishingly rare event occurred in the annals of journalism: a cartoonist made the news.

For the previous two months, since the election of Donald Trump to a second tenure as President of the United States, the headlines had been filled by the steady drip of media and technology barons paying physical and financial homage to the incoming president. On Nov. 21, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong made the pilgrimage to dine at Mar-A-Lago with the president-elect, leading to momentary speculation that he might play a role in the new administration. On Dec. 12, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (which had previously banned Trump from its platforms following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol) made $1 million personal donations to Trump’s nonprofit inaugural committee. A day later, Open AI’s Sam Altman did the same.

That the figures most lucratively demonstrating support for the incoming president were, in many cases, the gatekeepers of major media outlets passed the attention of no one, nor did the fact that ABC News, owned by the Walt Disney Company, reached a $15 million settlement with Trump over a defamation suit viewed by many as frivolous at best. It was in this climate that cartoonist Ann Telnaes posted on her substack an entry entitled “Why I’m quitting the Washington Post.”

For the past 30 years, Telneas has been among the most prominent of the nation’s political cartoonists, drawing for the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune, among other outlets. Her subsequent role as staff editorial cartoonist at the Post placed her in one of the most enviable positions among the nation’s political satirists. Yet in her post that evening, Telnaes wrote: “ I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations — and some differences — about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”

The cartoon in question, a rough of which Telnaes included in her Substack entry, showed Altman, Zuckerberg, Soon-Shiong, and Bezos (to whom Telnaes’ employers at the Post ultimately report) dutifully hoisting bags of money toward a towering statue of the new president; at his feet, lying prone in worship, is the sprawled form of Mickey Mouse.

Telnaes’ unmistakable implication was that the paper had rejected the cartoon specifically because of those being lampooned in it, though whether the issue was with the figures in all or with Bezos specifically Telnaes did not say. “To be clear,” she wrote, “there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer … and dangerous for a free press.”

Three weeks before Telnaes’ announcement, while I was in the midst of researching this article, I had spoken to her about the experience of censorship at the Post, and whether the paper’s ownership made it difficult to express criticism of Trump in her cartoons – after all, the Post had recently made headlines during the election when Bezos rejected the paper’s would-be endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. Back then, Telnaes was firm: she had never faced anything resembling suppression of her work from her editors or the paper’s owners. “I haven’t experienced censorship or pressure about the content of my work yet,” she told me, drawing specific attention to the published cartoon the paper ran reacting to their own non-endorsement of Harris.

At the time, the statement read to me as a clear dismissal of any instances of Telnaes’ work being compromised by her editors. In retrospect, perhaps the emphasis ought to have been placed on that word, “yet”.

Over the course of her career, Telnaes’ work has become a study in laconic understatement. Her drawings tend to eschew the hoary devices of written signs and emblazoned labels. Instead, she draws heavily from Robert Osborn, Gerald Scarfe, and the artists of mid-20th-century animation, relying on a simplicity of form and a strategic use of negative space to drive her daggers into a single, isolated subject.

More than most cartoonists, Telnaes’ most potent weapon is her grasp of art design as a means of satire. Her panels are arranged to draw the reader’s eye systematically toward the hapless subject at their center. In a cartoon drawn in November 2016, just before Trump’s first election, she depicts a wide-eyed Uncle Sam floating alone toward the gaping maw of a rock-hewn Trump: the implied motion of the boat tangibly suggesting the tension of a nation just about to be swallowed by disaster. Likewise, and even more brutally, her response to the Jan. 6 riots was a panel of Trump, standing ankle deep in a sea of blood red, tucked into a corner against a blank white wall, declaring, “Not my fault!!”

This is Telnaes at her best, relying on a mastery of form and composition to land her blows. Yet even for a cartoonist of her caliber, Trump has come to represent a kind of perpetually unkillable satiric white whale. Six years ago, when Telnaes published her book Trump’s ABC’s, depicting the president as a petulant toddler in faux-children’s book form, Chris Mautner lamented her reliance on easy jokes and facile targets, writing that, “This is another book tailor made for the choir, and the eloquence of the preaching doesn’t make it any less slight.” (Mautner is, today, the co-editor of TCJ.com, and Trump’s ABC’s is published by Fantagraphics: a double conflict of interest that may or may not negate inherent bias in this article.)

When I ask her about it now, Telnaes balks at the notion that either her own work in particular, or the field of political cartooning more generally, failed to meet the challenge of depicting Trump. “I think on the whole American editorial cartoonists were consistently portraying Trump as a threat to our democracy,” she says. To the extent that there was a failure in conveying the existential stakes of a Trump presidency, it belonged, in Telnaes’ view, to the broader media of which cartoonists are only minor, functionary part.

“I strongly feel the news media in general did a horrible job leading up to and during the first presidency – and their performance hasn’t improved much since,” she tells me. “The normalization of Trump by the news media during this election was inexcusable; they portrayed him as just another presidential candidate. Every interview, every article, any coverage of him should have included the fact that this man broke his presidential oath of office and tried to overthrow an election.”

The question of how cartoonists can say something more incisive within a media environment unwilling to focus on key truths is, she concedes, only likely to become more challenging now. “I think the situation is more dangerous now and yes, I see Trump’s presidency as an existential threat to democracy. Unlike going into his first term, the guy knows what he’s doing now.”

Consequently, Telnaes' handful of cartoons since the election have focused predominantly on the looming nature of Trump’s authoritarian plans. On Dec. 4, he leans toward a TV set showing scenes of South Korea’s attempted coup, thinking “I like it.” On Dec. 11, he looks into a gilded mirror and sees the reflected image of the Jan. 6 “QAnon Shaman.” Such daggers might not be likely to persuade the unpersuaded, but Telnaes doesn’t feel that they need to. Nevertheless, if they can manage that feat of education in spite of the obstacles, so much the better.

“I’ve never believed that I can change people’s minds with my editorial cartoons, especially now in this hyper-politicized environment,” she says. “I look at an editorial cartoon as a way to put a spotlight on injustices and call out hypocrites. The most I could hope for is to raise a question in readers’ minds.”

“Editorial cartoonists are not reporters,” she tells me. “But with so much of the American public only listening to one biased news source without applying any critical thinking, I feel more of a responsibility to include whenever I can actual quotes to support my point. This shouldn’t be the responsibility of editorial cartoonists but if the news media doesn’t present facts when covering stories where the narrative is being purposely changed, then we have to.”

The Washington Post, for its part, have steadfastly denied that censorship of content played any role in the rejection of Telnaes’ cartoon. In a statement provided to multiple outlets including the Comics Journal, Opinion Editor David Shipley said, “I respect Ann Telnaes and all she has given to The Post. But I must disagree with her interpretation of events. Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force. My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column – this one a satire – for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”

When I asked whether the paper’s ownership or management had played any role in rejecting the cartoon, the Post’s Chief of Communications Kathy Baird clarified further: “Absolutely not, this was all on the opinion side,” she said, citing a number of opinion pieces on the same topic the paper has run in recent months. (Contacted by the Comics Journal following her departure from the Post, Telnaes did not reply to requests for further comment.)

Nevertheless, in the days following Telnaes’ departure from the Post, Telnaes and her cartoon became something of a rallying point for her colleagues in the editorial cartooning field. On Jan. 4, the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists issued a statement reading in part, “The AAEC condemns the Post and their ethical weakness. Editorial cartooning is the tip of the spear in opinion, and the Post’s cowering further soils their once-stellar reputation for standing up and speaking truth to power. We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper.”

Meanwhile, cartoonist Steve Brodner spearheaded a push for other artists to post their own renderings of Telnaes rejected panel, posting his own version on his Substack, alongside a text piece stating, “Ann Telnaes, cartoonist for The Washington Post, resigned last night. The reason was the Post’s censoring of art by her that was too truthful for the editors of the paper that had adopted the motto, ‘democracy dies in darkness.’ ... When freedom of expression is denied by the formerly free press (which enjoys the protection of the U.S. Constitution) we see the clear shutting down of the nation’s ability to function as a democracy. If we remain quiet in the face of this ongoing threat, we must be comfortable with a Viktor Orban-style oligarchic authoritarian government, operating in the interests of a cabal, outside of politics and law.” Other artists – including Jack Ohman, Barry Blitt, Marc Murphy, Wes Tyrell, Lalo Alcaraz, Matt Weurker, Rod Emerson, Ted Littleford, John Cuneo, André Carrilho, Daniel Boris, Ben Sargent, and Emma Cook – followed swiftly.

It all amounted to a striking display of solidarity, as well as a possible case study in the fabled Streisand Effect. Whether the Washington Post had, indeed, rejected the cartoon for reasons of content was ultimately less vital to the moment than the fact that the capacity for cartoonists to be unfettered in their political statements was a thing of value to major newspapers, or at least that it ought to be.

In a radio interview with the BBC following her departure from the Post, Telnaes said that she had not been told by her editor that another cartoon on the same topic was being planned, and expressed larger concerns about the responsibilities of publications like the Washington Post beyond those of their owners and buyers. “We're talking about these billionaire tech titans. They control media companies and news. Even the social media companies, they also push news through, and that's where people get their news from. They do have obligations to a free press to make sure that it is a free press,” she said.

Meanwhile, other cartoonists had little hesitation speaking up on Telnaes’ behalf. Jack Ohman, a veteran cartoonist who worked on staff at the Portland Oregonian and Sacramento Bee before taking his current position at the San Francisco Chronicle, said that he has “absolutely no confidence in [the] assertion” that the Washington Post’s decision was not based on Telnaes’ political content.

“Are they killing any of [conservative Washington Post cartoonist Michael] Ramirez’ cartoons for content?” Ohman asks rhetorically. “Some of the crap he puts out is ridiculous. And they're okay with that. He can say whatever he wants as long as it's in his lane. … It’s like, what would Herblock do? I'm 64 years old. People my age, we all knew Herb, we admired Herb. He had stuck it to the man since 1929. He'd been at the Post since 1947. He literally was the guy [taking on] Joseph McCarthy. And now we're in a new McCarthy era.”

Matt Wuerker, the staff cartoonist for Politico, says that he isn’t surprised by Telnaes’ decision: “I’d heard from Ann over the last several years about her struggles with the editors at the Post,” he tells me. In particular, he says that the editorial judgments of David Shipley, who succeeded longtime editorial page editor David Hiatt in 2022, had posed a challenge. Wuerker is one of several cartoonists who tell me that Telnaes complained that her editors had instructed her not to draw politicians as animals, “Which,” Wuerker says, “is like asking a country singer to not write songs about pick up trucks and dogs.” According to a source within the Washington Post, however, Shipley’s directive applied to a prohibition on cartoons depicting any human figures as animals, not just politicians, a determination meant to avoid racially or otherwise offensive stereotypes.

Wuerker also notes as an example of Shipley’s editorial attitude that it was Shipley himself who penned the paper’s highly-publicized endorsement of Kamala Harris, which the newspaper’s leadership declined to publish, marking the first time in 36 years that they did not issue an endorsement for a presidential race. Following that decision, one third of the paper’s Editorial Board resigned as a show of protest, but Shipley remained in his position. A Washington Post spokesperson declined to comment on these statements.

Terry Mosher, the veteran cartoonist for the Montreal Gazette who draws under the pen name Aislin, has been a friend of Telnaes since the two artists met in the late 1990s. He, too, says, “It seemed to be a growing issue for her. The changes at the Washington Post have been kind of startling in terms of, she had a very good editor there [prior to 2022]. Some of us are blessed with editors who are very sympathetic and knowledgeable about the importance of satire and cartooning. But more recently, editors that have moved in are not that sympathetic. That's not a blanket statement, but I'm saying it sort of seems to be a trend.”

For Wes Tyrell, a longtime acquaintance of Telnaes’ who currently serves as the president of the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists, the warning goes well beyond the confines of Bezos’ Post. “There's a lot of dismissive responses to the [news]papers from the average Joe on the street, it seems,” he says. “And I think they'll be caught with their knickers down, as my grandmother used to say, when suddenly you go, ‘Oh, wow, this is somewhere in Eastern Europe from 40 years ago, and we can't do anything.’ Or certainly one only has to look in Russia right now [where] there's no such thing as a press that could say anything derogatory about the leader. And as someone who used to live for many years in Cuba, I know many great cartoonists there. Most of them don't even know of a life without the Castro family. So we could very reasonably have that in North America.”

When I ask Tyrell if he’s suggesting cartoonists are the canary in the coal mine for an end to the American free press, he agrees without hesitation. “It’s certainly not unrealistic,” he tells me.

If it’s true that democracy dies in darkness, maybe we should have asked if the killer was inside the house.

The longest and darkest political joke in American history began its setup on the evening of Jan. 6, 2021, hours after the President of the United States had egged on a violent mob as they attacked the U.S. Capitol in an unsuccessful bid to overturn the defeat of Donald Trump. It was then that the nation’s editorial cartoonists, scattered across websites, alternative weeklies, and legacy newspapers throughout America, began to grapple with the question of how to acknowledge and satirize the cataclysmic events of the preceding day.

They were doing so at a moment of, if not exactly jubilation, then at least exhausted relief. In the early morning hours of Jan. 7, Congress had reconvened to formally certify the election of Joe Biden. One week later, on Jan. 13, Trump was impeached for the second time in the House of Representatives with the condemnatory votes of 197 Republicans; there was some talk at the time that he stood a reasonable chance of having the verdict echoed by the Senate. Meanwhile, Trump found himself cut off from the soapbox of social media, which had always been the beating heart of the MAGA personality cult, with both Twitter and Facebook indefinitely suspending the outgoing president’s accounts in the days immediately following the bungled coup. It had been touch and go, but we had made it: as it had been at the end of Watergate, the system had proven its durability, the flag still waved, the Republic endured.

So the dominant theme of the cartoons that began to grace newspaper pages the following morning was overwhelmingly that a national fever was, at last, finally breaking. Here was Nancy Pelosi (as drawn by Steve Benson) obliterating a red-faced Trump with the literal force of an Abrams tank. Here was the GOP (as depicted by Matt Wuerker) destroyed by civil war under the weight of the MAGA movement. Here, in more than one cartoon, were Trump and his historical era as the modern-day Hindenburg, its bloated frame plummeting helplessly as America’s brief bout of fascism went up in flames. Emblematic of the moment was the work of Mike Luckovitch of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who depicted a metaphorical Trump Train careening into the Capitol steps, as its Republican passengers declared, “I’m guessing now’s a good time to get off.”

But wait, you haven’t even heard the punchline yet.

It is less than four years later, in December of 2024, one month after Donald Trump has been elected to a second term as U.S. president, alongside a unified trifecta of Republican government branches dominated almost without exception by his own personal loyalists. Mike Luckovich is back home in Atlanta, where he has lived and worked since 1989. He had forgotten about that Trump Train cartoon until I reminded him, and now he can’t help but let out a short, rueful laugh.

“Yeah, no. I have been totally surprised that a convicted felon could be elected president for a second time,” he says. “It just blows my mind. This guy was convicted of a sexual assault. To me, he’s just an evil cartoon character, and how this guy could have been elected again just shows that people are not paying attention to what is really going on. I mean, after the election, one of the most googled things was, ‘What is a tariff?” ‘Can I change my vote?’ It is really frustrating to me that America has become so … almost immature in the way it gets its information.”

Luckovich is an editorial cartoonist of the old school in more than one respect. As the cartoonist for more than three decades at Atlanta’s daily print newspaper of record, he belongs to an increasingly rarified category of artists, a fact of which Luckovich himself is well aware. “The industry has changed so much, and decreased in size as far as editorial cartooning goes,” he says. “There was never a huge amount of editorial cartoons to begin with, and now there’s a lot less. So I don’t know exactly what the future holds for editorial cartooning, but I feel very fortunate to have had this long of a career doing it.”

In many ways, Luckovich’s style is as much as time capsule of that earlier era as the newspapers themselves. If you summon in your head a mental image of what an editorial cartoon must look like, Lukovich’s work probably comes close to that Platonic form. His cartoons consist of single panels, each built around a solitary visual gag drawn from the day’s or week’s current events. His characters tend to take on the iconic stock forms of political shorthand, carrying over identifiable personas long after they’ve vanished from actual political discourse, like players in a Congressional comedia del arte: Republicans are elephants, Democrats are donkeys, and characters have a helpful tendency to carry labeled signs and shirts lest we be unable to suss out their metaphorical purpose.

During the heyday of printed editorial pages, this was the expected form of political cartooning, but Luckovich isn’t wrong to note that the field presently finds itself embattled. There is no definitive count on the number of working editorial cartoonists, but there is widespread agreement that their number is in decline.

“We’re like the red wolves of journalism,” says JP Trostle, “Minister of Information” for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, the field’s professional association. The AAEC currently lists 120 members on its rolls, but – since the organization represents a smattering of editors, historians, and other professions in addition to working cartoonists – even this might be overstating the number. By comparison, there were 230 members of the AAEC in 2014, and 300 in 2004. “The throughline,” says Trestle, “is pretty clear.”

This puts cartoonists like Lukovich in a somewhat precarious position, not only because of the shrinking number of venues in which to be published, but because their steady disappearance has meant a shrinking body of readership on which to depend. The comics, to his mind, have become increasingly a part of the same self-siloing of news sources among voters that led to Trump’s rise in the first place. “It’s hard, because there are just so many people in their own kind of information bubbles,” he says. “And if you’re not part of their information bubble, it’s hard to get your point of view out there. I mean, I was talking to someone about how on social media, people get stuff from algorithms. Whatever people like, they get thrown back at them, and so they’re getting news that is tailored to them. Their whole worldview is being thrown back at them, and they’re not getting a lot of new information. And people need to be educated, but our education system’s struggling. I don’t know what the answer to that is.”

There is something of this tone of bafflement at the public creeping into Luckovich’s work of late. One Dec. 12 panel depicted the American public, aging across the distance of a lifetime, still getting its tongue frozen to the metal pole of the Trump presidency. Another cartoon, grimmer in tone, showed Walt Kelly’s Pogo Possum with an “I Voted” sticker, repeating Kelly’s trademark punchline: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

There is a tone of resignation that creeps into Luckovich’s voice when I ask him about this. “Years ago I viewed America as sort of like, no matter who was in power, the plane was on automatic pilot. It was going to land safely. But now I don’t feel that way. Now I realize how fragile it is, and to see that Americans reelected this guy – it really is a little depressing to me. But I’m hoping we never know how things are going to turn out. I’m hoping that people are going to finally wake up and see that this guy is not representing anyone other than billionaires and himself.”

It’s almost startling, in 2024, to hear that kind of dogged optimism in the restorative potential of American common sense, but perhaps it makes the most sense emerging from one of the voices of a lingering legacy newspaper. Simply by virtue of appearing on paper every week without fail, the cartoonists of Lukovich’s epoch offer an implicit reassurance in dependability of long-term institutions. And that carries with it a responsibility to give confidence to the faithful few for whom the real-world news is worthy of daily devotion. At one point, I ask Lukovitch what he sees as the modern function of a political cartoonist.

“I think it’s just to bring some sense of what’s actually happening,” he says. “I did a book signing a year or two ago, and people were telling me, ‘Thank you for what you do, for saying I’m not really crazy, and that all this stuff going on is really insane.’ So I feel almost like a therapist, in a way, for some people, because they find comfort in my cartoons being able to skewer Trump or members of his administration. People find comfort in that. They realize, ‘Hey, I’m not nuts. This is really insane, what’s happening to our country.'"

For all his warnings about the siloization of information sources, Lukovich has managed to make an eloquent defense of the maligned concept of the echo chamber: if nobody else is willing to speak the truth, sometimes it still feels important to hear it through the echo.

Still, even the most skillful cartoonists are part of a larger media ecosystem, and that environment has increasingly presented an intractable problem. One of the odd paradoxes of Donald Trump is that while he is notoriously thin-skinned, he is also prone to an astonishing degree of self-mockery. The final weeks of his campaign found the candidate dressing up as a garbage man and a fry cook. More recently, he allowed his Vice President-elect JD Vance to tweet a frankly bizarre photoshopped image of a Norman Rockwell painting, with Trump and Vance as a happy husband and wife serving up a place of fresh-carved America at Thanksgiving dinner.

Clownishness, that is to say, is a part of Trump’s brand, both because his supporters enjoy it for its own sake, and because the appalled response it inspires offers the opportunity to own the libs. The key is that Trump wants the mockery to occur, but only on his own terms, and on his own schedule. And thanks to the news media’s happy compliance in following his news cycle lead, he’s had little trouble keeping that hold.

To see a typical cycle in action, let’s return to Ann Telnaes as a case study. It begins when Trump makes some appalling and often lying statement about the world – say, that immigrant-running “coyotes” are smuggling bound and gagged bodies across the southern border. Shortly thereafter, the reputable media (like the Washington Post) dutifully covers the statement, putting it at the center of the news cycle. A week or two later, a cartoonist like Telnaes uses that news cycle as a platform to skewer the president – cleverly, to be sure, but still on the basis of his own strategic lie two weeks earlier. Somewhere along the way, the basic element of truth has been lost within the mendacity of the liar. The satirist has unwittingly become a part of the PR machine.

Telnaes is aware of the paradox. “During Trump’s first term the political news cycle in D.C. changed drastically,” she says. “Whereas before you could expect about one big news story a week, with the Trump administration it was a constant barrage and 24/7 news coverage. For me there weren’t enough hours in the day to cover all the lies and outrageous actions so I’d try to be selective in choosing important subjects rather than just comment on silly stuff (like Trump’s Covfefe tweet).”

All of this would seem to suggest that cartooning, like the media more generally, can’t help but be pulled in favor of the political right along with the nation’s figurehead. Yet editorial cartooning remains, oddly enough, largely the province of left-leaning artists. In the popular imagination, conservative cartooning is exemplified on one end by Mallard Filmore delivering melancholy monologues about budget deficits like a Regan-pilled Howard the Duck, and on the other by the weirdo alt-right fantasies of Ben Garrison, whose panels are entirely indistinguishable from an elaborate left-wing satirical bit.

One of the handful of establishment conservative artists in the field is syndicated cartoonist Al Goodwyn, who has been plying his trade since first George Bush was in office. As with many cartoonists of his era, Goodwyn’s style is as conservative as his politics, hewing as faithfully to the traditional conventions of the genre as Luckovich does. His viewpoint, however, is unmistakably conservative: his targets over the past several weeks have included Hunter Biden, New York City DA Alvin Bragg, and young people wearing Luigi t-shirts. So it’s surprising to hear Goodwyn speak with candor about the dearth of conservatives in his profession.

“I really do believe that liberals, the way the brain works, they’re more creative,” he says. “You see it in Hollywood. You see it in literature. You see it in art and cartooning.” Goodwyn, for his part, sees himself as something of a cartoonist of the old school, in that while there is no denying the clear positions of his editorializing, he at least tries to make a good faith effort at giving credence to rationality.

Like most Republicans, Goodwyn is firmly a supporter of Donald Trump now, but he was critical of him both in 2016, and in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riots. Even now, Goodwyn stands by the latter position. “I thought [Trump’s conduct] was horrible,” he says. “I thought certainly the prosecution of it for four years was a bit extreme, but at the time, that was a bad, bad scene.”

Fundamentally, though, Goodwyn just doesn’t see Trump’s threat to America as particularly existential. Partly, it’s simply a matter of actuarial realities: “I know people are worried he’s going to want to be dictator for life, but I have no worries about that,” Goodwyn says. “He’s going to be, what, 84 or so when he gets out? [Trump will be 82 years old in 2024] ... I could be wrong, but he was duly elected. Let him carry out his term. I don’t think very many people either publicly or privately are going to tolerate bucking the two-term limit for the presidency.”

This confidence in the resolute strength of basic political institutions explains much of Goodwyn’s willingness to focus his lampoonings on missteps from the left, rather than constitutional threats from the right — just as it perhaps explains the media’s (to say nothing of Democrats’) evident lack of urgency in talking about threats to democracy. The world that Goodwyn’s cartoons occupy is the world that political cartoons have always occupied, where both parties stumble and fumble, elections happen freely and dependably every four years, and a basic notion of common sense and national decency might temporarily take a nap, but will always awaken in time for the next midterm.

Implicit in this worldview is a belief that whatever bizarre and outlandish tangents our political discourse might take, it will, pigeon-like, return home to the shared sense of national values with which it began. Without that shared ground on which to stand, that universally-recognized body of legal, political, and constitutional realities that underlie American patriotism, no editorial humor is realistically possible.

In the words of cartoonist Alex Norris: oh no.

Every joke, according to the novelist Arthur Koestler, is at heart an argument between two worlds: one made of truths, the other of lies. In 1964, Koestler wrote The Act of Creation, one of those self-styled modern supplements of Aristotle’s Poetics that, among other things, attempted to diagram and diagnose humor at enough tedious length to defeat the entire point.

Koestler was dissatisfied with previous definitions of comedy and its function, which went as far back as the Greeks themselves. It was not (pace Aristotle) merely a release valve for built-up tension, nor was it (as Thomas Hobbes, typically, argued) a means by which the more powerful mock and preen over the weaker. Rather, jokes depended on what Koestler termed bisociation: the unexpected collision between two mutually exclusive systems of thought. Every joke, by this system, is a kind of logical syllogism. First, the thesis, rooted in what we know about observable reality, and based on the cause and effect we have learned to trust (a man pulls the trigger on a gun). Then, the antithesis, a blatant and uninvited violation of those rules and norms (a flag reading BANG comes out). The synthesis is our own response as readers as we wrap our brains around this new hybrid world – this we call laughter. Koestler writes:

The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms – as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible.

The key distinction is that word “permanent." Unlike art or science, which are born when an unknown system of knowledge is fused forever with our own, comedy is a fundamentally conservative craft – it ropes in abnormal realities only to expose their abnormality. The end of laughter is the return to our own steady state of being: we are reaffirmed in our knowledge of the world precisely because other worlds are seen to be so utterly bizarre.

This has important implications when it comes to political cartooning, and especially when it comes to the newspaper that traditionally housed it. After all, no better source of affirmation about the logical, known world could be devised than the traditional daily newspaper. In essence, the news and the editorial cartoon acted as the elaborate setup and punchline for a long joke. The paper’s hard reporting and evidentiary knowledge of facts provided readers with their basis for an empirical reality: the setup. The editorial cartoon punctured that reality by exposing some element of current events that deviated from it in some wild, exaggerated way: the punchline. It was a symbiotic relationship. Cartoonists acted as the final backstop in the newspaper’s assertion of reality as it is: by exposing the horrors and absurdities of those politicians who violated the norms and logic of the American system, they implicitly reminded us why the system was worth preserving.

No surprise, then, that the great heyday of the political cartoon coincided precisely with the golden age of the postwar American press. Newspaper circulation in the United States reached its all-time peak in 1984, with 63,340,000 reaching homes and subway commutes on a daily basis. That year, a sampling of newspapers with salaried staff cartoonists included not only such usual suspects as the Washington Post, but also the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the East Grand Rapids Cadence, and the Cleveland, Texas Advocate. These were the years between Watergate and Whitewater, when the force of investigative journalism could be such that Robert Redford was cast as a beat reporter in a major motion picture, and when the pens of Garry Trudeau and Pat Oliphant could cause the mighty to tremble.

Precisely how and when this golden age began to fade is a matter of debate, but a single-word answer would be: technology. Twenty-five years before he offered his theory of humor, Arthur Koestler posited a theory of political history. At the end of his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon, the protagonist, a prisoner awaiting execution in a Soviet prison, sketches out a logical process behind the rise and fall of governments:

[E]very Technical advance leads to a further complication of the economic framework, to new factors, new connections that the masses are at first unable to comprehend. And so every leap of technological progress brings with it a relative intellectual regression of the masses, a decline in their political maturity. At times it may take decades or even generations before the collective consciousness gradually catches up to the changed order and regains the capacity to govern itself that it had formerly possessed at a lower stage of civilization…

The invention of the steam engine brought a period of rapid objective progress, and as a consequence, a period of equally rapid subjective political regression. The industrial era is still historically young, the gap still very great between its enormously complicated economic structure and the intellectual awareness of the masses. It is therefore understandable that the relative political maturity of people in the first half of the twentieth century is less than it was two hundred years BC or at the conclusion of the feudal period.

Cable news first came into its own during the Gulf War in 1991, but it took its next great leap in the middle of the decade with the launch of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel. Run by former Reagan and Nixon advisor Roger Ailes, the network was designed from the outset as a mouthpiece for a loud and consistent right-wing counterpoint to the Clintonian center-left. The network’s growth over the next decade was tied intimately to fortunes of the fate of various campaigns against the Democratic party and the left more generally: on the day of Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, the network registered what was then an all-time high of single day ratings. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which the network both covered and overwhelmingly supported, ratings jumped by 300%; by 2004, it was by some magnitude the highest-rated news network in America.

Concurrent with this was the initially subterranean development of a right-wing news ecosystem within another new technological terrain, the World Wide Web. Matt Drudge’s gleefully tabloid-toned Drudge Report launched in 1995, piggybacking on the same aura of Clintonian scandal as Murdoch’s Fox by drawing widespread attention to conspiracy theories like the murder of Vince Foster. More were to follow over the next two decades: Newsmax, the Daily Caller, Breitbart News. The last of these launched in 2007, one year after the debut of Twitter – one of a number of newborn social media sites that would now vie for the attention and informational oxygen of American readers. The field was growing both more crowded and less discernible all at once.

Pressed by so much new competition from so many different sides, bled dry by the loss of ad revenue thanks to the growth of influential web sites like Craigslist, newspaper circulation began a precipitous decline. In 2000, its aggregate number was just under 55.8 million. In 2009, it was 45.7 million. In 2020, just under 21 million. By 2024, the news ecosystem was both wildly fragmented and politically polarized. In November of this year, one in five surveyed Americans reported getting their news from social media influencers, a number that approached 40% of those under age 30. During the election, more than 60% of voters said that TV news was their primary source of information that informed voting, while more than 20% said it was the internet. Only 4% relied principally on the printed word.

We have seen what this has meant for the number of staff cartoonists during this period, but the problem is more profound than raw numbers suggest. If Koestler was right – if every joke depends on our shared reliance on the same reality – then a world without a common set of facts is a joke consisting only of punchlines. Every cartoonist is slipping on a banana peel with no ground to land on.

Steve Brodner has had time to think about all of this. Since the 1970s, Brodner has been among the most respected and preeminent visual political satirists in America, having published in virtually every major, respectable publication during that time – the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, GQ, Esquire, The New York Times, Playboy, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Times are among his credits. He is, in fact, one of the handful of artists in the field for whom cartooning is almost certainly too restrictive a characterization: though his work blends like David Steadman and David Levine, Brodner’s own style is a hybrid of realistic portraiture and the tragicomic grotesque that is equally funny and unsettling. When I speak to him shortly after the election, he is just finishing the preliminary sketch for a large project he is doing for The Nation: a 40-portrait illustration of Trump’s second inauguration as it descends into another Capitol riot. I ask him what his first reaction was when he heard that Trump had won a second term.

“My reaction was to go to bed,” he says. “The idea of Trump even running was an absurdity. I wouldn’t allow myself for a second to even consider the possibility that Trump could be president again…But on top of that, I was watching cable news. I was watching all these people on CNN and MSNBC delivering kind of happy talk. And I realized at that moment that I’ve been deceived by a commercial operation, which is mainstream news – corporate media – to keep me going.”

For Brodner, even after decades of observing the tumultuous ebb and flow of American politics, it was a shattering blow. “I’m 70 years old,” he says. “I have been a political observer since the 1960 campaign. That’s, what, 60, 64 years of observing politics on one level or another. And I always believed that from the Civil Rights era until now, the better angels of our nature would finally prevail. And this destroyed my belief in that – my belief in the essential democracy of the United States.”

It’s not just that Brodner is disappointed in the rest of America; he’s equally disappointed in himself. He, too, had allowed himself to become trapped in the intellectually deadly echo chamber of corporate cable news. “I should have sought out media that was giving me a broader view of where the country had moved. And I was viewing the frivolous nature of most media as something most people would see as frivolous. And I didn’t allow myself to understand that if Fox News has a good night and has 4 million views, and Joe Rogan has 60 million listeners, that maybe I was watching the wrong shit.”

For people like Brodner, sinking into the comfort of pre-election Rachel Maddow was a momentary lapse. For those within Trump’s orbit, falling under the sway of rightist media is a far more existential concern. As Brodner puts it, “People today are able to choose their own reality. … Today, if you’re a Fox News viewer, you may see things that are heroic as antiheroic. You may see things that are demeaning, and disgraceful, and appalling as fantastic.”

“Did you ever see the movie Network?” he asks me. “Remember Howard Beale, the anchorman who loses his mind, and in one of his rants he says to the camera, 'Television will give you any line of bullshit you want.’ That’s an old movie that came out in the ‘70s. This is now 50 years later, and it came true. Cable and the internet wound up giving people exactly what they want. You can tailor the bullshit, make yourself really happy, and keep your narrative going. So I think that’s where Trump comes in. Trump is an incident in an accident. He didn’t cause this: he is a wiley businessman who can read the room. He enjoys power, he enjoys wealth, he enjoys importance. He is a small human being who is looking for opportunities to appear to be big. He's an opportunist the way a parasite can be an opportunist, the way an opportunistic virus finds the perfect place to breed and grow and take over an organism. And I think that's what we see here.”

Brodner is quick to point out that the development of this environment is, paradoxically, a result of an increasing democratization of the media landscape overall, even as the old guard of media sources – legacy newspapers, cable TV channels, magazines – are gobbled up by a smaller and smaller number of right-leaning billionaires.

Reflecting on the cartoons of Thomas Nast, whose work in the later 19th century for Harper’s Weekly is famously credited with helping bring town Boss Tweed and Horace Greeley, Brodner says, “Nast was that powerful because you had very limited media. There was nothing other than Harper’s Weekly, the Police Gazette. You had Harper’s Bazaar for fashions. And then you had these startup papers and nothing else.”

Today, by contrast, “When some bodybuilder like Joe Rogan can persuade men that he is someone to look up to, and have a website or a blog where he gives them the impression that he’s talking to them and is like them, you suddenly have a free for all, which is much more democratic. Since Nov. 5, I’ve gone to just reading journalists separate from corporate media who I respect very much. I still read the New York Times. I still read the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones."

Paradoxically, then, the very system of technological innovation that enabled Trump’s rise also opens the ultimate opportunity for his fall: because communication is infinitely democratic, and because reality, at the end of the day, can and must assert its own existence, there is yet some cause for eventual hope. There are limits to this optimism, especially considering the sheer scale of media consolidation in the hands of Trump’s richest supporters. Among Brodner’s past and present employers, the Los Angeles Times is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong (net worth: $6.2 billion), one of the president-elect’s most outspoken supporters, whose actions during and since the election have been a cavalcade of increasingly absurd self-abasement: squelching his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, proposing an computer-generated “bias meter” to gauge the political tone of his staff’s reporting, and proposing that any editorial critical of Trump be required to run side-by-side with one defending him. Jeff Bezos (net worth: $251 billion), owner of the Washington Post, attracted widespread ire and a quarter million cancelled subscriptions when he vetoed his own paper’s endorsement of Harris in October (Bezos’ Amazon, meanwhile, would subsequently announce that they were making and theatrically releasing a documentary lauding the achievements of Melania Trump). And once-stalwart Newsweek and Time are now owned by vocal supporters of Trump and his party.

And yet, for those like Brodner who retain a platform either at or in spite of the hostile media environment, there remains ample opportunity to be seen and heard. For all the right-wing noise of the modern news climate, the internet has opened the potential for political speech (for the moment, anyway) to anyone who cares to use it. Social media and websites can be toxic, but they can also be freeing. In this world, even the lowly satirist has a duty.

“Tell the truth,” Brodner says. “Every day, tell the truth. Document the atrocities. Draw the faces of people who are being deported. Here’s the thing that we can do: we can occupy the space that could be a place of silence in the face of repression and tyranny; the space that could be used to support authoritarian dictatorship. I’m going to say it today, and I’m going to say it tomorrow, and it’s a pebble in the lake. Somebody will see that, and it will give them courage to say it, and so on, and so on. … I think it’s going to be very hard when people are in pain, when people are hurting. And I think there’s a limit to bullshit we’re going to see.”

It’s a convincing argument. It may well come to pass. But I can’t help but think of what another cartoonist, Jules Feiffer, said during Trump’s first term: “As Martin Luther King famously said, you have these fights over and over again, but the arc goes toward freedom. Well, I’m not so sure the arc necessarily has to go that way.”

Long before Twitter, long before Bezos, when the grinning specter of Ronald Reagan was as menacing a vision as the Republican right could muster, a new kind of media was emerging. Between the late ‘70s and the early ‘90s, a bumper crop of alternative weekly newspapers started sprouting in metropolitan centers across the United States. The Seattle Stranger, the LA and SF Weekly, the Houston and New York Press: these new alt weeklies took as their basic model the venerable shit-raking ethos of New York’s Village Voice, but they brought to it a distinctly 1980s twist. These new papers combined a sincere desire for local, honest journalism with a sneering cynicism that suggested the inherent ridiculousness of the entire civic endeavor to begin with. They captured, in other words, what would rapidly become the default cultural stereotype of the Gen X generation: deeply disaffected from the political culture, suspicious of sincerity, but unwilling to do anything as uncool as get genuinely angry about it.

In time, this kind of cynicism would prove volatile, insomuch as it could be captured by right-wing hucksters just as easily as left-wing punks. Indeed, by 2024, Gen X voters supported Trump in greater proportion than any other generational cohort. But in those early days of the '80s and '90s, there was a raw creative exuberance to the alt weeklies, and the young cartoonists they cultivated were no exception. Matt Groening’s Life in Hell, Tony Millionaire’s Maakies, and Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek helped pioneer a new aesthetic for weekly comic strips, combining the raggedy look and feel of the classic ‘60s undergrounds with an intellectual self-awareness closer in tone to RAW Magazine. It wasn’t long before they had a top-flight editorial cartoonist of their own.

For a certain generation of politically engaged comic fans, the name Tom Tomorrow still has a certain unmistakable luster. Since 1986, Tomorrow (real name Dan Perkins) has been the artist of This Modern World, the aesthetic ur-text of alt weekly political satire. Tomorrow’s work is strikingly different from the classic one-panel editorial gag. Instead, the template of a This Modern World strip is built on a grid of blocky panels inhabited by clip-art-styled figures depicting newsworthy figures or everyday people on the street. Tomorrow’s characters do not address one another with dramatic naturalism (à la Doonesbury), but instead face squarely at the reader to state their political absurdities with blunt directness. They might also direct their bloviating toward the strip’s interlocutor, a visored penguin named Sparky who serves as something of Perkin’s self-insert. The strip is, and long has been, brutally effective, chiefly because of its utter lack of artifice or guile. Its characters simply say what they mean at all times, without regard for wit or verbal cleverness, their punchlines are both funny and devastating. The joke is that nobody is ever kidding.

For readers like me, who grew up in the shadow of George W. Bush and the War on Terror, Tomorrow’s strip’s skewering the politics of Iraq War and FISA surveillance remain the stuff of legend: like Trudeau in the ‘70s, they could achieve the rare feat of being comic strips that actually colored and influenced the lens through which we viewed our political era. So influential was This Modern World to me, in fact, that when I first introduce myself to the cartoonist behind it, I make a stupid error: I call him Tom.

“You can call me Dan,” he says politely. “That’s my real name.”

Tomorrow – or, rather, Perkins – doesn’t have a lot to second-guess about his approach to Trump. Unlike those cartoonists who struggled to find a grip on the preternaturally abnormal president, This Modern World’s style was perfectly suited to the no-bones honesty of an authoritarian dunce. A strip from August 2017 entitled “The Ol’ Trump Two-Step” diagnosed the cycle of media enabling behind Trump’s rise long before the penny dropped for many more respectable journalists. Another, from the height of the social ferment of 2020, was frank in acknowledging Trump’s desire for military rule. So if Perkins has reservations now, it’s simply because he isn’t sure if anyone is still listening.

“I’ve been reading over some of the old stuff, and it still holds up,” he says. “It’s just that it’s all fairly obvious, and I think a lot of people this time are just going to be tuning out entirely. I’ve just noticed a lot of my friends don’t want to talk about it or think about. I mean, I’ve been trying not to think too much about it myself, just because of the sheer, oppressive weight of the realization that I’ve got to go through all of that all over again.”

One thing Perkins is keen to avoid is the tendency to chase Trump through his endless news cycles, a trap which even he was unable to sidestep last time around. “I really just cannot do another four years of this sort of rapid response cartooning: Trump posts something on social media that’s insane, and everyone’s in a furor about it for 12 hours until the next thing he does, and you’re trying to keep up with it. I don’t know if there’s a way to step back and look at larger things. And one thing I’ve been thinking a lot is that our information ecosystem is just completely broken right now, and there is no consensus reality anymore.”

There it is again: that vertiginous sense that satire is impossible in a world where no one can agree what reality is left to satirize. Perkins continues: “That has definitely shifted for me in the 30, 35 years I've been doing this. The old guys, their purpose was to break up a block of what would otherwise be a broadsheet full of text. You know what I mean? They just existed to provide a graphic element on the editorial page. And as we've moved from print to online, that was lost. That became something that didn't matter so much. So you have this art form that largely existed just to provide a graphic element to make a page look more interesting, and now it's just like it's been cut loose from its moorings. It has no real purpose in the world anymore.”

The crisis, however, goes well beyond cartooning. Comedians, with their immediate gauge of reader response, are just the canaries in the fascist coal mine. “Newspapers matter less and some guy ranting on TikTok or some podcaster matters so much more,” Perkins says. “I mean, essentially we are, as a society, sort of turning our backs on expertise and shared consensus reality. The fact that an anti-vaxxer might be heading HHS. This is crazy stuff. And I've always been a critic of the mainstream media, but I think we're going to miss them when they're gone.”

For his own part, Perkins is resigned to the next however-many years with the kind of weary resignation that befits an icon of Gen X cartooning. “I’m 63 years old,” he says. “How long am I going to do this anyway? This next administration is either going to invigorate me or crush me, and the jury is still out.”

With its two-tiered grid and deliberately interchangeable figures, This Modern World was one of the first strips to effectively bridge the gap between traditional print publication and now more widespread readership of the internet. Many more alt cartoonists followed in his wake; Ted Rall was one of them.

Since beginning his career at the NY Weekly in the late ‘80s, Rall has had what might be politely described a controversial career in comics. In the late ‘90s, statements that Rall made in the Village Voice accusing Art Spiegelman of nepotism resulted in a messy series of arguments and legal actions (none of which directly involved Spiegelman himself). In 2004, he was dropped by the Washington Post’s website for a cartoon comparing George W. Bush voters children with intellectual disabilities. Between 2015 and 2019, he was engaged in a series of legal actions with the Los Angeles Times after Rall was dropped from their rolls for allegedly lying about a jaywalking ticket he received some years prior.

Nevertheless, Rall remains, due chiefly to the reach of web publications and his own website, one of the more influential and of the modern alt-editorial cartoonists, and his treatment of Trump since election has been unstintingly brutal. Rall’s strategy is simple: talk about Trump by refusing to talk about him.

“I didn’t care for caricaturists [at the time I got into the field],” Rall says. “One of the big cartoonists at the time was Pat Finn – and now I really appreciate what he does, but at the time I always thought it was cheap to make fun of, say, Richard Nixon because he had a ski slope nose. I was like, ‘the fact that he’s prolonging the Vietnam War is why we should be making fun of him, not because of the way he looks.’”

Consequently, Rall has pursued an oblique strategy toward Trump, especially heading into his second term. Rather than attempt to depict the president himself, he illustrates little vignettes of panic as Trump’s actions have rippling consequences on the hapless victims of the world at large. The results can be blunt, even if their bluntness sometimes have questionable comedic impact. Some panels land with the relative subtlety of a comic strip Pete Seger song: A Dec. 3 cartoon in which a child asks her parents for Christmas presents in advance because of Trump’s tariffs, for instance, or one from Nov. 29 in which Biden comfortably promises a seamless transition process to Adolf Hitler. Even so, the impact is no doubt greater than attempting vainly to make the president’s spray tanning the subject of a punchline.

Rall is aware that he is not a universal taste among cartoonists, not least because the targets of his satire are just as often too-moderate Democrats as too-fascist Republicans. But he balks at the notion that policy ideas and social systems are a less promising target for satire than Trump’s gut-line. “I’m not really on the Democratic team, and if the Democratic president is doing things that I don’t approve of, I’m going to call him out,” Rall says, mentioning specifically the criticism he received for cartoons mocking Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. “But for me, the ideas come first. I think a lot of the criticism of Donald Trump fundamentally comes down to style. People don’t like the cut of his jib. They don’t like the way he dresses, the way he talks. And, I mean, he’s really crass, there’s no question about it. But I think if you get distracted by all that, you’re kind of missing the point. If Joe Biden is comparatively more polite, does it make any difference to the people of Gaza?”

To an extent, Rall speaks in the familiar language of the activist artist – there is no mistaking that his comedy is in the service of political agitprop, independent as it is. Yet for all his emphasis on ideas and education, Rall is under few illusions that cartoonists are themselves effective agents of social change. “It’s meant to spark,” he says of his work. “Part of being entertaining is to be thought-provoking. Ridicule is obviously an incredibly powerful force, but it’s hard to ridicule someone who ridicules himself like Donald Trump. He doesn’t take himself seriously at all. I don’t think people who support Donald Trump think of him as a man with gravitas and dignity.”

Better, he thinks, to avoid the immediate particulars and focus eyes on future. “Look, in my ideal world, there would be a revolution,” Rall says. “And to me, Donald Trump, and for that matter the fucked-up democratic election process that we just witnessed, are all symptoms of a collapsing, and decaying, and rotten system that's falling apart. So I like my readers to think about, is there is life outside of these two major parties. … I always think about what Lenin said after he failed in [the] 1905 [revolutionary attempt in Russia]: 'The job of the revolutionist is not to make revolution. The job of the revolutionist is to identify revolution when it's happening.'

“I think that’s right. People like me, we can't make anything happen. All we can do is comment, and be one small cog in that machine, that maybe helps to move the needle one way or the other. It's sort of like, when I grew up, you could smoke in a maternity ward; now you can't smoke in a public park or at the beach. Why did that change? Suddenly 330 million people, including those who smoke, all had a consensus that things had to change. So it does happen, and I think people have to get to the point where they just realize, this is ridiculous.”

Somewhere between the traditional caricatures of the printed page and the latter-day alt ethos of Tom Tomorrow is Jen Sorensen. Sorensen is another cartoonist who has effectively straddled the line between print and web cartooning: she has appeared in bastions of the print media like The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice, but is also a staple of internet pioneers like Daily Kos, The Nib [now sadly defunct], Politico, and Alternet. She has succeeded, in both realms, at proving herself to be one of the most adept and respected of her generation of cartoonists: over the past two decades, Sorensen has been the recipient of the Reuben Award, the Herblock Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and more besides, and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.

During Trump’s first term, Sorensen steadily evolved her depiction of Trump himself, a comic creation that transforms in her art, over the course of four years, from a recognizable human being in a bad hairpiece to a bizarre aardvarkian creature sloughing up from the uncanny valley. Sorensen’s Trump is perhaps 50% puckered lips, thrust forward in a kind snout beneath a menacing unibrow and beady eyes. He had become, for better or worse, the star of the show, and as far as comedy was concerned, there’s no doubting that it worked. So it’s somewhat surprising to hear that Sorensen, too, has been rethinking her approach. “The usual tools of satire,” Sorensen says with a sigh, “are rendered useless when politicians are doing such extreme things that you can't, it defies parody.”

“I think back in the beginning there was a sense that everyone was operating on the same playing field and in the same reality,” she explains. “And now you have this fragmented reality where people are not even starting from the same place anymore. So first you might need to just establish the facts of the situation before you even get to the satire part. And then the clownish behavior, and the extreme policies, and rhetoric. I mean, really you can't exaggerate it because it's already so ridiculous. So I guess in my case, what interests me intellectually is just examining the ideas and the language that's enabled us to get to this point. To me, it's kind of boring, just saying, ‘Trump's bad. This is bad. This thing they're doing is bad.’ It's not even interesting to me anymore.”

Where Rall and Tom Tomorrow have made an effort to aim their sights on Trump’s actions and policies, Sorensen is most fascinated by his language itself. “My background in college, I studied cultural anthropology,” she explains. “I think there are certain rhetorical ways in which they've advanced their ideology that a lot of people seem to be oblivious to. For example, this whole narrative that informs their ideology that the colleges are out of control. They're bad. They're teaching our kids dangerous lessons about inequality. And it's all framed in this language of ‘wokeness’ and ‘all the kids today.’ The idea that the left or liberals are always at fault. We're always demonized.

"You see people now even blaming the left for the rise of oligarchs who are going to be running the nation. This reactionary narrative with all this terminology, these buzzwords that are used to stop any kind of rational argument. You've had this absolute moral panic and hysteria about transgender people that's been swallowed without question by mainstream media outlets, and not seen as the divisive, strategic wedge issue that it clearly is. So when I talk about the ideas, it's the language they're using, and the ideas that are parroted and repeated, sometimes I think unknowingly, by people who should know better.”

Sorensen is discussing these concepts in the abstract, but she is keenly aware that the consequences are immediate for her and others in her field: the threat of censorship looms. “The other thing going forward is you almost certainly have a changing legal landscape,” Sorensen says. “There’s HR 9495 [a bill which passed the House this past Congress], which is the bill that would strip nonprofit status from various organizations who are deemed to be sympathetic to terrorists. And this is obviously going to be abused and applied very broadly.

“Then the other thing people haven’t been talking about so much is the case of New York Times Company v. Sullivan [the 1964 case that established limitations on what speech constitutes defamation against public figures], which the right has been wanting to overturn at the Supreme Court for many years. That would open up the floodgates if they do overturn that – you would see a shifting legal environment for satire and parody, not to mention actual reporting. And there’s another case Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, and it was a major victory to preserve the ability to use humor to mock powerful people. I think that going forward, you might see a shifting legal landscape where some of this is eroded, and any kind of humorist might need to change their approach. I am hoping that’s not the case. I think we’re going to have to see what happens.”

This is a matter worthy of further attention. Let’s take a moment to examine it. Let us consider the question of Larry Flynt in the light of Donald J. Trump.

Perhaps the earliest recorded instance of Donald Trump in cartoon form appeared in the Doonesbury strip dated Sept. 14, 1987. In it, character Mike, the strip’s sympathetic namesake, is bemused over his morning coffee to hear a recognizable voice declare over the TV his interest in the US presidency with the words, “...and I think most Americans want walk-in closets.” “Donald Trump?” thinks Mike.

Trudeau was responding to an open letter that Trump had published as an advertisement in the New York Times decrying America’s weak-willed foreign policy leaders who had “let our great country be laughed at,” which was widely interpreted as the possible first step toward a Trump presidential campaign. On Sept. 16, Trudeau began a sustained sequence of mock Trump press conferences, beginning with the would-be candidate declaring: “I’m Donald Trump, and I’m not running for president! I’m just a billionaire developer exercising his right to float trial balloons! If I were running, though, it’d be as an original, as a beloved archetype – the American landlord!” Trump was reportedly displeased, calling Trudeau a “loser” and “total jerk” – or so claimed Trudeau when he later collected the strips for a book in 2016; no contemporary source for such statements is readily forthcoming.

Around the same time, and in response to the same news cycle, Berkeley Breathed of Bloom County fame began a celebrated sequence in which Trump’s brain is transplanted into the raggedy, hairball-inflicted feline body of the character Bill the Cat, and in whose body he attempts to mount a (failed) bid for the US presidency. Trump became a fixture in Breathed’s work throughout the rest of the 80s and early 90s, and when Trump became to ramp up his campaign for the Republican nomination, Breathed was inspired to lift himself out of a decade of retirement to revive Bloom County solely for the purpose of mocking the soon-to-be president.

And this time, Trump was, belatedly, moved to respond. In 2017, Breathed posted a letter on his Facebook page, appearing to be from Trump’s attorney Marc Kasowitz, instructing the cartoonist to stop using the president’s image in his work: “To use language that you might understand (per my client’s wishes) we will ‘have your [word blacked out] in a sling by lunch.’” When a reporter from Buzzfeed tweeted about the letter later that day, someone from Kasowitz’s firm denied it; this was the full extent of their public comments.

Nevertheless, a day later Breathed made a new Facebook post, stating that he would indeed cease using the president’s image: “While it’s a good time to make America great again, it’s not a good time to be sued.” The episode was bizarre, and it remains unclear to this day whether the initial cease and desist letter was or was not genuine. But clearly, between 1987 and 2017, more than a few things had changed profoundly in the climate around cartoon mockery of Donald Trump. And to better understand how and why that happened, you’ll need to shut the door: we’re going to look at Hustler Magazine.

In 1983, The Reverend Jerry Falwall, televangelist, right-wing activist, and Chancellor at Liberty University, was at the height of his power and fame. Falwall’s Moral Majority activist group had claimed personal credit for the election of Ronald Reagan at the beginning of the decade, and the group’s leader was playing a leading role in shaping the Republican platform heading into the following year’s presidential race. It was in this climate that Larry Flynt’s Hustler (with a monthly circulation of just over 2 million, approximately 1/3 the claimed membership of the Moral Majority) ran a mock ad – a parody of a Campari liquor ad in which Falwall spoke tenderly and nostalgically about losing his virginity to his mother in an outhouse.

Falwall, incensed, promptly sued Flynt and the magazine for libel, emotional distress, and invasion of privacy. While the initial jury verdict came down against Falwall on the libel claim, it found in his favor for emotional distress, and a series of appeals by Flynt eventually found the case before the U.S. Supreme Court. It was here that the court handed down what has become a landmark ruling for parody law in the United States.

According to the opinion written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, although the statements in the parody ad were demonstrably false, criticism of public figures was still protected by the standard in New York Times Company v. Sullivan (this being the case that Trump and his allies want to overturn) that defamation must show “actual malice”: “that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” As Rehnquist wrote in his opinion, "At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. The freedom to speak one's mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty – and thus a good unto itself – but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole.”

Ever since, the Hustler case has provided both a set of guiding principles and a measure of security for satirists setting their sights on public officials and public figures, ensuring not only a continued freedom from the threat of formal government publication bans (in legal parlance a practice called “prior restraint”) as well as reflexive private lawsuits for libel and slander. As Rehnquist wrote in his opinion, “At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. The freedom to speak one's mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty – and thus a good unto itself – but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole. We have therefore been particularly vigilant to ensure that individual expressions of ideas remain free from governmentally imposed sanctions.” Consequently, the case has become a celebrated example of a free speech victory, and a piece of civic lore. It was, among other things, fictionalized in the 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt with Woody Harrison in the lead role.

This, along with the traditional sense that filing testy legal actions tends to make a politician look both undignified and implicitly guilty, has offered a set of traditional restraints against the fear that a major political player might use the law to crack down on comedians who target him. Trump, however, is a politician who has placed little value on either dignity or innocence, so it’s not surprising that cartoonists have begun to worry that these traditional barriers may not hold.

Somewhat more surprising is the fact that legal experts are less worried. Justin Harrison is a Senior Policy Counsel for the ACLU of New York. In his view, despite the clear risks to both satirists and journalists under the incoming administration, there nevertheless remain protections in place that he thinks are unlikely to be fully demolished.

Harrison states frankly that, “I have concerns given the things that Trump has said in the past about wanting to open up First Amendment protections for media that offends him. And I don't know what that means, but I know that there are jurists who want to take a look at longstanding protections, including protections for journalists, and satirists, and writers in general who take on public figures. So to the extent any of that poses an increased risk to comic artists or people who draw or publish political cartoons, yeah, there are heightened concerns when you have a powerful administration calling for relaxing First Amendment protections for artists, and journalists, and speakers who criticize the administration or who criticize public figures.”

Nevertheless, he is bullish when it comes to the durability of precedents around First Amendment parody protections. “There are pretty solid First Amendment protections within the context of political cartoons and political satire,” he says. “These are legal protections for traditions that have existed since before the country was founded. Things like protecting political satire – issues like that were on the mind of the people who wrote the Constitution. So these are not new protections, but rather they are longstanding constitutional protections for political satirists and people who make fun of the government and people who, by way of humor, want to expose the truth about the government. And these protections are not to be taken lightly. They are taken seriously by some of even the staunchest conservative members of the judiciary.”

Like Sorensen, Harrison points specifically to Hustler Magazine v. Falwell as the key case in question: “It involved an advertisement that quite crudely satirized a very powerful person who took Hustler Magazine to court and ultimately lost," he says. "And I think the protections are similar. The jurisprudence has evolved a little bit in modern times to accommodate things like social media and the advent of the internet. But this has been going on since the development of modern First Amendment jurisprudence. This has certainly been going on since the 1960s, really since the 1930s.”

Harrison is confident even despite the locked-in Republican majority on the modern Supreme Court, very different from the swing court that held sway over the Hustler ruling or even during Trump’s first term. Even so, he says, “I would be surprised [if the court overturned the Hustler v. Falwell opinion]. I can’t, off the top of my head, cobble together a combination of justices [who would vote to overturn it]. Justice Thomas has written, I think, about the idea of revisiting New York Times v. Sullivan, which is the actual standard that applies in defamation cases to public figures or elected officials.

“But he's the only one who's seriously gone there of the nine justices who are currently on the court. You might say that this court is not shy about taking an axe to firmly established Supreme Court jurisprudence, but if you look at the First Amendment jurisprudence of this particular court, they're really not too bad in terms of respecting strong First Amendment rights in the area of speech. Is it a more corporate speech-aligned court than past courts? Absolutely. But have they also respected the rights of anonymous speakers online? Yes, they have. Is it a court that in the modern age has found itself pretty concerned about privacy in at least some spaces? The court has expressed an interest in taking a look at data privacy and how data changes hands online – not the most enthusiastic look, but certainly it's starting to wade into those areas. But we will see. If there are additional retirements that further change the alignment of the court, who knows.”

The presence of legal precedent does not, however, mean protection from the threat of legal action. The months since Trump’s election have been ample and alarming proof of this. Since November, the incoming president has (as we have seen) sued ABC News into a $15 settlement, sued CBS news over a 60 Minutes interview with his former opponent, threatened a suit against the New York Times, and perhaps most astonishingly, sued the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer over an opinion poll with results unfavorable to Trump. The significance of these suits is immeasurably magnified by the fact that their instigator is soon to control the Department of Justice, but they are par for the course for Trump and his circle, who count among them some of the richest and most litigious individuals on earth. One of Trump’s close confidantes, for example, is Peter Thiel – the same figure who, eight years ago, bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s successful defamation suit against Gawker, ultimately driving the website out of business. If the press is, as cartoonist Larry Gonick once wrote, “as free as the nearest attorney,” then we are looking at a future in which the costs of freedom have been raised to an exponential degree.

Because of this, the perhaps greater risk is not that a court will rule in favor of a frivolous defamation suit by the president or his allies, but that the risk that one might be forthcoming will serve to intimidate cartoonists and satirists from risking it in the first place. This chilling effect, according to Jeff Trexler, Interim Director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, is enough to alter the climate of political cartooning.

“There are usually so many charges as part of a case that … the case would go long enough [to dissuade cartoonists],” Trexler says. “I think there’s some possibility that somebody could be found guilty, but even if not, even if every single one of these cases goes away, ultimately these things are damned expensive to defend against. And you’re going to be called a lot of things, because they’re going to be doing discovery to determine what you’ve said about this person elsewhere, and what you’ve said to other people about this person, and what evidence you had for your claim. And you’re going to be called a liar. You’re going to be called a radical. … I can tell you that even a simple case that ends up in a settlement can cost several hundred thousand dollars to defend against, even if it doesn’t go to trial.”

Ironically, one of the best defenses cartoonists might have in this regard is the profession’s obscurity. All of Trump’s lawsuits and threats so far have been against reputable outlets of reporting; cartoonists are, quite simply, beneath his notice. In 2019, Ann Telnaes courted controversy by directly parodying the famed Hustler ad with Trump, referencing his alleged dalliances with Russian sex workers. No response from the President was forthcoming. Decades ago, a Garry Trudeau or a Berkeley Breathed could command the cultural caché to warrant an insulting letter from Trump. Cartoonists today are lucky if they can command the attention of their newspaper.

Trump is complaining about Saturday Night Live and tweets that the show "should be looked into". Somebody explain parody and the 1988 #SCOTUS Hustler Magazine v. Falwell decision to him. pic.twitter.com/fvpueCgXTT

— Ann Telnaes (@AnnTelnaes) February 18, 2019

Still, the effect of Trump’s intimidation is real, if not for cartoonists themselves, then certainly for their publications: even those media outlets not actively supportive of Trump may well feel that risking a lawsuit for the sake of a single-panel cartoon just isn’t worth the trouble. Both Trexler and Harrison suggest practical steps that cartoonists can take to protect themselves: make sure whatever you’re satirizing has a basis in fact (so as not to leave yourself open to charges of disregard for the truth). Exaggeration and metaphor are effective guardrails for protected speech. Know who to reach out to and when – both the CBLDF and the ACLU have been known to take up free speech cases on behalf of artists. Above all, says Harrison, know when not to back down.

“I hate to use the old line from public transit, but if you see something, say something,” Harrison says. “If you see a writer's rights being violated, if you see a young reporter's rights being violated, if you see a cartoonist or a humorist who's being chased down. Social media platforms are going to have to stand up to subpoenas, and [likewise] platforms that host comics and that host online content. If you see it happening or if it happens to you, reach out to the ACLU. That's the sort of stuff that we love to defend.”

There was one more person I wanted to speak to for this piece. He didn’t have much to do with Donald Trump, not directly, but his story still matters. He’s the person who might know more about the significance of the Hustler v. Falwell parody better than anyone, for the simple reason that he wrote it.
Terry Abrahamson had been working in advertising in San Francisco when he developed a working partnership with Mike Salisbury, the art designer who would go on to become famous for originating the logos for (among others) Hasbro Toys, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall album, and the film Jurassic Park. Abrahamson, though not an artist himself, had come in contact with comics early, through which he developed what would turn out to be a consequential affinity for outré parody.

“Do you know who Paul Krassner is?” Abrahamson asks me. “I went to a Chicago public high school between ‘64 and ‘68, and there wasn't a lot of intellectual stimulation. I read a lot of great books that I was assigned, but what was going on outside the school walls was uniquely significant, and it demanded a counterculture. And I had a good buddy who said to me one day, ‘Take a look at this.’ And he gives me a copy of [Krassner’s magazine] The Realist. Paul Krassner was the face of the magazine, and almost in glorious defiance to everything the establishment considered beautiful. He even had really badly pockmarked skin – even his skin was in defiance of the norms.

“It came out every couple of weeks, and it had a lot of humor that was in terrible taste. But it was tremendously effective in getting across this spirit of resistance, the spirit of the devaluation of the validity of the accepted authorities and the accepted conventions. At the time when Bobby Kennedy was shot, on the cover of the next issue of the Realist was Hubert Humphrey hugging Sirhan Sirhan. And there was a famous photograph [on the cover of the Realist] of Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California. And Reagan had a child in front of him between him and the camera, and he was hugging the child, and the way he was hugging the child could have been interpreted – and was by Krassner – as Reagan getting a blowjob from this kid.”

Perhaps most memorably, there was the Disneyland Memorial Orgy.

“My favorite little vignette,” he says of the Wally Wood tableau, drawn for the Realist in 1968 to commemorate the recently-dead Walt Disney in Wood’s own unique way, “is down by the lower right corner. Captain Hook, in all his feminized glory, is joining I can’t remember who else watching Tinkerbell do a strip tease. This was my first real introduction to contemporary political satire, and the use of humor for irreverence and subversive messaging, and it stuck with me. I was in touch with Paul Krassner shortly before he died, and he was one of the founders with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies. So his politics and his place in '60s counterculture and in American history I think is – I wouldn't say ubiquitous, but it's a big footprint. And I found him to be a heroic enough character for his spirit to have stuck with me through 20 years until I came up with that Hustler thing.”

“That Hustler thing” came about by way of an introduction from Mike Salisbury, who had begun working with publisher Larry Flynt (“A hillbilly from Kentucky,” in Abrahamson’s description), who had begun doing work with the magazine on humor pieces that Flynt wanted to incorporate.

“Mike calls me up: I'm out in LA doing this work with him, and he says, ‘Hustler wants some humor. You got any ideas?' So I'm thinking, well, we both come out of advertising, let's do ad parodies," he says. "And Reagan, the monster just got elected [president], largely due to his association with Jerry Falwell, and all the televangelists, and all the God stuff, and the Moral Majority. And so I thought, “This fucking Falwell, how can I stick it to this guy?” We were looking in the closest thing you could find to a magazine like Hustler that would have legitimate ads, which was Playboy and maybe Esquire.

“There was an ad campaign from Campari, and they would use celebrities. And the one I remember was Jill St. John, and it's a long copy ad: a photo of Jill St. John, and the headline is ‘Jill St. John talks about her first time’: ‘I saw skyrockets, my toes curled, my body temperature went through the ceiling.’ And you'd think she's talking about the first time she had sex, but as you read, you realize it's the first time she had Campari. So this looked like a pretty good framework to me. And so the [parody] went, “Jerry Falwell talks about his first time,’ and the template was the same as the Campari campaign. ‘I never dreamed I'd make it with grandma, but when those six guys came out of the outhouse smiling, and grandma was still breathing, I figured, ‘Shit, if the flies can take it, so can I.’”

Abrahamson had been warned to prepare himself for any reaction to the mockup ad from the notoriously mercurial Falwell, but as it turned out, the publisher had only one note for him: “Larry is very close with his grandmother. He can't imagine anyone, not even Jerry Falwell, having sex with his grandmother in an outhouse. Can you change it to Falwell having sex with his mother in the outhouse?”

Despite having both come up with and written the ad, Abrahamson got lucky. Because he had been sub-contracted for the work by Salisbury, his name never appeared on any official documents, which meant that he was never a party to Falwell’s lawsuit. Not that Abrahamson knew it at the time. “I'm shitting it,” he says. “I mean, my wife's a civil rights lawyer and should know about this stuff, but I think we're going to lose our house. I thought this could lead to some trouble. But I was thinking, 'Man, I'm so far down the totem pole of guys they want to get to.' Now Trump has a whole government with no agenda other than ‘Get 'em, get everybody.’ But it wasn't like that then. There was no internet. It wasn't that easy to get people.”

“The Supreme Court decides to hear the case,” Abrahamson continues. “So this is my favorite part to think about: you got eight justices [Anthony Kennedy did not take part in the court’s decision]. Each one of 'em [before they were confirmed to the court] had to sit in a room with the president, and the president was saying, ‘You sure you're clean? You sure you're not going to embarrass me? Sure you're not going to fuck me if I put you on the court?’ And then they had to go sit in front of the Senate, and the Senate had to approve each one of these justices to sit on the highest court in the land. And here they are, sitting around this table, talking about Terry Abramson's dirty joke.”

Was Abrahamson proud of his starring role? “Of course!” he says. “I did a set of ads, and I probably made $1,250 bucks. But of course I was proud! Of course! I was able to stick it to these evil fuckers, these guys who are hiding behind God, and using this cross to shovel all the money into the wheelbarrow. ... This is the epitome of why this country has not lived up to its promise, and I can stick it to these guys. Great! Thank you Reverend Falwell.”

I will confess that this conversation surprised me. I’m not sure what I expected when I called up Abrahamson, but I suppose that, things being as they are, I wouldn’t have been surprised to have been let down: a deadline writer who one made a dirty joke, and never thought much more about it. But Terry Abrahamson knew what he was doing. He wasn’t lobbing a cheap gag to people flipping through a porno mag, he was, in his own way, turning masturbation fodder into rebellion. He was aiming his writing like a slingshot directly at the exposed groin of the Reagan Revolution.

Abrahamson has had an impressive career since the time of the Hustler ad. He’s been a songwriter (winning a Grammy for co-writing tracks with Muddy Waters) and a playwright, with a new work in progress centered on suppressed voices during the Civil Right era. He knows perfectly well that things are darker now than most Americans alive have ever seen. “They [Trump and the Republicans] have every opportunity to really follow down the path of Hitler,” he says. “I think they've got a great head start, and they learned from a lot of really ridiculous mistakes that they made. And they have the advantages of the internet, and help of a lot of countries around the world, and an environment in this country where the loudest voice is the truth. If you can get that megaphone and turn it up to 11, you can tell people that Chicken Little is going to be speaking in front of Congress and the sky is falling, and people, they won't flinch. It'll be, ‘Okay, get the popcorn. Let's watch this.’”

And yet, Abrahamson continues, “You got to do it, man. You got to do it. I got kids, I got grandkids. This world isn't going to get better by doing nothing. And it's not even at this point, trying to get it to a better place, it’s just trying to keep the place we're in from getting worse. … You've just got to use humor. You've got to use music. You've got to use anything that can somehow make the person you are talking to listen up. You’ve got to believe that that will continue somehow. The internet works both ways, and it's going to be pretty hard to silence dissent.

“So I think there is hope with younger people to be less tolerant of intolerance. And it's not going to be like, ‘Boom, boom, boom, lights out, and everybody has to play ball or get snuffed out.’ There's going to be a lot of opportunities to make people aware of the emptiness, the absence of whimsy, and fun, and hope, and community that we're facing. And it feels good to be part of a community that doesn't necessarily hang its hat on hate, it hangs its hat on love. You can't just take that out of the equation. People need that. And it's not that hard to desensitize people, but it's not as easy as they would like it to be.”

It becomes easy, as the social progress of humankind slides steadily backward into the murk of Jim Crow, to imagine that our stupid jokes are a pathetically ineffectual weapon to wield: that the cartoonists and satirists, and, yes, the comics journalists writing about them are all just whistling forlornly on our way to the graveyard. And on a broad, social level, we probably are. No cartoon or song or parody can hope to save the world, even one as consequential as the Hustler ad, and at this point none of us is kidding ourselves that it can.

But it might do something to save our souls. The artists under authoritarian regimes have always known that. Eric Godal knew it when he drew his cartoons and wrote his captions in the darkest portion of the Nazi Holocaust. Komar and Melemid knew it when they painted their bizarre, hilarious faux-portraits of late Soviet politics. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that, “One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin’s ruffians … was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor’s dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.”

It would be nice to think that our political cartoons can make a difference: that perhaps they can provide some measure of, if not comfort to the afflicted, then at least an assurance that they are not insane to believe in the affliction. But even if they do not, they – all of our jokes – are acts of affirmation of the world for its own sake. They are a way of saying to ourselves: I’m not crazy, everything else is crazy, and in being the last thing that isn’t crazy, I remain a human being until the end.

There isn’t much we can do if Donald Trump loads us on that truck and shuffles us toward that place of execution. But neither is there anything he can do if, with our last words after our last drag on a cigarette, we tell him to get fucked.