IN DECEMBER OF 2016, after Donald Trump won the presidency and even before he was sworn in to the office, I announced on my Instagram account that I was initiating a new project called “A Storm is Coming.” I promised to post cartoons every day about what Trump’s leadership of the country might mean.
In those days, I posted cartoons under the name Jay Duret, the pen name I used for all of my creative writing.
My first post called out what I saw as the disturbing rise of Alt Rights groups:
In the following days, the cartoons in my project focused on Putin’s role in the U.S. election, Trump’s obsession with his Generals, his geopolitical philosophy (“Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard”) and the other disturbing messages that were emanating from his campaign and his tweets.
There were a dozen cartoons overall in my series and after posting them individually I collected nine of the dozen into a single panel that supported my prediction that a big storm was coming.
I used the storm metaphor a week after Trump’s 2017 inauguration in a cartoon that imagined what was going on at the U.S. Supreme Court. This one was “Quiet Before the Storm.”
I even invoked the Bard:
Storm clouds came and went during the four years of Trump’s first term. At times it seemed certain that a tsunami was inevitable.
We came close when Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden and thousands of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington.
For a time, it seemed the hurricane had arrived, but the courts saw through the Big Lie and in lawsuit after lawsuit Trump and his team lost. They lost so badly that Trump’s hand-picked lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, ended up in bankruptcy court.
Power was transferred to Biden, though not completely peacefully, and when he arrived the storm clouds receded.
It seemed as if the sailing ahead might be smoother, and for a while it was. But weather is changeable. Immigration. A chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pandemic then inflation. Culture wars. Polarization. Acrimony everywhere.
Biden was getting older and feebler.
And then the debate. The bottom fell out and he was the only who didn’t see it.
The party dithered and delayed and then, a hundred days before the election, consolidated around Kamala Harris.
Trump was shot in the ear. He rose defiant just in time for the Republican convention. He claimed Messianic status. He vowed retribution. And the Project 2025 team mapped out a playbook that he could start to implement on the day of his inauguration, if he won.
And he won.
Democrats were shocked. Beaten down, they hoped for the best but feared what was to come …
… But it was “Game of Thrones.” And the only hope was the courts.
The lower courts stood tall:
But all roads lead to the Supreme Court, and it was hard to feel secure about anything at the Supreme Court.
At the Supreme Court, there is a tradition of talking the grand talk, but are they prepared to do the hard part?
Are there votes on the high court to stand up to Trump? It seems possible — maybe the three liberals plus John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett — until you remember that this is the Roberts’ Court, the same court that delivered Donald Trump the victory of all victories:
And so we are here in March of 2025, eight years after I first said that the storm was coming.
Threats. Revenge. Retribution. Attacks on the rule of law. Perkins Coie, Covington, Paul Weiss.
Now I have no problem saying that the storm is no longer coming:
