MY CAREER AS an editorial cartoonist owes much to Donald Trump. I am a lifelong political junkie, and I followed Trump’s improbable rise to political office from the first of the Republican debates in 2015. When I watched the candidates jockeying and posturing on the screen, I often sketched them and wrote next to the sketch some snippet of their oration that struck me as comedic. They were only cartoons because of the cartoonish things my subjects would say, but that process led me to try my hand at political cartooning.
In September of 2016, an editor at SFWeekly gave me the chance to do a Week in Review for the paper that included three of my cartoons each issue, a good way to look back on what the week had wrought. I attended the Republican Convention in Cleveland in 2016 and, after the election, I cartooned at Trump’s 2017 inauguration and the Washington D.C. Women’s March.
I created cartoons all the way through the first Trump administration. That time did not fly by but there was a lot to work with if you have a taste for irony.
With the end of the Trump presidency, I lost a large well of material, but the opportunity to refocus was more than welcome. I needed a breather from the Trump Cinematic Universe.
But when he won the nomination in 2024, I put a toe back in those waters. I covered the Republican convention for Bay City News, posting a daily feed of text and cartoons from Milwaukee. For the Democratic convention I joined my colleagues Jay Harris and David Paul for expanded coverage from Chicago.
Which brings us to…
THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS.
We all knew that Trump would begin with a raft of executive orders and he did not disappoint. With the stoke of a pen Trump realized that he could strike fear in institutions and industry throughout the land. It was a heady feeling, even though he must have bridled at the bureaucratic language.
Besides Trump, no one got as much attention and news coverage as Elon Musk who used the newly established Department of Government Efficiency to take a chainsaw to the federal government. The stories began to follow a familiar pattern. DOGE would show up at a federal agency like a mystery shopper but would soon gain access to the agency’s data trove. There would be an outcry from the employees and their union. Musk demanded to know how they spent their time and what they accomplished. Mass layoffs followed and then, inevitably, lawsuits. Emergency hearings, sketchy testimony about the activities of 20ish-year-olds somehow once connected to Tesla or SpaceX or X or PayPal. And then court orders.
A question that perplexed many observers was how the Trump administration expected to implement the many ambitious goals set forth in his edicts. Among them were edicts that ordered the end to birthright citizenship, cutoff funding for lawyers representing children who came into the United States without parents, and terminated federal employees at the direction of Musk. For observers it all seemed an impossibly heavy lift, but Trump himself was not troubled; he had a strategy:
One target of the executive edicts was the Seattle law firm Perkins Coie whose primary offenses were to have represented Hillary Clinton and George Soros and to have promoted DEI in its firm to expand diversity among the ranks of lawyers and staff. Trump’s edict told all federal agencies to revoke the Perkins lawyers’ security clearances and terminate any contracts with the firm. Faced with the prospect of losing clients and the ruination of their law practice, Perkins sued and quickly obtained a preliminary injunction.
The Perkins edict was followed by similar ones targeting elite firms WilmerHale (former home of Rober Mueller), Jenner & Block (Mueller team member) and SusmanGodfrey (Dominion Voting), each of whom sued. But Paul Weiss, also the subject of an edict, made a settlement that involved providing $40 million in pro bono work for causes aligned with the president’s priorities. Other big firms like MilBank and Skadden followed the Paul Weiss approach, raising the amount of pro bono work to $100 million apiece. Pretty soon Trump had put together a pro bono war chest of $950 million. That was not great news for some law firm associates.
And then a funny thing started to happen. In the competitive -some might say cut throat – world of lawyering, solidarity began to bloom. Law firms and lawyers throughout the country signed a friend of the court brief that was filed to support Perkins Coie in their fight against the Trump administration. Soon there were more filings — in the Perkins case and the cases brought by the other targeted firms.
In the Susman case more than a thousand law students weighed in to support the firm. Other amicus briefs were filed by groups: 21 states (including California), 775 law professors, 884 law firms, 777 solo practitioners and small law firms, 23 nongovernmental organizations, 366 former judges, 22 litigation firms, 23 bar associations and lawyer membership organization (including the bar associations of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago), 27 former senior governmental officials (including William Webster, former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Susan Rice, former National Security Advisor, and John Danforth, former Ambassador to the United Nations) and a clutch of public interest organizations led by the American Civil Liberties Union.
AND THEN THERE WERE TARIFFS.
Trump declared that April 2 was Liberation Day for the people of the country. Tariffs were spun out in a sputter-step process that confused and pissed-off broad reaches of the business and political community. The formula for reciprocal tariffs was a running joke. Then Trump managed to get in a testosterone contest with China and soon trade relations between the two economic superpowers had ground to a halt. Consumers started to get the idea that this was all going to be very expensive.
All in all, it was proving to be a good time for lawyers turned journalists. The website Lawfare started a tracker to keep track of the lawsuits filed around the country challenging executive orders or trying to enforce them. As of April 25th, there were 297 such cases. So much to write about. California’s Attorney General announced at a presser on April 16 that his office had filed 14 lawsuits against the Trump administration.
The Pope died on April 21, the day after meeting with Vice President JD Vance. The internet bristled with memes that connected the two events, but at least this cartoonist refrained from that arch speculation.
April was a rough month. The term whiplash became as closely connected with the name Trump as word compound with the name Kennedy. The markets were volatile and erratic. Gold soared. Crypto crashed and boomed. Trump’s approval numbers dropped harshly.
April was also the month when it started to sink in that what was being done would not be easy to fix. The loss of American leadership in global affairs and the seemingly pointless insults directed at allied countries who shared liberal democratic values with the U.S. made some think that they were witnessing the end of the American era in world history. And it all felt personal.
There wasn’t anything that Trump wasn’t willing to wade into. During the campaign he’d promised everything would be done instantly, and every edict included a “promises made, promises kept” announcement. He was ending the war in Ukraine, bombing the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and threatening Iran that they’d give up their nuclear capabilities either by negotiation or military force. For a self-declared isolationist who was sick of the U.S being a police force for the world, the Trump team was everything, everywhere, all at once.
Perhaps his most ambitious idea was to address the devastation of Gaza with a creative proposal, informed by his legendary skills as a developer and business guru:
One of the cartooning joys during Trump 1.0 was the cartoonable cast of improbable people who came into Trump’s orbit like comets that passed by Earth for a lap or two before being pulled inexorably into the sun where they exploded, lighting the Washington sky. Who can forget Anthony Scaramucci, Rudy Giuliani, and Paul Manafort? But even they paled before dramatic players in the farce of the century: Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, and a lawyer of dubious integrity named Michael Avenatti.
THE STEAKS ARE HIGH
Most observers thought there is no way that the players in Trump 2.0 could compete with the characters who populated his first administration. But never count Donald Trump out in a contest; many have made that mistake and rued it afterward. He proved his mettle when he appointed Linda McMahon, former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, to be the head of the U.S. Department of Education. On April 8 she spoke to a group at an event devoted to educational innovation. In her remarks, she referred to Artificial Intelligence not as AI, but rather as A1, the name of the popular steak sauce.
McMahon was definitely a serious contender for elite status among the Trump 2.0 team, but she got a serious competitor when Trump decided that presidential-looking Robert Kennedy Jr.’s lack of affection for vaccines made him the perfect candidate to run the nation’s Department of Heath and Human Services. Kennedy soon had the opportunity to preside over the largest measles outbreak since 2000 when it was declared eradicated.
Through it all, Trump’s press team flogged the narrative that the president was an honest man, blessed with God-like acuity and acumen, fighting the good fight with grace and honor and steadfast concern for the people of America. Those qualities were in full display when just days before his inauguration he launched a new meme coin into the cryptoverse — this one trading under the name $TRUMP. His bride created one too, hers called $MELANIA. Trump-related companies participated in the original initial coin offering selling the coin to the public and pocketing at least $350 million, according to the Financial Times. But the gravy chain won’t stop there. Going forward the Trump group will earn trading fees whenever one of the coins is traded in the market and they will also enjoy the proceeds of new sales of $TRUMP as the remaining 80% of the inventory is gradually released to the market.
The President’s faithful like the way he predicts the future and shares without embellishment his insights with the American people. Truly the people’s president.
The first hundred days has been quite a ride for the country. Every morning, citizens throughout the land turn to their source of news to learn the latest. One thing that cannot be disputed, no matter what one thinks of Trump, is that he has united the country around a common question, almost as good as the One City, One Book program:
