The above cartoon was inspired by the news that Donald Trump went on social media and announced that Vladimir Putin “has gone absolutely CRAZY!”
(Trump’s CAPS, not mine, BECAUSE UNLIKE SOME PRESIDENTS, I REALIZE WRITING IN ALL CAPS IS THE LITERARY EQUIVALENT OF SHOUTING!!!)
And Trump’s evidence for Putin’s recent insanity was that Putin was “needlessly killing a lot of people” which seemed to come as a complete surprise to Donald Trump even though for years and years people had been trying to tell him Putin’s not your pal; he’s a vicious thug who thinks nothing of assassinating enemies and killing the citizens of whatever territory he wants for Russia and as I tried to point out in the above cartoon, it was crazy of Trump to believe otherwise.
No shortage of crazy these days.
As I have explained on more than one occasion, being “creative” (which only sounds good to people who don’t live with “creative” people) means I’m walking around thinking about things like the Proud Boys “No Wanking” policy and Donald Trump’s comb-over and why when Sue Storm –the Invisible Girl (now the Invisible Woman and eventually the Invisible Nonbinary) of the Fantastic Four – turns invisible her superhero costume turns invisible too and since I’m preoccupied with these kind of important issues, I’m not paying attention to mundane things like paying bills, what day of the week it is and national holidays.
A mental routine which recently bit me in the ass and here’s how:
On Friday, May 23rd Donald Trump ambushed South African president Cyril Ramaphosa with a series of false charges about genocide against White farmers in South Africa and to show just how bad things were in South Africa, Trump held up a news story that was actually about events in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Just in case you’re not up on your African geography and so few of us are: South Africa is 1,833.045 miles away from the Democratic Republic of Congo (two totally different countries) and depending on your direction of travel you’d have to go through Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Angola to get there so it’s kind of like holding Donald Trump responsible for events taking place in Costa Rica.
Which doesn’t make one bit of difference to Donald Trump’s fans because they still believe if they just drive South far enough they’ll eventually run into that border wall financed by Mexico and women don’t mind being groped if the groper is famous enough and COVID didn’t kill 1,193,165 Americans.
When Donald Trump is playing to his crowd (and that’s what the Ramaphosa ambush was all about) it doesn’t matter if what Trump says is true and Liberals like me and probably you need to accept that fact-checking articles with titles like “57 Lies Trump Told During His State of the Union Address Last Night” have absolutely no effect on Trump supporters. (And now that I write that, it sounds like some kind of undergarment involving hernias.)
Timeout for second thoughts…
After writing that line about Trump being held responsible for events in Costa Rica it occurred to me that in the past the US has done some sketchy shit in Latin America and a president might actually be responsible for events in Costa Rica, but that president probably wouldn’t be Donald Trump because he doesn’t read his daily intelligence briefings (he prefers to be informed by J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio acting out current events with the aid of sock puppets) and according to the internet, Trump has only attended 12 of his daily intelligence briefings so if the CIA decided to assassinate somebody in Costa Rica Donald Trump might not be the last to know, but he definitely wouldn’t be the first.
Anyway…
Because the syndicate that distributes my cartoons has a ridiculously early deadline (I’d have to work the same as hours as a vampire to meet it) my cartoons are drawn the day before I send them in, which means an event that happens on a Friday has to wait until Sunday for me to draw about it and then I’ll send it to the syndicate on Monday.
(Man, if I keep trying to explain this I’m going to eventually ask: “Who’s on first?”)
Short version assuming there is one and I seem to be proving there isn’t: if an event happens on a Friday, the soonest a newspaper could publish a cartoon about that event is the following Tuesday which goes a long way in explaining why newspapers are in trouble: “Yesterday’s News Tomorrow!” isn’t much of a sales pitch.
Nevertheless, I liked the cartoon idea (possibly because I didn’t have a better one) and decided to draw the cartoon anyway.
But only after I drew it on Sunday, May 25th realized the next day was Memorial Day and my syndicate wouldn’t be open for business, so now the cartoon couldn’t appear in a newspaper until Wednesday, May 28th and Trump would have told 57 new lies in the meantime so the cartoon would seem way behind the news curve and as Benjamin Franklin didn’t say, but definitely could have:
“Houseguests, fish and political cartoons stink after three days.”
So I didn’t send the Ramaphosa cartoon to the syndicate on Tuesday, May 27th, but also didn’t want it to go completely to waste so I posted it here. But I will use that bear-trap-on-a-chair idea sometime in the future and if Trump keeps ambushing White House visitors it might be sooner than we both think.
A while back I theorized that maybe Elon Musk wasn’t all that bright and if you read Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter you’ll be theorizing the same thing.
Lots of “right-place-right-time” in Elon’s success story, but he’s a publicity hound so the general public winds up thinking Elon’s down in his basement building electric cars, space ships and solar-powered time machines when it’s actually other people doing all those things and Elon jumping on stage and taking credit.
And speaking of jumping on stage…
Craving attention, Elon jumped at the chance when Donald Trump offered him the opportunity to be his Head Asshole: the guy who fires government workers without knowing exactly what they do and ends programs without knowing exactly what they do and along the way Elon managed to project the image of an out-of-his-depth Far-Right Winger who celebrated other people losing their jobs and, as long as it didn’t affect him personally, didn’t care how much damage he did.
Meanwhile…
Lots of Save-the-Whales Liberals buy Teslas and realized Elon’s actually a titanic jerk and quit buying Teslas and sales in Europe dropped 49% last April compared to the April before that, so Elon’s getting out of government because the more you hear from him the less you like him and being the Head Asshole was costing him money.
You losing all your money is cause for celebration; him losing even a fraction of 1% of his money is a disaster.
When Elon took the Head Asshole job he wanted to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget and when that proved unlikely, reduced the target to $1 trillion and when that wasn’t going to happen either, reduced it to $150 billion and to meet that much-reduced target DOGE lied about how much they were cutting.
And since lying seems to work I’d like to announce that I have an IQ of 220.
Would you believe 120?
Would you believe 87 and I’m working on it?
So not knowing what the fuck he was doing (Standard Operating Procedure) Elon fired a bunch of people who had to be rehired and caused chaos when he demanded that federal workers describe five things they’d done the previous week and they had to do that every week and waste time thinking of new ways to describe their jobs, which reminds me of the time the Kansas City Royals were in the playoffs and those of us who covered the team were asked to come up with three things the Royals needed to do win in the first round and I said:
Throw strikes.
Make the routine play.
Get a good pitch to hit.
And when the Royals survived the first round, we were asked to come up with three things they needed to do to win in the second round and I said:
Throw strikes.
Make the routine play.
Get a good pitch to hit.
And when a frustrated editor pointed out that I said that’s what the Royals needed to do to win in the first round, I replied that’s what they need to do to win in every round. While 100% true, it wasn’t the answer they were looking for and I suspect someone somewhere got out my permanent record and added the remark:
“Does not play well with others.”
So Elon did a lot of damage to individuals and programs and while DOGE claims to have cut $150 billion from the budget, verifiable claims makes it more like $63 billion and meanwhile – according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate – Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill tax provisions will increase federal deficits by $3.8 trillion (other estimates are even higher) over the next decade.
So the things you want to spend money on (like feeding starving kids) are wasteful, the things Trump wants to spend more on (like giving yet another tax break to the rich) are completely necessary.
Today’s Lesson
Vladimir Putin is not our pal, “creativity” means I’m not thinking about what you want me to think about and Elon Musk leaving the government is a good thing, even though it’s going to cost me a lot of top-quality cartoon material.
But I’m sure Donald Trump will make up for it.
I ran across this Who's on First spoof of Johnny Carson doing Ronald Regan at a press briefing. I don't know how he remembered all the lines. It's hilarious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8D4C3hR8PY
Thanks, Lee for this insight. I have to say I started to watch the Abbott and Costello sketch. Boy that never gets old, does it?