The Make-Out Artist
A week's worth of cartoons about Donald Trump, Raquel Welch, Joe Biden and Twitter...
Google “how many women have accused Donald Trump of sexual assault” and you’ll be shown a variety of articles, one of them from ABC News which says at least 18 women have accused Trump of inappropriate behavior including sexual harassment, sexual assault or rape. But Business Insider says it’s 26 women and USA Today says it’s 19 women and New York magazine says it’s 20 and Forbes says it’s more than two dozen, so it kinda sounds like Trump has been accused of this so many times it’s hard to keep track.
Off the top of my head it seems like if enough women accuse you of sexual misconduct to start a softball league, you might have a problem.
The following Associated Press article about the Trump civil trial (a woman named E. Jean Carroll is accusing Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room) says during the trial two more women testified that Trump sexually assaulted them.
Over the objection of his lawyers, jurors also got to see the Access Hollywood video in which Trump bragged about being famous enough to grab women by the vagina (although he didn’t use the word vagina) and get away with it.
Trump also said: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them.”
And there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of women willing to confirm that’s Donald Juan’s approach to romance.
After that tape came out, Trump called it “locker room banter” and said “I apologize if anyone was offended” which makes it sound like he thought maybe what he said wasn’t offensive, which immediately offended quite a few professional athletes who said they never talk like that in a locker room.
Anyway…
I thought with so many women accusing Trump of sexual assault and/or rape, I’d add the United States of America to the list.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-rape-trial-carroll-columnist
This just in in
After I drew the cartoon you just looked at, I read a New York Daily News story that appeared in the Kansas City Star which said Trump did a deposition before the trial and a video of that deposition was shown to jurors.
And during that deposition Trump – who seems really determined to prove he hasn’t learned a thing – confirmed that he believed “stars” have been able to get away with grabbing women by the vagina: “Historically, that’s true with stars.” Trump also said it’s been true over the last million years, which might make you wonder just exactly who was considered a “star” a million years ago.
Wait…got it:
OK, probably wrong gender because men seem to behave a lot more poorly than women when it comes to sex and Raquel Welch seems an unlikely candidate to take advantage of Donald Trump’s approval if she wanted to grab another woman’s fur bikini. (Yeah, that last part might have come out wrong.)
Anyway…
Trump then confirmed that he believed himself to be a “star,” went on to misquote an E. Jean Carroll interview – “She actually indicated that she ‘loved it,’ okay?” – and when shown a picture of him and Carroll laughing at a party, misidentified Carroll as his ex-wife Marla Maples: “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife” which kinda screws up his defense that he couldn’t have raped Carroll because she’s not his type, which also sort of implies that if a woman is his type, all bets are off.
When Carroll’s lawyer – Roberta Kaplan – asked him about saying Carroll and other women who have accused him of sexual assault weren’t his type, Mr. Smooth informed Ms. Kaplan he also wasn’t attracted to her: “You wouldn’t be a choice of mine either, to be honest.”
This man definitely deserves another term in the Oval Office and I say that as a political cartoonist who’s always looking for good cartoon material.
As usual, the Democrats and the Republicans are trying to score political points off each other, so they refuse to agree on anything and you get the feeling that if someone made a motion to turn on the air conditioning when it was 102 outside, someone from the other party would object and stage a filibuster which would be just fine as long as it was just a bunch of blowhard politicians who might suffer self-induced heat stroke.
But now their political-game playing is affecting the rest of us because they won’t agree to raise the debt ceiling so the government can pay its bills. (And if you’re a Conservative screaming government should live within its means, feel free to give your Trump tax breaks back.)
A default could mean a delay in Social Security payments and paychecks for civilian workers and the military or the stock market crashing or the economy taking a dump or unemployment skyrocketing or cats marrying dogs or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse entering the Belmont Stakes, but nobody knows for sure because the government has never defaulted before.
So let’s not find out.
Although…if the Four Horsemen were actually in the Belmont Stakes, I’d probably watch that.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/02/politics/debt-ceiling-social-security-economy/index.html
As long as you’re looking stuff up on the internet, Google “examples of Joe Biden dementia” and you’ll get a ton of articles, but when you look at who wrote them they’re being produced by sources like Fox News and the New York Post so they just might have a political motive behind their conclusions.
Nevertheless…
Joe didn’t help himself when he called out for Representative Jackie Walorski to join him on the stage (or was it just a shout out…I can’t remember because I’m old) and either one would have been a touching moment if she hadn’t died in car crash two months earlier.
Now here’s an article from a fact-checking site I’ve never heard of called News Wise that says Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson used video clips out of context to make Joe Biden look confused and out of it:
And here’s another article from some site I’ve also never heard of called AllSides that says maybe you shouldn’t trust News Wise:
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/news-wise#:~
I think today’s lesson is if you spend enough time on the internet, you can find someone to confirm whatever bias you woke up with that morning.
In any case: Biden said he wanted to be reelected so he could “finish the job” and I took the opportunity to illustrate the job he seems to have started.
In Cleveland, Texas a man was shooting his AR-15 rifle in his yard when his neighbors asked him to stop because a baby was trying to sleep. So this being America where nobody can tell you what to do especially if you’re holding a gun, the man opened fire on his neighbors, killing five including an eight-year-old child.
And before I got around to posting this cartoon, there was another mass shooting at a mall in Allen, Texas.
After a mass shooting the pro-gun people argue that the real problem is there just weren’t enough guns around because “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun” so if that’s true, we need to arm kindergarten teachers and bartenders and librarians and ice cream vendors and make sure we’re packing heat if we go next door to talk to a neighbor or stop by a mall to shop for shoes.
On the other hand…
It seems like having a gun available turns arguments, domestic squabbles and fender benders into shooting opportunities and in a recent article the author claimed there were more than 400 million guns in the US and the following article says that might be possible, but nobody knows for sure:
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total/
But whatever the number, the NRA and the people who make money from selling them still don’t think we have enough guns and the above cartoon expresses what I think about that logic.
We (and by using the word “we” I’m dragging you into this) often make the mistake of assuming that people who are rich are rich because they deserve it and people who are poor are poor because they deserve that and if you don’t believe me, just ask a rich person.
(Poor people might tell you a slightly different story.)
“We” also make the mistake of assuming anyone who is smart about one thing is smart about everything and you know that’s a mistake if you spend any time watching sports and see how many Old Rich Dudes assume that if they know enough to run a (fill-in-the-blank with the boring business of your choice) they definitely know enough to run a sports team, which is absolutely true if you include running those sports teams into the ground.
Which brings us to Elon Musk and Twitter.
Elon is known for an erratic and idiosyncratic management style in which he pulls decisions directly out of his ass and might change his mind 10 minutes later, like deciding to make Twitter users pay $7.99 a month to get a “blue check.” (A “blue check” meant a Twitter account was authentic and the real person’s account because apparently some people with way too much time on their hands like to pretend to be someone famous.)
Turns out, actual famous people didn’t have much interest in giving Elon Musk $7.99 a month.
And apparently it eventually dawned on somebody at Twitter that they really want famous people to be on Twitter to get the rest of us rubes to pay attention to their platform. Think about it that way and Twitter ought to pay famous people $7.99 a month to post pictures of themselves carrying Chihuahuas in purses and taking duck-lip selfies and all the other inane shit famous people seem to spend all day doing.
Also…
After Elon fired a bunch of people he considered unnecessary – because who knows more about running an efficient and cost-conscious business than someone who launched a Tesla sports car into outer space – Twitter started having “outages” so maybe those unnecessary people were the ones keeping things working.
Anyway…
The above cartoon was inspired by a Washington Post story about Musk and Twitter that said lawmaker’s official accounts would be spared from Twitter’s “verification purge” (which sounds like something that would involve Joseph Stalin and the Khmer Rouge) but the lawmaker’s campaign and personal accounts would not and now there’s a new “grey checkmark” and there’s also a “debadging” period and maybe people ought to consider Twitter Blue as an alternative because the Infield Fly Rule will now be applied on alternate Tuesdays.
When Twitter was asked what the hell all this meant, they declined to comment, possibly because nobody could figure out what Elon was up to or what he’d say next.
Basically, everybody was confused about the new rules of the game which Elon seems to be making up as he goes along, so I needed a visual metaphor for something being really confusing and illogical so I used M.C. Escher’s stairs and redrawing it in cartoon form was harder than you think because I had to keep checking the original art to figure out when the stairs should be upside down and when the people should be standing on the ceiling.
Bottom line: it was hard enough to copy this so whatever drugs M.C. was on when he thought all this up, I definitely want to avoid.
OK, that’s it for today, but I’ll leave you with this thought: if you’re a woman and you meet Donald Trump, you better hope you’re not his type.
The cartoon of the two guys sitting under the overpass is golden! LMAO
Fortunately, Donald Trump isn't MY type.