Why you're seeing yet another Donald Trump cartoon...

Here’s the deal: to be perfectly honest, I’m pretty damn tired of drawing cartoons about Donald Trump. So if that’s true, why keep drawing about him?

I’m glad to pretend you asked.

There are exceptions, but most political cartoons require the reader to have some knowledge of the event being depicted. For instance, in the above cartoon, you need to know Trump has been irritated by reporters questioning his response to the coronavirus pandemic.

So before a political cartoonist creates a cartoon, he or she needs to ask themselves what readers know. That question used to be easier to answer than it is today. When I started as a cartoonist, newspapers were the main source of news so it felt safe to draw about any subject that got significant coverage in a newspaper.

Now, not so much and here’s why.

I never thought about this until I went to work for newspapers, but the size of your paper is decided by how many ads it sells. Sunday papers weren’t huge because so much news was made on Saturdays.

Sunday papers were huge because advertisers figured you were home trying to think of an excuse not to go to church and might sit around and read the paper while you did it.

Newspapers are laid out ads first and the space left over is called the “news hole.” I’m aware that name lends itself to some off-color jokes about the news media, so I’ll wait here while you think of one.

Done?

Because of shrinking revenues, newspapers are shrinking as well and that means the news hole is smaller so you get fewer stories than in the past. And these days Donald Trump is featured in a whole bunch of those stories.

Taking the air out of the room

Back when things were a little more sane, there might be a daily White House briefing and the president didn’t always attend. Whole days might go by and we didn’t hear a thing from our president and we were pretty much OK with that.

But Donald Trump likes attention so he tweets all the time and those tweets constantly make news.

And now he’s giving a pretty much daily press conference and since he doesn’t always check the facts before making statements, those press conferences are generating a lot of news as well and all that activity is taking up space in the news hole.

I get that some of you might have problems with CNN (I do as well, but you gotta get your news from somewhere), but here’s a link to a story about the stuff that went on yesterday:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus/index.html

Ignore anything that looks like opinion, focus on the facts that neither side can dispute and just yesterday Donald Trump did enough stuff to keep me drawing for a month.

When Trump sucks the air out of the room with his antics, that leaves less room for other stories about other people and events and that limits the cartoon possibilities.

(Last night I saw Joe Biden on TV and my first reaction was surprise he was still alive. And from the looks of him, my first reaction wasn’t all that far off…the dude looks more like a Muppet every day.)

There hasn’t been a lot of Joe Biden news lately (I’m working on a cartoon about that) because Donald Trump has sucked all the air out of the room and that’s why you’re seeing yet another Trump cartoon today.

Also, I think Donald Trump is a horrible president when we really need a great one.

Stay safe, everybody.