[ad_1]
Covering visual culture and storytelling: cartoon art/illustration, comedy/satire and animation.
As the Trump legal news broke Thursday, Steve Breen quickly knew he wanted to draw a cartoon callback.
Breen, the right-leaning editorial cartoonist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, had rendered his commentary in late 2021 when Jacob Chansley, better known as the “QAnon shaman,” was sentenced to prison for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection attempt. “I showed him in an orange jumpsuit touching Trump’s hand behind the glass,” Breen says. “Now with Trump indicted and Tucker Carlson in the news, it made sense to update the arrangement.”
Trump was indicted Thursday for his role in a hush-money scheme ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The unprecedented case, with its vote to indict brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), involves the paying off of adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. Trump plans to turn himself in Tuesday for arraignment on still-unspecified criminal charges, The Post reported.
Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing and says he did not have an affair with Daniels, called the indictment “fake, corrupt, and disgraceful.” He is the first person in U.S. history to serve as president and then be charged with a crime.
“The beauty of big stories is that the reader already has an understanding of the topic,” Breen says. “It’s even better when it involves a well-known, iconic entity like Trump, because you can keep out the captions and labels and just lean on the art.”
Jack Ohman, the cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee, loves to devise wordplay, so he leaned into what images could come next week.
“I thought about a Trump mug shot, which I am sure we will see many of soon, and thought: How can I twist this a little?” Ohman says. “So I managed to see MAGA in ‘mug.’
“It was also an opportunity to do a larger caricature,” he notes. “I tend to work very small — the actual size of most of my caricatures are the size of a quarter.”
Jeff Koterba, who is syndicated by Cagle Cartoons, was in a coffee shop Thursday when a friend texted him about the Trump indictment. “I get the text and within like five seconds I had the idea,” he says. “It was one of those cartoons that just works easily.”
Adds Koterba: “I wanted to simply do a quick reaction cartoon. … I figure that this is such an unprecedented story that as we go along and learn more, there will be more opportunities to get into the details and nuances of the story.”
Koterba chose to let the power of the image tell the story rather than words. And he wanted to depict Trump smiling while in an orange jumpsuit, “as if he’s never done anything wrong,” Koterba says. “And sadly, there will still be people who support and defend him, no matter what.”
Jeff Danziger of the Rutland Herald decided to render a different visual viewpoint, imagining how Daniels might react when she sees Trump next.
“I was just thinking that Stormy must feel a bit of justified payback,” Danziger says. “She has suffered some degree of indignity.”
[After Trump indictment is handed up, late-night hosts bring house down]
Unlike some commentators, Matt Wuerker of Politico isn’t so sure that the indictment will prove a significant obstacle to Trump — so he drew the former commander in chief surviving the flames of legal peril surrounding him.
If President Ronald Reagan was Teflon, “Trump is the asbestos president,” Wuerker says. “Despite all the scandals and outrageous behavior, he’s barely singed. The indictment will only help him fundraise more off his devoted base who don’t smell the smoke, much less see the many fires.”
And Mike Luckovich, the cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had recently drawn a cartoon in anticipation of Thursday’s news — with an outlook in contrast to Wuerker’s.
Trump makes former president Richard M. Nixon “look like a saint, and I’ve been waiting for Trump’s indictment like a kid waiting for Christmas,” Luckovich says. “That’s where the concept for the cartoon came from: This is just the beginning of the well-deserved reckoning Trump is going to face.”
[ad_2]
Source link