Getting the sharp end

Cartoonists make their points about Trump, et al.

For many of us, words are everything. We delight in them, we excoriate with them, we lavish praise with them. We struggle to find just the right ones.

But for cartoonists, the challenge is tougher. In a small space their images can — and must — speak volumes. Even as they may hit a few targets at a time, they must make a single, sharp point. They carry an extraordinary burden.

Consider Donald J. Trump’s propensity for lying. By the count of The Washington Post, during his tenure as president, he logged 30,573 false or misleading claims. Each requires many words to debunk, an exhausting task that, too often, is ignored by Trump’s followers.

At his Thursday press conference in Florida, for instance, Trump told some whoppers.

“As is typical for the former president, his remarks were littered with falsehoods,” wrote The New York Times. “He falsely accused Democrats of violating the constitution by replacing Mr. Biden on the ticket. He said nobody was killed on the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol, when in fact several people died, including one Trump supporter, who was shot dead by the Capitol Police.”

As reported by The Associated Press, Trump insisted there had been a “peaceful transfer of power” in 2021. He argued, too, that the results of the 2022 ruling that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision pleased Democrats, Republicans and “everybody.” To quote the news service, “He also falsely claimed he drew more people to his speech at a ‘Stop the Steal’ speech before the riot than the famous March on Washington in 1963, the iconic event at which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

Note that journalists routinely include the word “falsely” in their reports. Sad.

Explaining his falsehoods, though, can take a lot. Indeed, a long page on Wikipedia is devoted to his lies. Scholars have written papers and journalists have opined at length about them. “Jeremy Adam Smith wrote that ‘lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump's campaign and presidency’. Thomas B. Edsall wrote ‘Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency." George C. Edwards III wrote: "Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president. There is no one that is a close second."

So many words. But Dan Piraro’s cartoon above gets to the point far more simply. Plato thought there were universal truths. For Trump, by contrast, the truth seems to be whatever notion he can conjure up that serves him at the moment. Even for folks who know little of Plato (perhaps like Trump), the cartoon works.

A cartoon, ideally, can endure even as it nails feelings of the moment. Piraro’s work above is eight years old, yet it still is fresh. So, too, is a memorable bit of Mike Lukovich’s work from 2016, an Olympic year like 2024. This image is circulating with new life on the Net:

Trump, of course, earlier this spring suggested he may not accept this fall’s election results, as he repeated his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. “If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” he said. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

The Olympics have offered fertile ground for other cartoonists, too. New York Daily News artist Bill Bramhall saw the July 28 election in Venezuela as a chance to pillory Trump. Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro lied about his hefty defeat at the polls and, so far, has clung to power. In an image drawn from a great collection of cartoons by U.S. News and World Report, Bramhall also invoked the infamous shirtless images of Russia’s Vladimir Putin to cast Trump as a third-rate would-be dictator:

Bramhall also is very much in the moment with an image that reflects the recent stock market turmoil and the trouble Trump got into from his infamous suggestion that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently decided she was Black.

Trump’s incendiary commentary about Harris also inspired Chris Britt, a longtime editorial cartoonist for several newspapers who also works as an author and illustrator:

Lukovich, too, generates powerful cartoons that speak to the moment. As vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz has made “weird” the operative word for Trump and his peculiar running mate, JD Vance, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cartoonist leapt into the fray. He used Trump’s frequent references to a 1988 movie cannibal, Hannibal Lecter, and Vance’s memorable cat ladies line to underscore the pair’s oddness:

A few cartoonists have plumbed The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a conservative administration to great effect. Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, Trump has maintained he knows nothing of Project 2025 and has sought to distance himself from it. So Chris Britt saw the topic this way:

Pulitzer Prize winner Walt Handelsman of The Advocate, and formerly of the Times-Picayune, took on the topic, too:

The boldest cartoonists are willing to push their themes to the edge of acceptability and sometimes beyond. Lukovich was irked by Trump’s use of the term “Black job.” Trump’s usage has been widely ridiculed, of course, including recently by Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles, who said she loved her Black job. Here was Lukovich’s take, which managed to both salute Harris and criticize Trump:

Race and gender were useful themes for Dave Whamond when Harris jumped into the race:

And gender, in particular, touched a nerve with Ed Wexler:

When Harris tapped Walz, she inspired several folks. Consider the riff The Plain Dealer’s Jeff Darcy took on JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” tapping into Walz’s Nebraska origins:

Handelsman also had an interesting take on Walz joining the ticket:

So, too, did Clay Jones:

For better or worse, this election will surely provide lots more fodder for these talented artists. As they poke, needle and ridicule, they may especially get under the humorless Trump’s thin skin.