McKee is among the U.S. editorial humorists who have created cartoons in recent weeks about the Republican presidential candidate’s mounting legal cases, including developments this week, when Trump and 18 others were criminally charged in connection with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election win in Georgia.
The indictment by an Atlanta-area grand jury followed a 2½-year investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) and included charges against former Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
“I tried to capture the history of that in a simple, fresh way, and it struck me as funny to combine it with a back-to-school theme,” says McKee, a self-described political moderate who drew a red-tied Trump writing a “how I spent my summer” essay while handcuffed. “I wanted to leave his face out of it, but still caricature him in a way that would be immediately recognizable by the reader.”
Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution says that taking on this editorialist’s embarrassment of riches has devolved from fun to fatiguing — as Trump now faces a total of 91 felony counts across the four indictments.
“The amount of alleged Trump corruption is almost too much for a cartoonist to bear,” the left-leaning Luckovich says. “Four indictments and 91 counts? Sheesh.”
“What’s particularly crazy to me is how many Republicans are still defending him,” adds Luckovich, who was drawing a cartoon “showing how maybe it might be in the GOP’s interest to finally abandon” Trump.
Steve Breen of the Creators Syndicate studied the cartooning titans of the Watergate era — including Herblock, Paul Conrad and Patrick Oliphant — while in college and envied that they’d had President Richard M. Nixon to kick around.
“Nixon and Trump are very different, of course, but Trump is fantastic fodder for my generation — an even better subject than Nixon,” says the right-leaning Breen (who took a buyout from the San Diego Union-Tribune this summer, becoming one of California’s last full-time staff cartoonists to exit).
To other editorial artists, mocking this moment in history brings no joy.
Lisa Benson, a right-leaning cartoonist for Counterpoint Media, says that amid the indictments, she doesn’t relish the prospect of satirizing Trump as White House contender. “It’s still early in the campaign season, but the thought of Donald Trump being the Republican nominee gives me chills,” says Benson, while noting that she thinks “relentless” criticism from the left has been unfair.
Yet “Donald Trump is his own worst enemy, and his constant whining and hateful comments have grown old. America deserves better,” she says.
Matt Davies, meanwhile, has a somber take on what he’s satirizing.
“It feels surreal to be drawing about a disgraced ex-president taking up so much political and social oxygen two-plus years into the current president’s term,” says Davies, the cartoonist at Newsday. Satirizing “our national predicament” “is harder, and sadder, than it looks.”
The left-leaning Davies says he hears from angry MAGA supporters “for whom Donald Trump has become a lifestyle,” and they ask him: “How come you never draw Biden?” His response: “I do.” He adds cheekily: “Reality has become meaningless.”
“I draw Trump as truthfully as I can, the way I see him, in the hope that his supporters might for a moment catch a glimpse of him as he really is,” Davies says. “I’m not trying to upset them — I’m trying to change their minds.”
